Horror of Asian factories
By IKENNA EMEWU (ikeroyal@yahoo.co.uk)
Saturday, June
18 , 2005
 |
•A
monument of bondage
•Photo:
Sun News Publishing |
|
Other factories, described by the labour camp veterans as
purgatory where lives of several thousands of Nigerians have
been ruined over the years included Whassan, Five Star Industries,
Arcee, Aswani Textiles, Reliance Textiles, West African Rubber
Products (WARP), Super Engineering, Shangai Shen-mei Beverages
and Food Company and Bagco Bags, to mention just a few.
While some of these companies have folded up completely, a
few of the others have transmuted into something else. For
example, Tonobi Plastics used to be Rubber Shoes Nigeria Ltd.
One of the many liabilities the Asians were running away from
was the horrifying accident in 2000 that saw a Nigerian worker
falling into a trough of molten rubber. By the time he was
scooped out, the victim was close to becoming an Egyptian
mummy.
OK Foods: Far from okay
The toil and indignities to which Nigerian workers are subjected
in labour camps run by Asians find a different expression
at OK Food Nigeria Ltd. This biscuit and sweet factory owned
by Lebanese and located at the Ladipo area of Mushin, very
close to Minaj Television Station, was the next place Saturday
Sun went to work in the course of the investigation.
Three times a day at 6am, 2pm and 8pm, hundreds of casual
workers throng the gate of OK foods, hoping to be hired. Forbidden
to go beyond the gate, the Nigerians stand under the sun and
in the rain waiting to be called in. Shocking though as it
is that some of the highest paid workers here go home with
N1,750 a week, the Lebanese still make the Nigerians beg for
the job. When the gate slides open, the mad rush begins as
the Lebanese make a show of picking the strongest-looking
labourers. It is a re-enactment of the auction sales to which
slaves were subjected in the Americas – with plantation
owners bidding for the strongest-looking slaves.
Not muscular enough
Given that this reporter had considerably emanciated and lost
colour after only one week in Eskimo, he stood no chance in
this tough labour market. This meant that he had to turn up
every morning and sometime afternoon for four days to try
his luck which, in reality, depended on how furiously you
could push and shove to get to the front. In one ugly incident,
a middle-aged job-seeker, apparently with some kids back home,
almost scratched out the eyes of this reporter with a spoon
he was carrying in his pocket. There was no provocation; just
the wild claim that this reporter stepped on his bandaged
foot. He would later limp away to a corner and busied himself
pronouncing some of the most profane curses, telling no one
in particular that he had almost made it to the front “before
this man carry him bad luck come meet me”.
After four days in a largely hostile crowd, it became clear
that to be hired at OK Foods, one needed to know somebody
or somebody who knew somebody in the factory. Having sat through
the morning hours without any luck, some of the Nigerians
continued to wait at the gate till 2pm when they jostle again
for the afternoon shift. A few of these people arm themselves
with garri and beans or God -knows-what, neatly packed in
black polythene bags. Others go home or take the brave walk
from Toyota bus stop along the Oshodi-Mile 2 Expressway to
another factory, Deli Foods, at Berliet bus stop, Itire.
Bribing my way through
Given the experiences of other people, it is not unusual to
go to OK Foods for three weeks without any luck. At the end,
money did the magic for this reporter. A suave security officer
promised to arrange something. And he did. A new employee
(names withheld) had gone on. AWOL after only a few days.
This reporter could use the boys ID card to work in the factory.
What more, the wage in the section was N400 a day. It was
like the oil company job of this seemingly cursed world.
Saturday Sun jumped at the arrangement. His fears about being
found out dissolved when the ID card arrived. The Lebanese
issue their Nigerian workers ID cards that have no passport
photographs. According to the security man, the workers name
doesn’t really matter unlike the card number. The card
is to let you pass through the gate. As far as the Lebanese
are concerned, anybody can be Adamu or Segun provided the
work is done. As you enter the gate, you hand over the card
to the security. After work, you request for it because you
would need it to enter the factory again the following day.
The card lasts only three months.
Earning every kobo of N400
When Saturday Sun resumed earnestly at Ok Foods, it turned
out that the original employee was on a permanent shift from
8am-5pm. It soon becomes clear why workers in this section
are paid so much. It becomes even clearer why the card owner
absconded. If anyone was looking for hard labour, here was
one. The men here are called ‘loaders’, and for
N2,800 a week, seven days a week, they are expected to toil
nine-hours non-stop, off-loading bags of flour, drums of margarine,
bags of sugar and other raw materials brought in by trailers.
The workers here are no different from the load-carriers at
Daleko Rice Market in Lagos who manoeuvre enormous weight
to their backs with incredible dexterity.
At the close of work on the first day, this reporter was not
only covered in white dust, he had developed a stiff neck.
Face-to-face with a slave driver
The strength to return to work the following day could only
come after the security guard, now acting like a sympathetic
mentor, had promised to approach a supervisor to help wangle
a deployment. It was his assurance that helped this reporter
to survive Mr. Hussein, one of the Lebanese supervisors who
proved himself a thorough slave driver. Cruel as anyone thinks
the Indians are in running their labour camps, they are more
benevolent than the Lebanese who treat their Nigerian workers
with sadistic mockery. While the Lebanese permit their Nigerian
workers to eat all the biscuits they can, the same Lebanese
give them no time to nibble anything, not with the presence
of Mr. Hussein who appeared to have been imported to ensure
nobody is ever found resting, waiting or engaging in conversation.
If at Eskimo one occasionally has to watch out for the Indian
bosses, a worker at OK Foods cannot possibly blink without
a Lebanese seeing him. They are always lurking around you.
Virtually all the supervisors are Lebanese. The forklift drivers
are also Lebanese. Same with the technicians and people in
the sales department.
Redeployed at last
After two days as a loader, and two more days of waiting,
the security officer did help to get this reporter a place
in the production line on a wage of N1,750. It must be said
that OK Foods was the most modern of all the factories visited
by Saturday Sun. Beginning from the store house, there is
a gate connecting the store to the production line. From here
the store boys supply the needed materials to the production
line. To the right is the quality control laboratory where
the formula for the particular biscuit is clinically mixed,
tested for colour and taste and when approved, is written
out on a sheet as a guide for the mass production that follows.
Everything here is by precision. There is a water line that
supplies cold and warm water. Next to it is an industrial
scale where things like flour, butter, water, milk, sugar,
flavour and colour are sorted out.
Beginning with the flour and butter, all the materials are
added at predetermined intervals into the mixing machine.
The next stage is the oven which has a block that carries
the mould. It is this removable mould that determines the
size and shape of the biscuits; be they round, rectangular
or square-shaped biscuits. The flour mixture is then moved
from the mixing machine into the mould side of the oven. The
biscuits are shaped accordingly and are moved by a conveyor
into the oven proper. There are over a dozen burners along
the network while about an equal number of pipes dissipate
the heat and flames from the oven. The biscuits, propelled
by cylindrical rollers, make a circuitous journey inside the
oven and by the time they begin to pop out, they are already
baked. An arrangement of fans cools the hot biscuits as they
fall off into a basket.
There are waste baskets into which burnt or broken biscuits
go. These are later ground into fine powder by a grinding
machine and recycled in future productions.
At break-neck speed, the good biscuits are manually poured
into a packing machine. The machine selects equal number of
biscuits and then packages same. The hundreds of packets pour
onto a large parking table from where another set of workers
put them into cartons. While the store boys maintain a regular
supply of empty cartons, the sealed cartons are put on a conveyor
and travel along what looks like an overhead bridge on their
way to the finished product store.
Security everywhere
To ensure that not one piece of biscuit is smuggled out of
the factory, the Lebanese are obsessed with security. There
are a total of five gates, manned by security men, inside
the premises of OK Foods. No matter which part of the factory
you are coming from, the workers are subjected to rigorous
searches. If a worker comes late to work, he gets a deduction
in wages or is turned back at the gate, depending on the mood
of the supervisor.
If you are sick, the Lebanese consider it as absence. Once
you enter the factory, you are not allowed to come out until
closing time. Even new employees who want to abscond from
the hard labour only after a few hours are rarely granted
their wishes. The supervisors insist you complete that days
work. Those determined to survive are due for wages every
two weeks. Curiously, workers toil at OK Foods in Ladipo,
but to collect their wages, they must travel to OK Plastics
at Iyana Itire which is considered the headquarter.
Get pregnant, lose job…
The tyranny of the Asian factory owners in Nigeria assumes
a pattern: slave labour, poverty wages and high turnovers.
The Nigerian workers in their thousands are faced with humiliating
employment regulations that tolerate no pregnancy, no medical
services, no annual leave and no pension. As was witnessed
in the various factories, the Asians survive on flagrant violations
of labour laws, negligence and apparent lack of concern for
workers’ general safety. Rather than put in place adequate
health and safety measurers the factory owners prefer to pay
“heat and (hazardous) chemical allowance” to the
Nigerian workers which, in some places, is a mere N200 a month.
Such was the discovery of Saturday Sun when he put in only
three days at a nail-producing factory called Eureka Metal
Limited. Run by Indians, this factory makes no pretence to
how it stays afloat in Nigeria’s harsh manufacturing
environment. “It is six to six,” this reporter
was told on the first day.
Eureka! But I didn’t find it
Located on Ladipo Oluwole Avenue, off Oba Akran Avenue in
Ikeja, Eureka is a noisy mockery of Nigeria’s Independence
and indeed, the lofty dreams of the late Premier of Western
Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. This factory which also produces
wire mesh, roofing sheets and iron rods operates inside the
fabled concrete structure built by Awolowo as a cocoa storage
facility. The expansive wonder is now on lease to the Asians
who have successfully turned the place into another Uzbekistan.
There are over 50 crude machines that must have been salvaged
relics of the former Soviet Union. The only cheery news here
is that this factory sources all of its raw materials from
the moribund Ajaokuta Steel Rolling Mill. When all the machines
are at work, the noise here will run anyone crazy. For some
reasons, which nobody bothered to explain, all the production
halls are hazy and dimly lit.
In the nail section, you can bump into the next man without
seeing him. Since everybody is covered in black dust, you
begin to get the impression you are inside a coal mine. One
corner here and another corner there, you find some Nigerians
crouching and doing something that this reporter completely
failed to understand. The only thing that makes sense is that
some workers are feeding thin strips of rod into the machines
and by some crude and complicated mechanism, the machines
are spitting nails, which in an event of mishap can fly in
any possible direction.
This reporter worked in the zinc section. Here, roofing sheets
are produced. The most dominant features here are the huge
blast furnaces that produce enormous heat, the different casting
moulds buried in the floor, the foundry and the gas supply
system. In simple terms, the furnaces melt the ingots, which
is a sort of raw material, into a motten state. Inside the
mould, the zinc sheet are made, after which some pulps of
brass are melted and used to galvanise the zinc sheet to prevent
rust. The waste product of some of the things they do here
is like sand which is used in the manufacture of matches.
Pitiable as all the workers here appeared, those tending the
blast furnaces consider themselves privileged because of the
N200 heat allowance paid to them at the end of every month.
Preference for women
In all the factories penetrated by Saturday Sun, the entire
workforce is virtually casual. That way, there is no trade
union and no organised dissent. At KRS Investment Ltd, for
example, it is forbidden for two or more workers to be seen
holding discussion. Paranoid by the prospect of possible revolt,
the Asian managers run the factory with rigid regulations
possibly borrowed from communist North Korea.
The same is true of Deli Foods, another biscuit factory owned
by Malaysians and located at Berliet bus stop in Ilasamaja
Industrial Scheme. This factory has a policy of hiring 70
per cent women for its workforce. The women do not only accept
lower wages, they are unlikely to give anyone any problem.
Unable to afford more than N60 on food a day and N40 on transportation,
Saturday Sun discovered that many of the Nigerian factory
workers skip a meal or two just to make their take-home pay
look a bit reasonable. Though they produce the foods, it is
a criminal offence for a worker to drink any of the fruit
drinks at KRS or eat the biscuit at Deli Foods.
Indeed, rigorous and dehumanising searches are carried out
on the Nigerians before they can leave the factory premises.
One of the most infamous of these companies, is said to be
a sac-making company. A former security guard at Bagco told
Saturday Sun that body searches are carried out in a room
equipped with close-circuit television. Conducted by both
male and female security guards, the workers take turns to
strip to their underwear to show they are hiding nothing while
the supervisors watch through the CCTV system.
In his daily struggle for survival, it is indeed a no-win
situation for the Nigerian worker. Such is the case of Solomon
Leku, a young Nigerian who for N14.50k a day toiled under
sub-human condition inside a Chinese factory called Super
Engineering. Then came the ill-fated day in February 1996
when a machine chopped off his left fingers while he was on
night duty. As if that was not enough nightmare for the factory
worker, his Asian masters, before dismissing him, robbed him
of indemnity paid by Elmac Insurance Nigeria Ltd. Out of the
N118,825 paid by the Insurance Company, the victim was handed
a paltry N14,300 for his troubles before he was shown the
door.
Of all the indignities, abuses and risks suffered by Nigerians
in the hands of the Asian employers, none is yet to surpass
the record of West African Rubber Products Nigeria Ltd (WARP)
where in September 2002, over 120 Nigerians were burnt alive
while on night duty in the Chinese factory. The fire roasted
all the workers because there was no way to flee. The only
expatriate supervisor on duty had, as a routine, padlocked
the only exit and gone home to sleep, promising to return
in the morning to let the workers out. By the time he did,
the scene of the horror was littered with the charred remains
of workers in grotesque positions.
Putting profit before lives, the Chinese had a policy of locking
in the Nigerian workers on night duty on the excuse of checking
pilfering, thus turning the factory into a prison where inmates
cannot escape even in the face of death. Before the tragic
incident, there was no adequate ventilation, no emergency
exits, and no fire equipment even in a factory that uses and
produces inflammable materials like bathroom slippers, rubber
sandals and soles, etc.
…And the law looks the other way
Apparently the Asian factory owners know Nigeria inside out
and have invested heavily in ‘connections’. A
disillusioned Nigerian worker told this reporter that officials
of the Inspectorate Division of the Labour Ministry who are
supposed to enforce safety standards in the workplace rarely
leave their desks except when they visit the Asians on “courtesy
visit”. What more, many of the factory owners, especially
Indians and Lebanese had, until recently, police escorts that
follow them everywhere while their immigration counterparts
fall over one another to serve the foreigners. Little surprise
then, when Saturday Sun discovered that some of the names
behind the infamous WARP were once deported from Aminu Kano
International Airport Kano, only to resurface with a bigger
factory in Ikorodu Lagos, where they continued the enslavement
of Nigerians with a passion comparable only to apartheid.
• NEXT WEEK!
Labour leaders, lawyers, human rights activists react.
|
