Beginning with the August 9-11, 1897 first major strike in Nigeria by workers of the Public Works Department (PWD) in clear defiance of then colonial Governor McCallam’s threat to deal decisively with them, organized labour in the country has remained in the trenches through different eras of the nation’s political history.

The infamous Iva Valley massacre of local coal miners in Enugu in 1949 by British colonial forces, General Ibrahim Babangida’s prolonged detention of Labour leaders in the wake of the national angst that trailed his annulment of the June 12 presidential elections, and ex- President Olusegun Obasanjo’s most infamous ‘October 8 Declaration’ are all but significant pointers that Labour may have innocently exchanged the colonial yoke for post-independence neo-colonial millstone on its neck.

In the latter case, Obasanjo, the Balogun of Owu and landlord of Otta had, via a nation-wide broadcast on that date in 1999, outrightly accused the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) of an attempt to hijack power illegally or unconstitutionally through the suspended nation-wide strike action.

In essence, the NLC, in unsullied pursuit of militancy without hostility, by agitating against the regime’s fuel price hike with its negative multiplier effects on living standards, was subjected to a ‘treason’ charge!
Such, indeed, had remained the lot of the Congress which each of its post-independence leaders had to carry. Against buffeting external pressures to compromise and sell Labour cheaply to rampaging state powers, including, for the most part, fiercesome military dictatorships, they stuck to internal principle and carried aloft the banner of conscientious opposition. Whatever fragments of a free, just, equitable and egalitarian society that remains on the country’s chequered landscape today is owed in part to the great sacrifices of the Congress’ leaders.

By standing up on the side of Nigerians when it mattered most, Pa Michael Imoudu, Wahab Goodluck, Hassan Sunmonu, Ali Ciroma and Adams Oshiomhole individually and collectively wrote their names in gold. But more than that, they flowered the Congress’ hard-wearing character by adding to its canvas, brighter colours that today define its golden moments.
The challenge, thus, before Abdulwaheed Omar (NLC President) and Peter Esele ( Trade Union Congress President ) as Nigerian workers mark with ashen faces this years’ May Day, is to recognize that despite those efforts by their forebears, Uhuru has not yet come for the workers. Before them is the onerous duty to compel the government and employers to respond to core labour issues on job creation, secured work environment, living wage and maximum welfare of workers as guaranteed by Section 16 of the 1999 Constitution.

The point, therefore, is self-evident that 110 years after the PWD general strike which shook the colonial government to its very foundations, neither labour, government, employers, nor civil society are yet to reap the immense benefits of recognition of trade union rights as human rights. The myopia of government, political and economic stakeholders to apprehend and apply the simple fact that the most affluent countries in the world are the ones that not only have trade unions but also integrate them successfully into their societies through forms of corporate governance and in alliance with non-governmental organizations, is partly responsible for the nation’s development tragedy.

For, no matter the abundance of natural resources and cheap labour which abounds in a nation, crucial foreign direct investments (FDI) can hardly be attracted if the labour environment is bereft of harmonious industrial relations. The frequent political upheavals, economic paralysis, social insecurity, non-descript infrastructure and absence of participation, transparency and accountability are all off-shoots of a marginalized labour in political and economic decision –making, among others.

Governments and employers have in the past 110 years erroneously viewed tripartism with labour as a dreaded business hemlock. They now equally risk being seen by the same labour as anti-social predators seeking to enforce a downward pressure on wages and working conditions in the search for greater profitability through blatant exploitation of their employees. As this balance of tension is sustained, the nation hurtles on its path to economic yo-yo, unable, unfortunately, to stabilize, not even by the best of policies.

Though organized labour in Nigeria is actually 125 years old given that the pioneer union, the Mechanics Mutual Aid Product and Mutual Improvement Association was formed in July 1883, and the instrumentality of strike employed only 14 years later, the lot of the Nigerian worker, is simply put, most tearful. He works hardest and is paid lowest. This indisputable evidence is vividly documented in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 2004. The report ranked Nigeria 151st among 177 countries of the world, and placed the nation in the category of ‘low economic development’ nations.

It not only put the nation ahead of small and distantly endowed countries but classified her in the same category with much smaller countries like Haiti (area: 27,400 sq km, pop: 8.2 million); Djibouti ( area: 23,200 sq km, pop 637,634); Gambia (area: 10, 689 sq km, pop 1.3 million) ; Eritrea (area : 121,100 sq km, pop 3.83 million) ; Senegal ( area: 196, 722 sq km, pop 9.48 million); Rwanda (area: 26,338 sq km, pop 7.73 million); Chad (area : 1.284,000 sq km, pop 7.65 million) and Madagascar (area 587,041 sq km, pop 15.941 million), among others. Comparatively, that Nigeria, with its massive land mass and resource-drenched geo-polity of 923,768 sq km and a virile manpower reservoir embedded in its 135.031 million population could be classified among these countries is an eloquent testimony to the unconscionable impoverishment and disempowerment of its labour force.

Workers’ impoverishment has been largely sustained because governments, especially the 8 years of Obasanjo’s pseudo-democracy, have pursued measures which were always bound to widen the divide between the majority economically propertiless and powerless people and the privileged, powerful, propertied and parasitic ruling class who are benefiting from these measures. There are no social security steps being taken or safety nets instituted to alleviate the impact of these obnoxious policies of privatization and free reign of market forces.

Even in its approach to either ‘reduce’ , ‘alleviate’ , or ‘eradicate’ wide-ranging poverty, the government heavily tilts towards the same neo-liberal economics which in the first place sired the odium it is seeking to expunge, thus stoking the embers of the massive poverty flame instead of dousing it. The unconfessed truth which government policy initiators, executors, monitors and evaluators know is that the neo-liberal terms of’ ‘reducing’ , ‘alleviating’ and ‘eradicating’ poverty are not just matters of semantics as they seemingly appear in government public speeches, but heavily ideologically loaded.

In implementation, the neo-liberal approach to poverty takes the view that poverty cannot be eradicated, but can only be reduced or alleviated. Indeed, neo-liberalism is based on the view that there must be the rich and the poor in society and that political power ought to be in the hands of those who own property. This inherent contradiction in neo-liberalism explains why the Nigerian worker has hardly fared any better despite a seeming harvest of policies to alleviate his suffering.

A plethora of these programmes conceptualized and implemented with the hope that they will impact on the workers’ poverty litter the landscape. And they bear mention. They involve the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI), the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), the Better Life Programme (BLP), the Family Support Programme (FSP), the Agricultural Development Programme (ADP), the River Basin Development Authority (RBDA), the People’s Bank of Nigeria (PBN), etc. And shortly after Obasanjo took office in May 1999, the Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP) was launched. Hundreds of billions of naira were lavishly deployed to it for disbursement.

The agency proved a carefully-plotted government deception as it turned out to be a quango for the reward of cronies of the ruling party and the entire political hirelings that worked for its electoral victory! The National Planning Commission’s 2004 report, in seeking to justify the agency’s untraceable billions, boasted that poverty had decreased to 54.4 per cent. This lie flew in the face of a precision-mediated report by the UNDP which put the number of Nigerians living below poverty line at 90.8 per cent

Odom writes from Lagos