Bimbola Oyesola
The core focus of Public Service International (PSI) worldwide is against privatisation of public facilities and as far as the vice president of the organisation, Comrade Peters Adeyemi, is concerned, PSI considers privatisation as government’s abdication of responsibility, hence it must be opposed by all means.
Adeyemi who is also the general secretary of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities and Associated Institutions (NASU), insisted that it does not make sense for anybody to say that government has no business in business in the face of pervasive poverty, unemployment, poor salaries, insecurity and collapsed infrastructure in Nigeria.
Adeyemi speaks on the campaign for tax justice, which he says is important to protect the poor who will be at the receiving end of any hike in prices as a result of inability of multinationals, organisations and other affluent persons to pay tax.
The PSI regional president also condemned private universities’ resistance of the unionisation of their workers and the steps by the union to ensure their compliance, as well as steps unions must take to succeed in organising the informal sector.
Excerpts:
ILO centenary celebration
It is always nice to celebrate occasions such as this. In the life of every organisation, a 100 years is not a joke and for the International Labour Organisation (ILO) it is a massive one. There have been successes, failures and challenges. So, this is a good time to take stock and chart a course for the future. I think there is a lot to celebrate, during this period there were a whole lot of challenges. I would take one, which is important to trade unions across the globe. The attempt by the employers and government to wipe out strikes. It is extremely fundamental because if one looks at strikes by the trade unions, the strike itself is the body of the trade union. If strike is taken out, what remains is the skeleton. Because the entire power of the trade union rests on strikes.
If you take cognisance of the fact that these days we have so many recalcitrant employers of labour, they go into collective bargaining, they sign agreements with you freely and later refuse to honour agreements; you try everything, everything, because no trade union man is insane, that will start the process of agitation using strike as the first option. There are a whole lot of things that we do and when we are ignored, so to say, we then have to use the most potent weapon of the trade union. For me, I think, this is a way of also celebrating the fact that attempts were made in the past 100 years. Everything about the ILO would have been rubbished.
It is a tripartite; how do you talk about a tripartite, if we look at it, there’s a thin line between government and the employer, they are actually the same thing. But the key out of these tripartite is the trade union, the workers. If we had lost the right to strike, there wouldn’t have been anything for me as a trade union member, there wouldn’t have been anything to celebrate in these 100 years. I think ILO has done so much and quite a number of conventions that have been there, ILO has done quite very well at least tried to get quite a number of countries to key and ratify some of those conventions in the last 100 years. Conventions like Convention 87 that guarantees freedom of association, and you know quite a lot of employers, governments in Africa are not comfortable with that convention and even most of them that ratified it have refused to faithfully abide by the provisions in that convention. ILO has also done something that is extremely important by bringing all the tripartite together to narrow down conflicts in areas where there’s serious conflict. If you look at Africa, for example, we wouldn’t have had peaceful trade union existence in countries like Zimbabwe, for instance. Virtually every year, they are listed as one of the cases to be handled here at ILO and we can call several cases like that globally where employers have shown lack of faith, this idea of not having anything to do with the trade union movement. The issue of decent job, trade union rights violation, child abuse, all of these are things that you have to commend the ILO for. I also know that we have not really reached the Promised Land. But I think the ILO has created that hope that the future will be better.
PSI support in Africa
If we remain without international exposure, our problems will remain with us. The beauty of belonging to a global organisation is that you are able to share experiences and then you are able to bear even on the government of your own country and the continent the vast experience of those members of the PSI in other developed economies of the world. Now we are talking of privatisation, privatisation is something that has happened severally in Europe and in most cases some of those fights, the research work of some of those fights, help us here. It’s helping us in Africa, when we confront employers and government. The beauty in belonging to PSI and one of the most important achievements or benefits is that we gain experience, we share from their successes and then we look at their failures and use them all as a guide in whatever we do. We also get our affiliates in other parts of the globe to assist us in our intervention on issues that affect us.
For instance, if there are issues that we are battling with in Africa, Nigeria in particular, we get our affiliates in other parts of the world to write to the presidents of our countries to ask them; this is part of the international thing, that is besides the letter that will emanate from the PSI office. Affiliates across the globe will continue to put pressure by writing to governments and in most cases we succeed in making the government to reverse some negative policies. In Africa, like I have said consistently, it doesn’t make sense for anybody to tell us that government has no business in business. Government must always have business in business, particularly in quite a number of countries in Africa where poverty is a major thing, where infrastructure has collapsed, government is not able to provide for the citizenry, salaries are peanuts, energy is irregular.
Countries where unemployment is massive and insecurity is massive, it can’t be true that our government has no business in business. They must have business in business, because creation of employment generally in countries like Nigeria, and some other countries in Africa rests squarely on the shoulders of government. There’s a little that those in the private sector can do, even if we look at our private sector, they are majorly driven by incentives from the government. Quite a lot of people say they are in the private sector, but their mainstay, the support is coming from the government. And if we look at the informal sector that could have assisted in generating employment and whatever, energy is the problem there. Hence it is nonsensical to say government should not have interest in business. So for us at PSI government must continue to have business in business.
The issue of privatisation, government wants to privatise virtually everything, that is one of the key campaigns that PSI has been involved in in Africa and globally. How would you say that you want to privatise education, to take it out of the reach of common people? Look at the privately-run universities in Nigeria, they have refused to allow their workers to be unionised. It’s even alarming and extremely unacceptable that they even include in the letter of their appointments that workers cannot belong to trade unions. If you look at the characters and the personalities that are involved in this unlawful act, because freedom to associate is not only guarantee in the ILO Conventions, it is also guaranteed in section 40 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. But today we have an Atiku, who served before as a Vice President, we have an Obasanjo, who used to be the President of our country, we have people who held serious and important positions in government who now own universities and are not allowing unionism to take place, that in itself is a violation of the right of the workers and they pay whatever they liked. They do whatever they like in those private universities. So, for us, that is one of the reasons and the fees those universities are charging are beyond the reach of ordinary people. When I talked about it, people told me even in Europe, everywhere, the cost of fees of universities are never small. I told them, no, the situations are not the same. How much money does a worker earn in Nigeria and out of this little earning how much does he put in powering his generator, how much does he use in fixing his cars, if he has the misfortune of driving from one city to the other on collapsed roads? How much does he have to spend on providing security for himself? So, by the time you put all of these together, you find out that there’s a difference between a worker in Europe who earns so much, more than those in Africa, and the fact that he enjoys amenities that are available except he wants to display bigmanism. In a place like Geneva, you don’t need to drive your car, except you want to show to the world that you are extremely rich, because public transportation system works perfectly. Energy is stable, security is guaranteed, health insurance perfect; all of these don’t work in our country, that’s why PSI is fighting tooth and nail against privatisation, because it’s abdication of responsibility when government starts privatisation. When it’s time for election they will promise heaven on earth, but the moment they get elected nothing happens. PSI has also been involved in the campaign for tax justice. Campaign for tax justice is extremely important, because government is always looking for more money and when they want to do this, what they do is to increase the price of PMS and if this is done, the burden is not on the big men because they can afford to buy at any price. It is the lowly paid, the poor, that suffer because the prices of goods and commodities will go up, rent, transport, everything goes up. It eats further into the earnings of ordinary working people. So we have said that there should be tax justice. All these unnecessary tax holidays are clearly unacceptable, it is corruption per se. Government will sit somewhere and grant long-term tax holidays to multinationals, those are things that we are doing, we are fighting tooth and nail to make sure that at least those who are supposed to pay tax are paying tax. Those who are extremely rich who can afford to buy a private jet, two three private jets should be able to pay commensurable tax on those things. This is because they are only showing opulence, displaying wealth and our big men how much tax are they paying, those in the National Assembly, those in the executive because in Nigeria it is only, the civil servants, the public servants that pay tax regularly because their salaries is in the hands of the employers, so it is deducted from the source. We have so much evidence, for example in the issue of Panama scandal, we have Nigerians in the list that have been taking money to Panama tax Haven and if we look at Thambo Mbeki report on the illicit transfer of funds from Africa, several billions, and some of these things are if you don’t block them, it is the ordinary people that will suffer for it. Campaign has been on and we are making sure that it is sustained, and we are quite clear that we are making some progress in respect of some of these things. In fact in Nigeria, the tax justice campaign has also received the support of the federal government because when you talk of the tax campaign thing, its shrouded with a lot of corruption.
Government calling on OPS to do roads in exchange for tax
Those are the things we are also fighting against. It is not only roads, what about oil blocks, or you say because one person is building a refinery and you give him tax holiday for so many years. So we are saying that that in itself is problematic. That’s what the campaign is all about. The campaign is targeted against those actions of government that are not in tandem with the welfare of the people, and I think we are doing creditably well. We are saying that even multinationals, the MTNs of this world, must pay appropriate taxes. That is where we are, we know that it will not be easy to achieve 100 percent success in a jiffy.
Ensuring private universities’ workers are unionised
Our first approach is to ask questions, what is the federal ministry of education doing about it because they issue licences to the universities? You can’t own a university until the NUC gives you a license. So the question we are asking is, how did you issue a license to people who don’t respect the provisions of the Constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria, who don’t have respect for ILO Convention 87 that Nigeria has ratified? We are also asking, why is the federal ministry of labour silent on this matter because it’s their responsibility to ensure that no institution or organization exploits Nigerian workers by denying them the right to unionise? And beyond that for us in NASU, we have decided that some of these proprietors are going to be taken to court to challenge them and ask the court if they have this right to continue to deny Nigerian workers who are in their employment the right to unionisation.