Recently, the Academic Staff Union of Universities suspended its eight-month-old strike. What are the lessons to be learnt from this?
Nigeria has a robust legal framework to resolve labour disputes. We are having disputes because the parties are not following the processes the way they should. We must have a sense of compromise. There must be mutual respect between the government and unions. If the government is too strong in a negotiation process, you will not get a better outcome because it will be like the government is dictating to the union. Also, if the unionists are too strong and they push the government to the wall, the outcome will also be the same.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But relative power in which two people will come to a compromise at the end, I will suggest that there should be respect for the processes. I will also suggest that there should be a time limit for every segment of the processes. Negotiations should have a time limit; it is not endless. However, when negotiation fails, mediation comes in. There is also a time limit to it. If mediation fails, reconciliation should come in. If these fail, you go for arbitration. After these, you go for adjudication. So, timeliness is of the essence. Every labour case ends at the National Industrial Court. There should be awareness of these processes. I want to advise the actors in this case to take advantage of the Michael Imodu Institute for Labour Studies. It is meant to build the capacity of workers, employees and government officials. When we go on strike, there should always be a limit. I don’t know how these public universities are going to cope because there are many things they have lost in the course of the strike. But in all these, it shows that we have industrial democracy. There are countries where workers don’t have the right to Organise union activities.
The mass movement of medical doctors from Nigeria has become something of great concern to every Nigerian and if this is left unchecked, it might cripple the health sector. What do you think is the way out?
Doctor issues capture peoples’ imagination for obvious reasons. People often say health is wealth; health is life; and you know what it takes to train a doctor; it is a minimum of about seven years. It is also capital and time-intensive to train them. That is why it captures our imaginations; nurses too are moving. I know graduates who are driving cabs in Europe and America. So, what we are having is brain drain and if you ask me, I will say it is voluntary slavery, unlike when the Europeans forcefully put the best of our people into ships and took them to America to use them for the first industrial revolution. The blacks developed Europe and they took the best. They are the equivalent of our doctors today. Especially, the slaves from West Africa were the best. They used to call them “black gold” because they are fit. But now we are doing voluntary slavery. Now you see Africans trying to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. This is happening because there is a crisis of compensation in Nigeria and Africa. What I am saying is that we cannot resolve this problem of brain drain unless we resolve to pay working men and women very well; unless you motivate labour very well. Africa will never develop unless we assign a monetary value to labour. We place a high value on money, oil and gas, solid mineral resources, diamond and gold, all of which we have in abundance. Crude oil, in fact, is Africa’s blessing and curse because we have so many resources but overlook the human resources that would make them work.The exodus of our technicians, engineers, nurses, and all the best brains that we have educated is a manifestation of our neglect of human resources. Those who are taking them, Europe, America and UK are taking them. If Nigerian nurses and doctors are asked to return to Nigeria today by whatever means, the entire National Health Service in Britain will collapse because it is being run by Nigerian doctors and nurses and they are being paid less compared to what they pay their own people.
That tells you that the value they assign to a human resource, which we don’t assign here, is that you pay them peanuts and they add more to attract them. You couldn’t give them accommodation; they accommodate them, and they value them more; but you don’t value your own and these are countries that are already developed. You’re further under-developing yourself by letting your best brains go to the developed countries of the world.
The way out is to take labour and human resources seriously. When we talk of resource control, the real control should start with control of labour; to retain labour. Resource control is not just oil and gas, but in any case, if the human resources are not well trained, you cannot get the best from oil and gas. China doesn’t have oil and gas but they have more refineries than us. What is the miracle? They have technicians, people who are trained; who can turn raw materials into products. In our case, the engineers have disappeared; you can’t maintain your refineries, you closed everything down, and we are the only oil-producing country with no functional refineries.
China is not an oil producing country, but it has fifty refineries. Singapore has about thirty refineries. They come here to buy crude oil and add value to it. You know, Jos used to be the home of solid minerals, but it is just the raw materials that we are taking away. They just process them in Europe and bring them back to us. They will take the raw gold to Geneva where they will turn it into trinklets, and we will catch the plane again to buy the same thing in Dubai, when we should have gotten a refinery that would process it here in the country. We must assign value to labour. The way to retain labour is to make them gainfully employed. Train them to have the skills and pay them very well. What we have today is working-poor people. People who are poor on account of working. You work for sixty years, your money can hardly take you home. The future is not guaranteed. You can’t get accommodation; you can’t feed your children. Nigeria cannot transform without addressing labour motivation and labour retention.
What unique thing do you think the Buhari administration has done that is different from others on workers welfare?
One of the things which the Buhari administration has done is that despite the COVID-19 challenges, recession (one and two), crude oil theft, and collapse of oil revenue, he has never retrenched. It is highly commendable that he has ensured job retention. In 1999, we never had it as bad as we are experiencing but the Obasanjo administration declared war on the public service. He stated that it was over-blotted and he started “downsizing and right-sizing.” This administration deserves commendation because the best way to dignify labour is to let people have something to do. Don’t criminalise employment or turn workers into commodities which can be thrown away. But Buhari has shown that despite the fall in oil revenue, he kept jobs and not only that he pays salary as when due. He went further to look at the plight of workers who are in uniforms. Also, when some state governors in 2017 were complaining that they couldn’t meet the challenges of the new minimum wage, he gave them bailout funds more than once. These are facts. You may not like Buhari but these are his legacies. And I hope that any future government will uphold these legacies and promote labour as an important factor in development. He paid consequential adjustments. Some state governments have done that. Let’s commend Governor Lalong, who as a result of prompt payment of salary and clearing the backlog is named “Governor Alert.” We are willing, as part of our 40th-anniversary programme, to honour all employers of labour, be it federal, state, or public sector, who have respect for decent work; work that is secured and paid for on time. We would honour President Buhari as a president who has kept to the spirit of decent work. Even in ASUU, President Buhari allows freedom of association and he has never harassed labour leaders on account of their union activities. You know very well that when we were confronting Obasanjo in those days, he was willing to dissolve the NLC if he had his way. All of us must work together to make that freedom go with responsibility. Just as you cannot overuse your power, the government cannot overuse its power, and unions, as well, cannot abuse their power.
As the 2023 general election is around the corner, what is your advise to the voters and the incoming president of Nigeria?
I will tell Nigerians that as we are going into the election next year, they should access the labour agenda of the presidential candidates. What is their vision on decent work? How will they create jobs that are secured and paid for? They should not judge the candidates by their claims but look at the content of their programmes as labour issues will be the determinant of the outcome of the 2023 election. People should demand for the industralisation plans of the candidates with a view to getting our teeming youths jobs; bring back factories, labour intensive companies like textiles and automobiles. We have to buy made in Nigeria goods and services. Thank God President Muhammadu Buhari has signed the executive order 003. I am happy about the level of government patronage of Innoson Motors, even me as DG of Michael Imoudu National Institute of Labour Studies, the first major vehicles we bought are from Innoson Motors because the money we spent there will create jobs for our youths but the money we spend on Prado Jeeps goes to Japan; the money we spend on buying Ford vehicles goes to America. Home-made is the way to go. So, we want to know their plans. These are the issues that will set the agenda for the 2023 election not about Christian/Muslim ticket, Southern/Northern candidates. There is no Christian or Muslim water. Water has no religious colouration or religious label. I am calling on the presidential candidates not to act locally but think globally. They should not forget the position of Nigeria
in Africa and the international community. Every choice Nigerians make in the forthcoming election, including those who are contesting, must think of the role of Nigeria in Africa and the world at large because Nigeria is the largest concentration of black people in the world. We can not afford to fail.
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