‘ Organised Labour Is A Subset Of The Nigerian Political Class’

The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party ( SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, recently spoke with select journalists on the state of affairs in the country where he advised the organised labour to engage the Federal Government more meaningfully towards enhancing productivity in the country rather than pushing for wage increment always. He, however, tasked the government to prioritise the implementation of Chapter Two of the 1999 Constitution, describing it as Nigeria’s map to greatness.

IVirtually everything that is wrong in the country is blamed on the government. Why is it so? think everybody is trying to survive. You don’t grow an economy of survival mode; you grow an economy of productivity and creativity. So, when you hire a person in Nigeria, you verily have hired your enemy because what you pay the person cannot pay his rent; cannot pay for his children’s education and cannot pay for the food his family eats. So, both the employer and the employee are lying to each other. If you see your secretary coming to work, if you just calculate what she is putting on from head to toe, you know that she’s not buying all those things from the money you are paying her.

As Tinubu is the President of Nigeria, you can go and ask him whether if he looks at his own private secretary or the typist in the State House, he is convinced as an accountant that any of the workers in the Villa is surviving on his/ her salary. So, right from the State House there’s a problem. That’s why I said that we need fundamental adjustments and it can be done.

That’s why I keep talking to Nigerians about Chapter Two of the constitution. That is the map to the greatness of Nigeria. So if you are lost, that is the GPS; go back to that chapter two. If we follow it, many of these problems will be resolved. There will be unity in the country; there will be order in the country. And you will not have a bank manager or managing director that is earning one million times the earnings of a fresh graduate in the bank.

So, we need to make those changes before we can see real changes on the street. Our people are good people, but we don’t like failure. We are not the kind of people that submit to poverty. There are many countries that are endemic in poverty. They take it as their lot. But in Nigeria, your driver still wants his son to be a medical doctor like yours. He wants his daughter to be a pharmacist like yours. He wants his youngest son to be a judge, so he has to be a lawyer. So, he’s looking for the money. He is earning N50,000 a month but he does not want to enrol his child in a government school; he knows the government schools are not good. He wants to enroll his child in a private primary school where he’s paying

N5,000 every month from the N50,000 he is earning. But if you go to many countries that are poor, they just accept it.

Some will not go to school at all. But

Nigeria is different. With a very aggressive population like that they will do anything to make money. That is why your driver may kidnap you because his budget is bigger than his salary. What is your take on the quest for wage increment by organised labour. How can the problem of agitation for better welfare by workers be addressed?

First and foremost, there are things we need to understand in basic economics. Having more money does not guarantee you anything. Purchasing power is what is important. So, what we should focus on is what the money can buy, not the volume of the money that is the minimum wage.

But you have to increase the volume of housing available. You have to increase the volume of food stuff available. You have to increase the number of classrooms available. You have to increase the spaces available for productivity by making sure you ramp up production.

As for the organised labour, they are a subset of the Nigerian political class. They don’t represent the workers. I am not saying that to insult the present leadership or anything. No; it is just the structural part of it.

Before you can be a member of Nigeria Labour Congress ( NLC) or Trade Union Congress ( TUC), you must have a job. And there are more people without jobs than people with jobs. So, if you are unemployed, you are not a member of any labour union because it’s only for workers. So, the challenge we are facing is how to put more people in the workforce; so the labour unions are not as representative as you think. Secondly, labour is supposed to be fighting for or against productivity and things that can affect productivity, not just wage control. If the government brings a policy that is going to affect productivity, labour should know that jobs will be lost. That was the difference between Obama and Mitt Romney when the election was decisive.

When you ask people of Michigan, who will you vote for? They will tell you they will vote for Obama, who saved their jobs, not Mitt Romney, who wrote an article, ‘ Let Detroit be bankrupt’.

So, those workers are not voting according to ethnicity, religion or for any politician that can give them money; they are voting according to their interests.

If you save General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, you have saved thousands of jobs; you have saved thousands of families and you have saved millions of people.

So, I want labour to engage the government more meaningfully, not just to be negotiating for N1 million per month wage. What matters is that you must ensure that employment is higher and that unemployment is lower and that you support only a government policy or a government arrangement that is working towards full employment. This is because when you have more people in the workforce, you have a bigger labour base.

There are more members of the APC than members of labour congress. There are more members of the PDP than members of the labour congress because how many people are employed in the country? How many are all the civil servants combined? If you say you are a road transport union, how many vehicles are on the road? If you say you are a member of the railway workers’ union, how many trains and train drivers are in Nigeria? How many doctors and hospitals do we have?

So, I want us to go back to that liberal movement of that time, which is pro- economy, pro- productivity.

How can you close all the textile factories? There would have been no Adams Oshiomhole without the textile factories. Where are those textile factories around the Aswani area in Lagos and the ones in Kaduna? Where are they today? That is what labour should be talking about.

With due respect, as poorly performing as the government is, the labour movement as currently constituted is worse. So we need to have a systemic review of what we want to do.

What is your assessment of the government’s policies so far based on the campaign promises of the ruling party?

There is something called parallax, appreciation of the situation. I will say objectively that what is happening is that Nigeria is doing her homework. We just realised that we need to do our homework. That is the objective reality. But the perception each person would have is now different. What I see us doing now is having a re- sit for our own homework. The fact that a student is now seriously doing his homework doesn’t mean he is going to use the right formula. He could use the wrong formula and soon enough, he would find out that it is not working.

The first thing I diagnosed in the course of the election and after is whether we understand our homework. If you have homework in Physics and you are bringing Wole Soyinka’s ‘ Trial of Brother Jero’ or ‘ Achebe’s Arrow of God’, you will realise that however well intentioned you are, you are doing the wrong subject. So, I see that what is facing and chasing us is poverty and security; and bad governance is the guarantor for both. In the end, the election went the way it went, and thanks to many of you, who keep liking me but didn’t come and vote for me and the election went the other way. We are failing to deal with poverty and insecurity; we are failing to run a competent government. I have some disagreement with the people in government now, including the party and the President and his team. I think they are answering the wrong question. However hard they work, they can’t get it right because they are answering the wrong question. My duty is to remind them all the time that you are answering the wrong question.

So, however much President Tinubu is trying, however wonderful his ministers are, I wish they would spend all that energy on actual priorities of what is ailing the country. They should try to create wealth for the people, through the people themselves. They should try as much as possible to deal with the primary duties of government, which is to keep people safe, to keep people inspired and to obey the law. The first duty of government is to keep everyone safe. The next duty is to make the law work, by the government itself obeying the law and showing an example that if you don’t obey, this is the consequence.

Yes, we have stylistic differences as to which economic model works better. What I found out is that you can give a basket of 30 successful countries.

Each one is pursuing a different economic model, but they are successful in their own ways.

It’s like a journey from Lagos to Abuja. A wise person might say, the best place for you is actually to fly. Another person may say, don’t fly, go by road. Another person may say, why don’t you take a train? If you are serious and you are determined, even if you choose the slowest method, you would eventually get to Abuja because you are facing the right direction.

Your mode of transportation may be weak, might not be most efficient, but you will get there. But if you take the most efficient aircraft and you are in Lagos trying to come to Abuja, if you take your navigation towards the South, you will be running very fast, but you never get to Abuja.

The Ministry of Interior came out with a policy which aims at taxing employment of expatriates in Nigeria as a means of encouraging and reinforcing local content even as the government is looking to attract Foreign Direct Investment ( FDI). Do you think the policy is in order?

Well, I think that it’s a question of a dilemma in policy. Policy is inter- governmental and intra- governmental. The nature of this policy is an inter- governmental type, which is that the government speaks with one voice .

And from what I saw, the President himself was the launcher of that policy handbook. There are contradictions that need to be resolved there. Those contradictions are legalistic in nature. If you are inviting foreign investors, on what terms are you inviting them? And there are two things you consider. What you want to do is, first, certainty. You want to know if the law is certain in where you are going. You reserve your comment as to whether you agree with the rules or not, but you want certainty in the rules. Do you come up with new rules every day?

I want labour to engage the government more meaningfully, not just to be negotiating for N1 million per month wage. What matters is that you must ensure that employment is higher and that unemployment is lower and that you support only a government policy or a government arrangement that is working towards full employment. This is because when you have more people in the workforce, you have a bigger labour base.