2023: NLC vows to rescue Nigerians from ‘bad governance’

Minimum wage, Nationwide protest, Nigerians, Warning strike, Power sector privatisation, NLC, Labour unions, Fuel scarcity

Ahead of the 2023 general election, organised labour has announced its readiness to rescue Nigerians from the “grips of continuous misrule and bad governance,” through its political party, the Labour Party.

The organised labour said this in Abuja on Sunday during the commemoration of the 2022 Workers’ Day.

The 2022 event was held with the theme, ‘Labour, Politics and the Quest for Good Governance and Development in Nigeria’.

The labour, in a joint address read by President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Comrade Ayuba Wabba, and his TUC counterpart, Comrade Quadri Olaleyi, noted that it resolved to launch the party after a series of serious discussions with progressive political parties and groups in the country.

The unions’ leaders said: “Workers can no longer play the ostrich while a section of our professional political class plays the roulette with the welfare of workers and the destiny of our country.

“History will be very unkind to us if we continue to stay outside the rings of politics and trust that our placards and protests will change the ironclad determination of many of our politicians bent on looting, enslaving and leaving in their wake smokes of destitution and despondency.

“Given the scale of disappointing returns on governance and national development, we must now do the needful.

“There is no better time than now to enter the political rings and engage more vigorously with the questions of Nigerians’ collective survival as a people and as a working class who produce the wealth that the political class squanders at whim.

“Instead of engaging the issues of physical security, social protection, decent wages, unemployment and poverty eradication, fixing the economy, our politicians are more interested in zoning of political offices and threatening the peace of our country which is already greatly imperilled.

“Clearly it is a failed political class that would wish to keep the masses, workers and the daily socioeconomic struggles we face as footnotes in the 2023 political agenda,” Wabba and Olaleyi stated.

The Star