Labour movement not for single centre – Ajaero

General Secretary of National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE), Comrade Joe Ajaero, and President of National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), Igwe Achese,  recently launched a labour centre, the United Labour Congress (ULC). Ajaero speaks with a group of journalists in Abuja on the plan to get ULC registered. MOSES JOHN was there

There will be three labour centres in the country if the newly launched United Labour Congress (ULC) is eventually registered. Where do you see Labour movement in Nigeria with three centres?
Pre-1978, there were four labour centres in Nigeria, including the United Labour Congress. Then, it was United Nigeria Labour Congress, and when the Obasanjo regime came, they tried Labour leaders, banned so many of them, people like Wahab Goodluck, from participating in Labour movement. With that dictatorial muscle, they brought everybody together and said, you must belong to a single labour centre.
It is not the culture of Nigeria Labour movement to have a single labour centre but for the military. That is the last feature of the military dictatorship in the labour movement.
Now the thing played up again in 1988 when we had the democrats and the progressives, trying to split, but because we were still under military dictatorship, the atmosphere for them to have their separate centres, based on their ideological persuasion was not there.
Incidentally, the same Obasanjo came again around 2002/2003 and saw that under democratic environment you cannot compel people to remain in one room even if they don’t want to be there. Section 40 of Nigerian Constitution says you have the right to form and belong to any trade union of your choice, religion or political affiliation. It is in exercise of that right that the TUC was registered. Incidentally, TUC was registered as the first labour centre with the number 001. NLC doesn’t have a registration number up till now. If somebody is telling you about registration or non-registration, they have not done that.

If it is all about receiving licence or certificate after the amendment of plural Labour centres, they don’t have that. Let nobody deceive himself, TUC is 001 and there is no 002 as at today.
In as much as I wouldn’t want to go into controversy, the atmosphere has been opened for people to belong to labour centres with some criteria; which is to avoid mush-rooming of labour centres and that is what we are trying to do. We are not fighting anybody, we did not attack anybody, and we would not attack anybody.
So, I am saying that for the fact that we have three doesn’t mean we cannot have four and if we had four in 1978, when we didn’t have these number of companies, these number of unions, and these number of workers, the tendency for us to have more is now, if it will serve our purpose.

Many are of the opinion that pluralisation of Labour movement may make workers vulnerable to government influences?
I don’t think so. That is why I stated that there were four from the beginning. Even these three cannot completely address the problems of the workers. Since the unfortunate thing that happened in NLC in the last two years, I tell you that NLC has not attended to issues concerning anybody from my group, whether when we were picketing Ikeja or whatever, it is internal here. We will now have to look for a way of solving our problems and this is important.
So, I don’t think it is pluralisation but there is room independently for mergers and acquisition. If we are registered and we are not doing well, we will be swallowed by a stronger centre or we have an arrangement with other centres to join them. So, by the time we move one year or two years and we discover that we can’t do it alone, it is either we fuss together naturally. Nature will take its course.

Given the crisis that preceded the centre, don’t you think it seriously affect your relationship with other centres if you are eventually registered?
I think we should stop being fixated. The solution to the crisis is what has happened. We have sat down and we have resolved to forget about it. We discovered that even the people we are operating with will not agree on any of those issues we have decided jointly. We discovered that on daily bases, it is either they are sending Police or EFCC or whatever to you to say you did this, or arranging some people from their own sector to send petition against you.
I can’t see the current move as a way of undermining the Labour movement. That is the only way we can resolve the issue. The workers are suffering, we have to render services, so I don’t believe that it will undermine them. We are exercising that freedom without fighting with anybody. We are not ready to join issues on a whole lot of matters coming up. We are not joining issues with them. We want to see whether we can render services in our own little way to the working class even if it involves unity in diversity. You will serve two or three organizations here, I serve two or three organization here, cumulatively, it will be service to the Nigerian workers, and we would be rated based on our services to the workers.

Do you have the required number of affiliate trade unions based on the extant Labour law and have you met all the necessary procedures for registration?
I want you to leave that. If we are 11 unions and we want to register and the law says 12, they will not register us. Get this right because I know why I am saying this. If I know that it is 12 and I am going there with 11, you can see the foolishness on my part. It then means no one will listen to me. That is why I say we have to de-emphasize that area. But I am telling you, more than 12 unions left from the NLC, and I am telling you that unions from the TUC and unions that are not affiliated to any for now are into this.
This is not a faction of NLC, there are unions from TUC, there are unions that are not affiliated to NLC and TUC and there are those unions from the NLC that pulled out.

I can count up to 12 or more. They now came together, to have a kind of merger arrangement to form this centre. If somebody is saying it is not up to 12, you allow the people who are responsible to count and know whether those unions are registered or not; because it is the same organisation that registered those unions that we are taking these names to. The point I am making is that the unions that pulled out of NLC are enough to register. We didn’t go to register those ones that left from NLC as a centre so the aim will not be defeated as if it is a faction. We have to align and start this process. So, the NLC and TUC alone cannot be fighting us when we have people who were not aligned with any of the centres before.
If NLC is challenging that NUEE is still its member, they can then write a letter to us that you are still our member and you cannot take that step, you don’t have the right. That is the area we can go to. Even if we are two or three, let them reject it based on that number.
Like other conditions you asked, we are trying to present them, if there are other conditions that they feel we have not met, they can reject it.

What is your ideology?
The workers first, which means if the worker is hungry, it will affect us. If he doesn’t have salary increase, it will affect us. First and foremost, there is no other thing that is bringing us to this business if not the workers. So, that is the ideology, that is what will drive us and we would resist neo-liberalism because it has killed jobs in Nigeria, it has killed a lot of people. When jobs are killed, people die. That is why we have to align with workers in the Aviation sector to ground Arik; and after that, even after 10 years of Arik refusing unionization, they signed an agreement that they have admitted unionisation and that the seven-month salaries would be paid immediately.

This is not a faction of NLC, there are unions from TUC, there are unions that are not affiliated to NLC and TUC and there are those unions from the NLC that pulled out.