Organized labor said yesterday that its decision to support the Labour Party, LP, presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, and his running mate Datti Ahmed, was unassailable.
Labor, under the sponsorship of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, said Nigerian workers would only vote for worker-friendly candidates in the forthcoming elections.
It also mandated urgent action from the nation’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to review the Naira redesign policy, including the extension of its timelines.
Speaking during an interactive session with labor reporters in Abuja, the outgoing President of the NLC, Ayuba Wabba, said people were tired of bad governance and the pain it had inflicted on the masses over the years.
He urged workers in the country to ensure they use their votes to install credible leadership in the coming general election.
He said workers should ensure they denied political parties and candidates with anti-people policies access to power.
“We need more workers in politics and at the helm of affairs of government, those who can understand the perspective of workers.
“Our workers are already in the field mobilizing and campaigning to make sure that only labor-friendly persons are elected into offices at the next general election. The labor party is already making headway in Abia state. We are tired of those false promises by politicians,” he said.
Speaking on the resolve of organized labor to support the presidential candidate of the Labour party, Peter Obi, NLC president maintained that the decision remained sacrosanct and that both the party and the labor movement had sealed the agreement with acceptance of the worker’s Charter of Demand.
He however said the support for the Labour Party was not wholesome as the workers reserved the right to deny their support for any candidate that didn’t pass its integrity test or against its Charter of Demand, especially at the state levels.
On the 31st January deadline for the withdrawal of old naira notes with the new redesigned ones, Wabba demanded urgent action to review the policy being implemented by the Central Bank of Nigeria, including the extension of its timelines.
Asked to comment on the Naira Redesign policy, he described it as crisis-ridden, adding that the policy has created additional hardship for the poor Nigerians, especially those living in the rural areas.
He said that NLC is aligning itself with the position expressed by the Senate on the need to rejig the policy.
According to Wabba, NLC has written President Muhammadu Buhari and the CBN Governor demanding urgent measures to address the challenges posed by the implementation of the policy.
He said: ” I mean, they are not enough new Naira notes in circulation and the old notes are being rejected, they are pushing people to the wall and very soon people will react.
“More importantly, even in city centers, where we have banks, the banks are not dispensing. If you go to rural areas and see the chaotic nature of how people have come with their money even changing it is becoming a problem.
“No policy will be meant actually to haunt people like what is happening now. And we have called on the government to look at this issue very carefully before it leads to a major crisis,” he said.
The NLC president whose tenure will end in February this year was taken up on some of the government policies that generated labor disputes under his watch and which were yet to be resolved.
One such issue was the unresolved negotiation on the right pricing of the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) of which a final agreement was not reached before the current price increases.
When asked to comment on the situation, Wabba blamed the federal government for not coming clean on its position on measures that would effectively put an end to the energy crisis.
He said there is currently confusion in the domestic petrol distribution system, to the extent that the regulatory bodies charged with the function of checking the excesses of marketers are not doing anything about it.
The outgoing NLC President also blamed the federal government for not acceding to the labor movement’s proposal to review the gas pricing template that is fueling the persistent hike in electricity tariffs.