Nigerians Have Suffered Enough, NLC Tells Fed Govt

There is a limit to how much more suffering Nigerians can endure, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) warned the Federal Government on Saturday.

It advised the government to halt all its anti-people policies.

The NLC said the perennial increases in the price of petrol amounted to the government transferring its incompetence to the people.

It vowed to mobilise citizens to resist any further attempt to inflict more pains on the citizens.

The Congress also warned some governors against starving pensioners and workers of their entitlement and the new minimum wage.

NLC President, Ayuba Wabba, in his new year message, said the labour movement was concerned about ”the deceit and duplicity associated with the politics of petrol price increase” by successive Nigerian governments.

He said: “Our argument has been that there is a limit to the imposition of hardship and suffering on the fragile shoulders of the Nigerian people.

”It is gratifying that amidst the deteriorating conditions of living, Organised Labour was able to rise up to ensure that the masses of our people were not completely run over by market forces enabled by the anti-people policies of the government and at the whims of shylock capitalists.

”Still, the government is not relenting in its determination to push through further increases in the pump price of petrol and which as usual had been dubbed as ‘removal of petrol subsidy’.

”Well, Organised Labour has made its position clear on this matter.

“We have told government in very clear terms that Nigerians have suffered enough and will not endure more punishment by way of further petrol and electricity price increases.”

The labour leader stressed that the socio-economic pains inflicted by the unprecedented lockdown in 2020 continued to manifest throughout 2021.

He believes another pump price increase will be insensitive.

”The truth is that the perennial increase by the government of the pump price of petrol is actually a transfer of government’s failure and inability to effectively govern the poor masses of our country.

”We are talking of the failure of government to manage Nigeria’s four oil refineries and inability to build new ones more than 30 years after the last petrochemical refinery in Port Harcourt was commissioned; the failure to rein in smuggling; and the failure to determine empirically the quantity of petrol consumed in Nigeria.

”The shame takes a gory dimension with the fact that Nigeria is the only OPEC country that cannot refine her own crude oil,” the NLC president added.