• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Suffering and smiling workers

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Guest

The late Afro Beat icon, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, obviously had Nigerian workers in mind when he released the “Suffering and Smiling” album. Nigerian workers earn about the lowest wages in the world and have political leaders who are paranoid about paying N52000 minimum wage monthly. And this is despite the fact that the minimum wage demanded by organised labour amounts to a paltry 200 pounds sterling which can barely sustain a politician’s child in school in Europe or America for a week.
Between 2003 and 2008, the country’s labour force was decimated by over 16 million, declining from 66 million to 50.13 million workers according to the United State of America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA’s) World Factbook.
In a country renowned worldwide for vast deposits of crude oil and other natural resources, workers’ take home pay can barely take them home from work nowadays due to harsh economic climate. Yet the government foot-drags when it comes to ameliorating the impact of the global economic meltdown on workers. A vast majority of workers cannot afford decent accommodation and healthcare, can barely feed and clothe themselves and their families, and cannot afford to pay their children’s school fees as at when due. And to add to workers’ woes, inflation is galloping away at double digits.

According to Central Bank of Nigeria data, inflation rate which was 12.4 per cent in August 2008 rose to 13.2 percent by May 2009. No wonder many workers cut corners and patriotism is the last word on most lips. For decades it’s been a case for every worker for himself or herself and God for us all.
While there are striking similarities between the lot of Nigerian workers today and workers in Poland in the 1980s, significant differences exist between the responses of both sets of workers to the oppressive leadership that brought their respective country’s economy to its knees.

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In Poland, workers did something about their suffering. Unfortunately, Nigerian workers have perfected the art of suffering and smiling, the sporadic wave of strike actions the Nigeria Labour Congress and its allies embark upon occasionally in toothless challenge to government ineptitude of the worst kind ever suffered by any nation notwithstanding.
For many a Nigerian worker, the names ‘Solidarity’ and ‘Lech Walesa’ ring a bell. Unemployed Polish electrician Lech Walesa squared up against Soviet communism after leading a strike action at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, by announcing the official birth of the Solidarity independent trade union.
Fifteen months later, the union’s membership grew from 1 million to 9 million people- about one quarter of the country’s population. Solidarity went on to play a vanguard role in the transformation of European history and the demise of communism across Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. Solidarity’s gallant role was a culmination of Polish workers’ determination to resist oppression even at the cost of their lives and at a time when the country’s then communist government was at a loss as to how to manage her declining economy. About 17,000 Polish workers seized control of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to protest a rise in food prices and demand for better wages and benefits, among other things. But none of their demands was as crucial as the right to organize and strike. Their leader, Lech Walesa, had narrowly avoided arrest by the communist secret police on the morning of the strike, barely managing to scale the shipyard gate to join his striking colleagues inside.
Workers in 20 other area factories later joined the strike in solidarity. The communist government’s inability to arrest Poland’s economic decline led to waves of strikes across the country in April, May and August 1988. In an attempt to take end the wave of strikes which were threatening to cripple the country’s economy completely, the government gave de facto recognition to Solidarity, and began talks with Lech Wa??sa on 31st August 1988.
Although initial talks broke down in October 1988, both parties engaged in what became known as the “round-table” talks by February 1989 through which an agreement was reached in April 1989 for partly-open National Assembly elections. The elections, held in June 1989, produced a Sejm (lower house) in which one-third of the seats went to communists and one-third went to the two parties which had hitherto been the communist party’s coalition partners. One-third of the seats in the Sejm and all seats in the Senate were freely contested with Solidarity fielding a majority of the candidates. Quite unexpectedly, the ruling communists failed at the polls and attempts to resolve the consequent political crisis resulted in the ascendance of Solidarity-activist journalist, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, into power as Prime Minister on September 12, 1989.

For the first time in over forty years of communist dominance, Poland had a government led by non-communists. By December 1989, the Sejm approved the new government’s reform economic transformation programme meant to rapidly transform the Polish economy from socialist to free-market, amended the constitution, and renamed the country the ‘Republic of Poland’. By the time of the May 1990 local elections, candidates supported by Solidarity’s Citizens’ Committees won most of the elections they contested and by December 1990, Lech Wa?esa, the Solidarity leader, became the first popularly elected President of Poland.
The time has come for Nigerian workers, under the aegis of the Nigeria Labour Congress, to transcend the realm of rhetoric by taking the country’s political bull by the horns. The solution to workers’ suffering and smiling does not lie in organising jamboree strikes across the country but entering into an alliance with progessive forces in order to wrest power from the political brigands that currently transverse our nation like leprosy. We’ll lose only our slavery chains.