Edo State governor and former President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, has castigated the leadership of the congress over their silence and inaction on major national issues, especially the Chibok girls, unpaid workers salaries by state governors and expatriate quotas.
Oshiomhole, who spoke at the ongoing National Leadership Retreat of the NLC in Calabar, Cross River State, blamed the congress leadership for not effectively challenging critical issues of national importance in the last few year, especially after he had left office.
While comparing his leadership and those before him to the immediate past leadership of the NLC, the governor said that even when the leadership made comments, they made them with reservation.
He warned that the NLC could not recoil to the old tradition of wages and minimum wage alone, adding that the congress had gone beyond wages and minimum wage.
According to Oshiomhole: "There are challenges in the movement and Ejiofoh had warned us severally that he believed we are not making the right investments in education and that we are going to end up producing union leaders who know nothing about the union's ideologies, traditions and core values.
"There is the need to revisit the core values of the labour movement because it must be guided by rules and it must be guided by tradition.
"NLC has been silent on some serious national issues, issues that threaten your immediate and long term prosperity and when you make comments, you make them with reservation.
"For example, I do not know what was NLC's position on the issue of Chibok girls. When I was the president of NLC, they allegedly killed the chairman of the Anambra branch of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), we suspected he was killed by the agents of the government and that was why the police were not interested in the investigation and the NBA is not an affiliate of the NLC but because we are a general purpose vehicle to champion the cause of all those who are oppressed, for us in the NLC, it is our mandate and so, we organised a protest to the IG and Obasanjo that he must produce the killers of Igwe. So, whoever was oppressed, we were ready to take up their cause.
"How could they kidnap Chibok girls and it is Oby Ezekwesilie that is seen as picking the conscience of the then government and of the world and the NLC is not even a footnote in this process/ I could never understand that, how?
"We have shown that we have less interest. So, NLC cannot recoil to the old tradition of wages and minimum wage alone, we have gone beyond wages and minimum wage anyway. Those are important but they are no longer at the hearts of our engagements,"
He also advised the labour leaders to build on the tireless efforts of their founding fathers and reinvent the wheel of unity in trade union movement.
On the many sins of the NLC leadership, Comrade Oshiomhole said: "You are fighting jobs, you want jobs to be created in the Nigerian economy, and you allow Chinese prisoners to operate in Nigeria and I have never heard a comment from NLC.
"You will see Chinese working in small cafe, you will see them carrying headpan in construction sites, where are the new member of workers going to work when Chinese employees have taken their jobs. Even when I was a small organiser in textile industry, we fight against excessive expatriate quota. Those quota jobs, they are jobs that Nigerians can do and it must never be done by foreigners.
"So how? I have never heard of any complain? How are we going to get the jobs? Of course, we have relationship with Chinese union, but carry yourself and go to China to work if they will not bundle you and put you in prison."
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