While I was engaging with some Labour Leaders over the new agitations for the new minimum wage, I was inundated with some newspaper publications of one new coalition called Working Peoples United (WOPU) led by the immediate past President of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG,) Mr Williams Akporeha.
The first shot of the new coalition is to declare that Nigerian workers are fully in support of the second term of current President Tinubu.
WOPU must be one of the chop-money organizations formed for the sake of elections. The aim is to campaign for President Tinubu and whitewash his anti-democratic and anti-Labour credentials. This is why the first summit of WOPU was done alongside the Ministry of Labour and Employments, while the President’s notorious Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila was Guest of Honour.
I have two reasons to believe that WOPU is dead on arrival!
One: Nigerian workers are living through one of the most hellish economic periods of their lives with Subsidies removed on all basic sectors like Education; Healthcare; Accomodations; Fuel; Gas; Food; Communication; Transportation; Electricity; Money Exchange; and others.
Two: The minimum wage of #70,000 amidst the current neo-liberal economic hardships, makes Nigerian workers one of the worst paid globally.
Also, WOPU is never a coalition of workers. It is a coalition of labour bureaucrats who are retiring, retired, or who are anti-workers. The Former NUPENG president is not even modest. Under him, what is unprecedented in NUPENG happened as the Union lost a trade dispute against Aliko Dangote. Even against Abacha, NUPENG never lost. It has become clearer to activists why recent labour struggles may have been sabotaged as these elements were the ones working with the government to betraying the larger interest of Nigerian workers and masses. We have now seen the faces of those betraying the struggle for a more equitable Nigeria and fair workplaces.
Overtime, the Labour movement has been perforated from within as the ruling class believes more in breaking strikes and frustrating Workers’ demands other than doing the needful. The confidence with which the Tinubu government care less about workers demands and people’s yearnings are traceable to the activities of these internal usurpers who march with the workers by morning, and dine with the oppressors by evening.
The Labour movement must be careful of agents and unprincipled people as leaders of the unions. These elements go back to backbite against workers at the end of the day. Imagine Akporeha combining with Gbajabiamila of many scandals to try to whitewashing the failed regime of President Tinubu?
WOPU, like the Adeniyi Adeyemi-led FCIPC agency, is a hogwash meant only for financial and power runs. Akporeha must desist from using Nigerian workers as baits for his new business. It is sure, just like the current national mess, WOPU will be another Gbajagate!
Imagine the hall where their recent outing took place was filled to the brim with thugs in the name of workers. It is public knowledge that is the Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila who has continued disobeying the courts and imposing Musiliu Akinsanya aka MC Olumide on the National Union of Road Transport Workers(NURTW.) It is these MC Oluomo thugs as facilitated by Gbajabiamila that WUPO and Akporeha call the “workers’ coalition.” This is very shameful and demeaning to the great name of the labour movement that fought through the military alongside the Left and civil society in order to win the current democracy we are practicing.
I call on all Nigerian workers to be careful of Williams Akporeha and the newly formed WOPU meant to lie to Nigerian workers and whitewash the deeply stained image of the anti-workers Tinubu regime. We Labour activists will not continue to look while workers are used as business baits. Akporeha and his cohorts should go and declare for Tinubu without dragging workers along into his muddy waters!