By Owei Lakemfa
I DO not belong to any political party or campaign organisation. But  I am not apolitical. I do not know who will be president after the 2011 elections, but I do know that Nigerians will be committing political suicide if retired General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida  were allowed to return to power.

If his first eight years of misrule and gross abuse of power was a farcical event in the innocence of time, his return to power under any guise, including zoning will be quite tragic.

I believe that the most basic criteria for leadership include trust, reliability, honesty, sincerity and humaness; none of these is part of Babangida’s strong points.

For the purposes of this write up, I will demonstrate how Babangida  through deceit and a streak of ruthlessness used just one  of his numerous decrees to wreck workers and the labour movement within  his first three years in power.

Sure, he was not responsible for the sorry state of workers before his August 27, 1985 military coup. Indeed for four years before, there had been a wage freeze. The return of the military to power from December 31, 1983 under the General Muhammadu Buhari regime merely worsened the situation.

That nightmarish regime in  which Babangida as Chief of Army Staff was a key player, retrenched over one million workers across the country and imposed a plethora of levies, including for  ‘Development’ ‘Survival’ ‘Recovery’ and ‘Education’.

The then military governors were simply on the rampage: Lt Colonel  David Alachenu Bonaventure Mark in Niger State imposed a five per cent wage cut and by the time other levies were added, workers in the state had one third of their wages deducted.

His Plateau State counterpart, Samuel Atukum was more humane as he cut workers wages ‘only’ by 20 per cent. But by far the most bizarre was Governor Ike Omar Sanda Nwachukwu who introduced the infamous “Imo Formula” under which as part of levies, workers were forced to donate blood.

When Babangida seized power, he  said of the Buhari era: “Contrary to expectations we have so far been subjected  to a steady deterioration  in the general conditions of living and intolerable suffering  by the ordinary Nigerians has reached unprecedented heights”.

The promise was that better days were here, but the reality was that things were just about to get far worse. He promised consultations; indeed his Labour Minister,  Rear Admiral Patrick Koshoni  instituted a monthly  dialogue with Labour to discuss labour matters.

This turned out to be a ruse. A few days after the ‘consultative’ meeting in November 1985, the Head Of Service issued a circular announcing   wage cuts of between two and 15  per cent. This had not been raised at the meeting and a shocked Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) issued an ultimatum that  the circular be withdrawn.

The Babangida regime pretended that it wanted dialogue; it sent a negotiation team led by its Federal Director of Budget, Mr Omowale Kuye to Congress. The NLC which thought that  the new Head of State could be trusted, relaxed. In any case, Labour had pointed out that the circular contravened Section 5 of the Labour Decree which states  that an employer may make deductions from an employee’s wages only with the worker’s consent.

To legalise his action and make the negotiations with NLC a nullity, Babangida issued the National Economic  Emergency Powers Decree 1985. A furious NLC met Koshoni complaining that the decree  was  a betrayal of the NLC- Federal Government agreement reached with the Kuye delegation.

To this, the Minister retorted that the agreement was “a technical input into a political decision”. Which indicated that an agreement with the regime was not worth the paper on which it was written.

One year later, Babangida amended the decree under a States (Special Development Levies) Decree 1986 which empowered state military governors “to levy and deduct monies from the salaries and earnings “ of public sector workers.

To worsen workers plight, his  new Labour Minister, the same Brigadier Nwachukwu of “Imo Formula”  fame gazetted on December 23, 1986 an Order that the 1981 Minimum Wage of N125 which was payable by companies employing 50 or more workers , should now apply to only employers with at least 500 workers. Only a handful of employers had up to 500 employees.

So technically, the Babangida regime abolished the minimum wage! It was only a concerted struggle that forced the regime to reverse the order.

In June 1986 when Congress decided to protest against the murder of four ABU students by his regime, Babangida ordered a clamp down on the NLC and students nationwide.

When a year later the NLC demanded a wage increase, and  began a campaign against punishing increases in the prices of petroleum products, Babangida rounded up labour leaders, including then NLC president, Ali Chiroma; scribe, Lasisi Osunde and  spokesperson, Salisu Nuhu Mohammed and clamped them into detention without trial.

Then the regime encouraged a split in the NLC, and in February 1988, under the guise that it wanted to heal the split, he decreed the ban of the NLC using the same Economic Recovery Decree which was originally meant for wage cuts.  To further  his mischief, the self-styled ‘Evil Genius’ imposed an employer, Mr Michael Ogunkoya as the Sole Administrator of the NLC.

After this conquest and seizure of Congress, Babangida’s regime demanded the death penalty for some  NEPA (electricity) workers who had dared to go on strike.  Nowhere in the world, including under the most evil dictator such as  Augusto Pinochet, the human butcher in Chile, did a workers strike carry the death penalty! Magnanimously, he reduced this to life imprisonment for 11 of the NEPA men.

After much pressures, Babangida told an international delegation that out of his large heartedness, he had decided to reduce the sentence to 10 years.

The men served time in Kaduna prisons.
I do not imagine that any of the presidential aspirants can be as iniquitous as Babangida, hence my slogan: Anybody But Babangida!