This  is  the concluding part  of the interview  Correspondent Johnbosco  Agbakwuru, had with Comrade Joe Ajaero, factional President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, where he spoke on the crisis rocking the Congress and how it could be resolved. The second  part was published a fortnight ago.

WHAT do you think is the solution to this  crisis?

Well, I want peace in Nigeria, I want peace in the labour movement  and I am an apostle of peace, but not peace of the graveyard and not peace at any cost. Things must be done properly.

As I said, anytime I am called, I will appear to give my own account  of what transpired up to this moment. So, depending on the political will of the people trying to drive the peace process, they may find the solution. If  not, instead of us  to work together and suffocate, we will continue to work apart.

There is no law that says we cannot operate outside NLC, but we are NLC and we remain in NLC and nobody through any thinking will tell us that we are not NLC or we don’t have the right to organise ourselves or organize a conference of our own if the other conference is not properly conducted. These are the issues, but we want a united labour centre.

Can  you give us a step-by-step method to be taken in achieving this peace?

Ordinarily, I should not be discussing this because we are in court. We have to explore the court option and if the option gives us peace, we will take it. But if we are out of court, we discuss out of court.

Genuine reconciliation

This is because it is not a question of what I want. If you remove it from me and my person, we will go far. I don’t need any of those titles for my views to be heard in this country. I am not boasting; my views will be based on what I believe or what I know, either for or against issues.

I have made myself available and  I can step aside for genuine reconciliation if it is the wish of the people. That is why I said we have a peace committee of which I am not a member. It is for members to meet with this other group’s committee and if veterans are meeting, if they come out with conditions that are acceptable based on the reality on ground, we will  fall in-line, but not anyone imposing anything on normal human beings.

Your union, the National Union of Electricity Employees, NUEE, with the privatization of the sector, what are the challenges?

We have a lot of challenges  as a union, and the challenges were envisaged before privatization. The major challenge is the fallout of privatization, but we strategized before now. We fixed the union in such a way that we  can drive this union for the next 20 years without one member,  because we knew what we were going to pass through.

After that arrangement, the privatisation came, and of course with the attendant job losses and the anti- labour position of the new investors, all these things came in together. So, the first six months, though they said they did not recognise the union, they did not pay dues, we said no problem.

Within that six months, we decided to fight, because the greatest achievement some of us met when we came to the leadership of the union was to make it a fighting organisation.   18 succesor companies reduced staff strength. But before then, that was part of the issues that came up on the floor of NLC.  The cheque-off dues of the union was reviewed with over 120 per cent, four years before the privatization.

It was reviewed because there were massive salary increases which we negotiated. This made the percentage increases not to be felt. A worker that was  paying N500 cheque-off dues before, if he starts paying N1,000 or N1,200 when his salary has risen from N50,000 to about N120,000, you will know that if you remove N1,500 or more he will not feel it.  That has generated some funds for the union. Before then we had over 11,000 persons they were calling temporary staff. We fought and brought them into the union by ensuring their regularisation. Similarly, we had almost 15,000 who were under contract and casual staffing. We again  fought for their regularisation and we got it. So, at the time the privatization was taking  place, within two years or so, we had a massive membership of about 30,000. We now had it in mind that if we have that number, we had another increase in wages, by the time privatisation would hit us, with expected job losses, it could  bring us to where we were before these new members joined and fund increase came up.

That brought us to the need for levies to have some investments that would be profit centres for us to survive within this period. When they came and behaved the way the did, we smiled because they were dragging us to war  that we had prepared for.

So, we allowed them some space, because if we had engaged them immediately, Nigerians would  say the power situation was sabotaged by the union. But we took our time to start engaging them. I will say that only Port Harcourt electricity that was using  its hand to design forms for our members gave us headache.  That made us to fight its management. We shut down power there for about one week.

They hired thugs; NUPENG and two other unions joined us to fight the management because NLC was singing another tune. Even in Kano when we mobilised to shut down Kano, the NLC headquarters in Abuja started shouting at the Kano State NLC chairman. So, that  was the level of sabotage we faced from the leadership of NLC. We discovered that the NLC at the centre started working for our fall, they were not comfortable with our rising profile.

So, in Port Harcourt, the NLC chairman went and signed agreement with the management. We said no because he is from Nigerian Union Teachers, NUT,  he can’t sign agreement on our behalf. So, based on that, the management hired thugs and fought us , even NUPENG bus was destroyed.

We went to Industrial Arbitration Panel, IAP, and got a ruling in our favour, but the management refused to respect the ruling and proceeded to the National Industrial Court,  NIC.  The matter is still pending at the NIC. But before long, we are going to hit them again because they had done one or two other illegal things apart from the issues  in court. We can’t keep quiet; we have to address those issues.

Yola was another example. We took them to court as well but they sought for out-of-court settlement. Apart from that, there are other areas we have moved in, and even those of them that seized three or six months check-off dues, they paid arrears of these dues. So, apart from our members that have lost their jobs , we are soldiering on. God willing, we will be there.