ONE of the issues that dominated the just concluded 106th session of the International Labour Conference, ILC, in Geneva, Switzerland, was the Green economy. Director General of Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association, NECA, Mr. Segun Oshinowo, who led a team of employers’ representatives to the conference, had a chat with a cross session of Nigerian journalists  at the conference on Green economy among others, and declared that while Nigeria is not ready for the green economy, the unemployment situation in Nigeria is worse than the statistics presented by National Bureau of Statistics, NBS.

Segun Oshinowo: Director-General of Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association, NECA.

By Victor Ahiuma-Young

LOOKING at the theme for this year’s conference which centres around Disaster and, Child Labour, from the employers’  view, what is your take?

First and foremost, I think Nigeria has done the needful, by ratifying the ILO convention that has to do with child labour and the worst forms of child labour and to that extent we must commend the country. But beyond that we need to domesticate those conventions which we have ratified and then declare in our minds what the implementation strategy should be to give effect to the provisions under those conventions. I think that is where the challenge really is.

Informal economy

But over the years, with the support of ILO, quite a number of initiatives have been commenced in Nigeria, the purpose of which is to reduce the incidents of child labour. And as an employers’ group, we serve in the Tripartite Committee which the Ministry of Labour has set up to be on top of this matter. However, we must acknowledge the various challenges we have been having in trying to reduce the incidents of child labour.

First, quite unlike developed economies in the world, where the formal economy is larger than the informal economy, in our own case, the informal economy is much larger than the formal economy and you have the incidents of child labour being quite much in the informal sector of the economy.

Unfortunately, the workers’ organisation has not really quite succeeded in extending its tentacles to the informal sector; neither has the Ministry of Labour been able to actually oil its inspectorate machinery to really be on top of the situation. So, those are the challenges.

But good enough, the ILO as an institution is aware of these challenges which are not really unique to Nigeria but quite peculiar to developing economies. That must have informed the decision of the ILO to put it on the agenda for the discussion this year. Also, the  follow up discussion on the declaration of fundamental principles and rights at work.

The objective of that discussion is for the constituents to actually bring to the attention of ILO those various challenges and then proffer advice and views as what ILO should do to support the constituents so that they are able to go back home, and refocus on the issue of child labour incidents.

We learned that a lot of times Nigera is on various committees looking at standards, as employers, how would you assess Nigeria’s participation this year?

I must say that we have been moving round in circle in terms of our strategy for proper involvement and engagements at the conference. We have not been able to build on some of the commendable initiatives which some past technocrats in the Ministry of Labour had initiated.

One example is the Nigerian delegation to have its own mini conference at home before coming over here where we can discuss the issues on the agenda of the ILO and probably agree on a Nigerian position. We have lost that because at the end of the day, we still  go back home to give the effect of the conclusion. But if we had given ourselves a head start by looking at the conference agenda and then having a common position, then each of us in our various constituent groups (employers group, workers group and government group) can push those positions.

It is not unlikely that if we had had that kind of mini conference, there would have been some differences. But at the same time, we will not come here to more or less enlarge those differences. In the course of clarifying those differences, we could have found a middle ground which the three constituents will push in their various ways.

Does it mean the employers were not carried along?

The NLC did, but you can’t compare the NLC initiative to the Ministry of Labour initiative. Ministry of Labour is the custodian of the tripartite machinery. In fact, the person that represented NECA is not here in Geneva because even though the NLC did well by trying to give effect to it, we didn’t really give it the attention that it deserves. It would have been a different thing if the session had been initiated by the Ministry of Labour.

So, those are two different things. As I have said, we must commend labour because you know as much as I do that, that kind of pre-conference gathering is important, but the appropriate party to handle it failed in its responsibility and that is the Ministry of Labour.

The Labour Minister during its presentation, said Nigeria was looking for support from ILO to help in country’s  recurrent budget deficit. What is your view?

With due respect to the Honourable Minister, I don’t think that message is for this house (ILO). That message is simply not for this house. Maybe, if he were to be addressing the conference of IMF or World Bank that would have been more appropriate.

Financial template

But even at that, I still feel that it is not a matter for multilateral institutions or global community to come and help us on how to manage our budgets. It is an issue for Nigeria to sit down and look at its financial template.  Do I have to broaden my income base or reduce my expenses?

Those are the basic questions that we must answer and it is a domestic issue and not an international issue. There is actually nothing wrong in being on deficit budget. The real issue is how do you finance it?

If you now want to finance a deficit budget what are you financing?  Am I financing recurrent expenditure or capital expenditure? If I am financing capital expenditure, then I could as well take solace in the fact that the productivity in which that infrastructural development will bring to the economy will enable me to pay my debt over time. So, it is a matter for domestic debate, not a matter for the ILO or the multilateral institutions.

What do you think government can do or put in place for greener economy to take place in Nigeria?

We are not yet there at all. If you are talking about green initiatives, you are talking about green jobs. The stage we are now really, going by the statistics the NBS released recently, almost about 12.2million Nigerians are unemployed. I can tell you that is quite conservative, very, very conservative. In fact, I won’t believe it because if 75 per cent of our populations are youths and you apply the unemployment rate in Nigeria to that youthful hands in our demographic profile, the figure you will  get , will be far more than 12.2million.

Now, if you want to promote a green job initiative, the issue is that, when you look at the environment in Nigeria, what type of job is the Nigerian economy capable of producing now.

We have got to be really honest with ourselves; there are nothing near in the economy of green jobs. Our priority actually is to make our economy grow to a level where it can generate jobs for millions of our youths. Our youths are not looking for big jobs. They are looking for the jobs or perhaps any job for that matter,  to be engaged in.

I am saying in the context of Nigeria given the scale of unemployment we are in, what we are interested in really is, are good jobs for our youths. The next level of that engagement can now be whether those jobs are green or not. But let us engage them productively first.