Don’t Kill The Labour Movement-CNPP

By Osita Okechukwu

‘They are hiding under this guise to register a new labour centre which they hope will support anti-people policies and cause distraction in the labour movement. These government agents have even fixed July 2012 as the registration date of their proposed new labour centre.’…NLC.
Conference of Nigerian Political Parties {CNPP} is outraged when we received the worrisome news from the Nigeria Labour Congress {NLC} that the Peoples Democratic Party {PDP} led Federal Government have perfected unholy plan to create a Labour Centre with the intendment to kill the Labour Movement in Nigeria.
Our worry stems from the fact that to factionalize the Labour Movement, which played a major role in reclaiming our democracy from military dictatorship and which always stood with the people in waging wars of attrition against anti-peoples policy, a metaphor of the PDP led Federal Government of the last 13 years, will be a national disaster.
Is it not paradoxically that the government is afraid of a Labour Movement which many patriots accuse of fraternizing with President Jonathan’s government as evidenced by the abrupt stoppage of the January 2012 Fuel Subsidy Mass Action and which have neither supported nor paged with the Save Nigeria Group’s agitation for Mr President to immediately sack and prosecute all those indicted by the House of Representatives Report and recover the stolen subsidy funds? This smacks of fledgling dictatorship.
CNPP also bemoan with nostalgia how since 1999 the PDP instead of utilizing our unprecedented oil revenue to provide electricity, modern railways and social services devoted humongous resources to kill the Alliance for Democracy, All Peoples Party and other democratic institutions.
The truism is that the Peoples Democratic Party is afraid of its shadow of crass incompetence in governance, monumental corruption and therefore ironically views the Labour Movement as an enemy rather than comrade in arms to better the welfare of the citizenry as provided in the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
With the foregoing, we challenge President Goodluck Jonathan to use his good offices to call to order those unpatriotic, undemocratic and anti-labour elements in his party and government whose plan is to factionalize and indeed kill the Labour Movement in Nigeria to stop forthwith.
Osita Okechukwu
National Publicity Secretary
CNPP