dmainboss:

I said it from day one that labor were going to shoot themselves in the foot. They have showed great inexperience in the handling of this crisis. This is where you have to duff your hat for Oshiomole. Having been a part of many protest myself even from my school days, I knew they had made some very major blunders with their approach. Their blunders left a lot of loopholes in the strike and boxed themselves to a corner. Some of their mistakes were:

1. You never ever take an extreme stand in a government labor dispute. You can take a hard stand, but you must always leave room for negotiations. Labor from day one allowed the sentiments of some clueless NGOs to influence them and took an extreme stance. They said they would never go back to the negotiating table until the government announces a reversal. No government will ever succumb to that. That is at best completely st.u.p.i.d and will always backfire. Labor is employed by government not by NGOs. It is like the fight between a husband and wife. Any third party that comes in between will eventually get the stick. In this case, labor became the unfaithful wife that decided to bring in an outsider to intimidate her husband. Foolish move!

2. When you do 1 above, you put yourself on the back-foot when you eventually come to the table. Also 1 above made the negotiations to start very late. At this time, the FG had gathered enough feedback and security reports to plan better and call the shots.

3. They allowed opposition politicians to take over the protest. Now before some of you defend that, consider this. There is a big difference between a mas action called by opposition groups and industrial strike by labor. They both have different rules and different outlooks. On top of that, there was no unanimous opposition support because the opposition actually supported the removal but only kept mute because they didnt want to offend the people. This created a real loophole. The opposition did not have the full moral power to protest. some say it is within the rights of politicians to hijack such protest. Well I completely disagree in a multi political state like Nigeria. There is a complete distrust amongst the various sections of Nigeria. So any protest can easily transform into a clamor for power shift. That is the reality of the day. And that was what people like Bakare brought to the table. The problem with that is that, those who seek power shift cannot seek it through mass action except they have the total support of the country. Unlike Libya and Egypt, they dont have that total support.

4. This one is interesting. They didnt consider a very subtle but key loophole. They didnt consider the fact that, though they were fighting a "good" cause on behalf of the masses, the corrupt oil dealers where as much beneficiaries of the strike as the masses. This was a big irony. I saw that loophole from day one and expected labor to find a way to maneuver themselves out of that but they didnt. That situation brought a moral question to the protest. Yes the loud voices of the mob tried hard to shut that down, but it was never going to go away. It was always going to be a recurring decimal in the whole saga. It also created a big moral problem for the labor leaders. There was always going to be the suspicion they were being sponsored. There was always going to be the issues that a return to N65 was a return to a cabal controlled Nigeria.

These are just my thoughts. I think that labor showed a lot of inexperience in the handling of this strike. I dont think they were bribed by government. People are too quick to say negative things because they have never worked in government circles. The situation on the ground didnt need government to bribe anyone. There are people whose job it is to do these kind of negotiations and believe me, they are good at it. they are what you might call evil geniuses. They know how to exploit all these loopholes I have stated. Some where too quick to say GEJ was not on top of the situation. But the silence for 4 days by the government shows he was on the driving seat all along. The ignorance of many here on NL is that GEJ actually works as one man. He never works as one man. He works as a team. There are people paid to handle crisis and they are well funded to research and act. Their reports give government the tools to navigate these waters. They get it wrong sometimes, but they always know how to regroup and restrategize.

4xstore:

OK!But when are we going to get things right?The transport hike,would they return back to old rate or slats the price?we shall be waiting.

However,all this point to the fact that we Nigeria should shine our eyes.NLC and TUC are not good representative of our plight.You will notice that once they out of the post,they are already billionaire .who can we look up to?

All is well with us in Nigeria!Sure banker.