Many Nigerians believe you got good help from some personalities and one of them they won’t shy away to mention is Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu who is a former Lagos State governor. How much help would you recall getting from Tinubu at the time?


Now the lesson to learn from Tinubu, more than anything else people want to talk about, is the fact that, whereas in the South-West, the preference was clear as evident in the fact that AD controlled all the states which they won, but by the time Obasanjo realised that he was President without the support of his home base, he decided to launch an attack on the zone. I believe only he and those involved in the game knew what tools they deployed but, at the end, it was only Lagos that survived under Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

So, you can’t but find that as a source of inspiration that it is possible in a game that many can be felled and one man can remain standing and begin to organize and mobilize rather than agonise and, overtime, claim that region substantially back to his fold.

You cannot fail to appreciate the fact that when the then Federal Government took over AD through undercover agents and manipulations, Ashiwaju led a revolution to leave AD completely to found AC where he later became the only governor and I think now people have forgotten that, at a point, Tinubu’s ADC was withdrawn, his police details were withdrawn, the Commissioners of Police were changed every other day depending on whether they were ready to be used or refused to be used.

INEC changed the EOs the way you change your underwears even a day to the election and the Lagos Army Garrisan was put on alert to ensure that Lagos was captured by all means by the ruling party and Tinubu, without control of the official instrument of rigging, fought hard to sustain his hold on Lagos.


There is something to learn about conviction, about not agonising, about believing in your own capacity to fight and you will also recognise that the Federal Government, at the time, got so angry that they withheld local government allocations to Lagos and the political consequences of that, amongst other things, is that local government employees will not be paid and local government administration will come to a halt.

Even with a Supreme Court pronouncement, the government of the day refused to release those allocations and Tinubu was able to run Lagos and pay local government workers as if the allocations were still coming. I always tell people that you don’t shy away from what works, admit it and see even how you can improve on it.

I was in the union when Ashiwaju was fighting to reorder the Lagos tax regime. I remember him, when we insisted that he must implement the minimum wage of 7,500 naira in Lagos as if it was a derivation state or Federal Government due to the cost of living in Lagos, showing me the allocation to Lagos was about 2 billion or so, and local revenue was between N400 and N600 million a month and he fought hard, everyone took him to court, he persisted, he re-engineered the locally generated revenue and by the time he was done, revenue had climbed to about 17 billion and today Lagos doesn’t really need allocation from the federation account to survive. Those are things that can inspire you not in terms of ‘come and see that purse, there is money there’. If money is the basis for electoral victory or defeat, PDP would never have lost federal power. So, it is about skill, vision, courage of conviction and I like to read, I like to watch, I like to observe and when I see someone doing something unusual and it is working, I would like to quietly find out what is the secret. To that extent, we were inspired by the Lagos experience and that was why we allied with AC as it then was to fight the Edo battle. Not in terms of Naira and kobo. No.

If you have an average of 4 – 5 hours a night rather than the 7 –9 hours that the doctors recommend to make up for lost sleep alone, you need more than 6 months. So, what I have been doing basically was to take time out to really rest in the truest sense of the word and find time to stay with my family and make up for my absence from home, free my brain from tension and worries. So, obviously, I have been resting and I spend more time in the village with my people; I still have a mum. I have brothers and sisters. Even when I was in labour, I always found time to go to the village to reconnect with my people.

What informed your choice of venturing into politics from labour activism in 2007?

I think the truth is that as you grow and begin to appreciate the forces that define the quality of life of the majority of the people, you realise the limitations of the organised labour, however militant it is and however dogged the leadership and the membership are to reorder the socio-economic order in a way that will deliver prosperity and welfare.


So having risen from the floor and walked to the most subordinated level in the factory to becoming the General Secretary of the Textile and Garment Workers Union and then to the presidency of the NLC and led strikes both at the factory and industry levels, and later at the economy level, you sit back to ask yourself; how much change have you really brought about? Each time you organise and you seem to get a concession, before you finish celebrating the concession, the ruling class has moved on to enact fresh policies that erode almost completely, sometimes, much more than you had gained in terms of welfare and purchasing power and then you are back to renewing negotiation. As soon as you go through this process and circle, you begin to ask yourself, when we say the struggle continues, till when? And can we really, with the power of organisation, activism, protest and strike, compel the ruling class to govern according to our own wishes and abandon their own class interest? Of course, one arrived at the conclusion that because governance isn’t value free, it is value driven. Those who govern would always pursue policies that protect their class interest and so, if you spend all your life agitating for welfare related issues; whether it is about a fair wage, living wage, social protection, all sorts of social economic issues, you begin to realise that as indispensible as the organized labour is, you can’t be, in the final analysis, the most effective tool to reorder the social economic environment in a way that delivers welfare to the vast majority of the people .

It is not just a political theory, it is also a political reality that if you want to fundamentally change the course, the way the society is managed and reorder who gets what and who pays, the only machinery available is the political machinery. I think by the time I ended my tenure at the NLC, these facts became very well known. Some people write sometimes unfairly because they are limited to their understanding of the forces at play. I believe that in the course of eight years I must have led more than 10 national strikes and in some cases succeeded in shutting down the economy which shows the power of the organised labour and which helped to reaffirm the NLC logo which says that labour creates wealth and on such occasion we ended up with some concession which we believed constituted some level of relief to the workers in terms of the minimum wage.

As President of the NLC, we got the legal minimum wage revised from 2,500 naira a month to 5,500 Naira and a practical wage for employees at minimum of 7,500 naira for federal, Lagos and the oil producing states particularly the core ones in the Niger Delta with the exclusion of Edo. After 100 percent increase in minimum wage and then causing an upward review of wages from levels 1 to 17 while also signing agreement for subsequent 25 percent increase the following year and 12 percent increase the year after and establishing a regime of annual adjustment of wages in line with the rate of inflation, you will think that you have gotten so much.

It was legislated upon once we signed the agreement with the Obasanjo government. But then you find out that the combined effect of other social economic policies was such that in no time this 100 percent gain in purchasing power begins to whittle down without anybody touching your pocket physically, the system simply devalue and put workers at the disadvantage and you begin to go back to the negotiating table.

So you find that, at the end of the day, you are generating so much heat, seemingly accomplishing so many gains, yet in real terms, the people are wondering if anything has fundamentally changed in their material conditions. So it was clear to me by the time I ended my tenure at the NLC that you needed a combination of activism as well as political power to fundamentally reorder the way the society is managed; who gets what and at whose expense? So this is what led me to the conclusion that I needed to get involved in politics. Now, the question was, at what level do you go in? You remember that there were people who said I should contest for presidency.


Meanwhile, I also knew that the process of converting public goodwill to political asset and electoral asset required more than just being known and well respected. There are levels of organisation, there are core issues, there is time factor and several other issues and I was convinced that I had spent so much time of my life doing communiqué, resolution, threat, strike, collective agreement and disagreement etc. Now, let me go even if it is at a sub-national government level but, even at that level, there are limits to what you can do; but, even at that level, it is possible to get things done as government and, in some fundamental ways, address those issues that you have been trying to address through negotiations, through executive orders and I think that is what really motivated me and I said the way to start was to go to Edo State. To be honest, it would have been more convenient for me to contest election in Kaduna State because that is where I have lived all my adult life but, under the rules, you have to go to your state of origin and I went there and, of course, as they say, the rest is history.

You must have faced some terrible situations in the course of negotiations with government. What can you remember about those days that were so daring?


Anytime you engage the state and you do so in a manner that commands the support of the people and here we have to redefine the issue because we talked about fighting for workers, things are relatively easy. I believe labour is always fighting not just for the workers but for the country because the worker is not just a factory hand, he belongs to a community. He spends only eight hours at work and spends 16 hours outside the work environment, in a community. So, what affects him and the issue you canvass goes beyond the work environment. For example, when we engaged government over fuel pricing policy, it wasn’t about wage.

Like I had to argue with the President and the government then, when you say you are going to give us buses to go to work, that’s not just what a worker needs. How does the increase in price, which affects my parents in the village, how does the provision of bus for me to go to work and come back from work address the cost of moving food from the farm to the market? The issues were much wider. Even though our immediate constituency was workers, the social agenda that we sought to push went beyond working families. It had to do with entire the voiceless people. Secondly, it is often not readily clear that, sometimes, the organised labour fights more for businesses but unfortunately business people, by reason of individual comfort and fear, are used to taking business risk but not often political risk .

They can take business risk but when it comes to agitating for policies that would make the environment for doing business more conducive, they go beyond quiet persuasion to political leaders and, even as we speak today, I still see Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, MAN, etc, talk about the cost of doing business, the challenges, the bottle necks in double breasted suits, cozy conference rooms, well written letters to ministers, while we are the attack dogs that go beyond the rhetorics to engage the government that they must pursue policies that emphasise production rather than importation.


A lot of the arguments we had to make, for example, talking about how all of these will affect the cost of doing business while public policy should focus more on protecting local production.

For example, my first contact with Aliko Dangote was based on this; we were in a committee together on Vision 2010 and he was in a subcommittee that I was also in and, when he listened to my own articulation on public policy as it affects the private sector, after one or two days, he called me and said ‘I thought you were the union man but you seem to be so committed in protecting business interest and the way you understand the issue is even much deeper than some people in the private sector and people outside just think that you people only fight business, you fight employers, and I said it was not even out of love for business, it was just a matter of self- interest because when business prospers, collective bargaining makes sense, but when an economy is in recession and businesses are in trouble and they eventually begin to fail, the first causalities are workers and even under the law, if a company goes to bankruptcy, you would be surprised that the terms of managing the liabilities when they appoint a receiver manager, the bank tends to take precedent over employees interest. So,the receiver manager will auction assets to settle bank loans before settling workers wage obligations. Therefore, it is a matter of enlarged self-interest for trade unions to defend the business environment in a way that would keep businesses alive so that jobs can be secure and employers can be prosperous and therefore give the union the basis to negotiate how to distribute the prosperity that has been generated.

So, when people say that unions fight for workers, it is only part of the truth. Unions fight for the country in a way that no other group seems to be able to do and, because labour occupies a very strategic position in the economy, it seems to be the only exclusive group that has the capacity to really engage beyond rhetoric to hold the regime down to specifics. So, we fight for everyone. I remember a lady saying to me when we were talking about pension reforms that when she watched my argument, she thought it was like she had spoken to me about the problem she was facing but she is not a member of the union but the issues we were canvassing affect people both at the vertical and horizontal lines.

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/05/battled-obasanjo-cultivated-tinubu-fought-jonathan-standstill-oshiomhole/

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/05/battled-obasanjo-cultivated-tinubu-fought-jonathan-standstill-oshiomhole/