Just a few days ago, a delightful news interrupted my election fixation. It was the announcement that Comrade Joe Ajaero has taken over as the new Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) president. He took over from Comrade Ayuba Wabba who had spent two terms of four years each. And his acceptance speech is ideologically sound:
We shall seek to reconnect more strongly to build greater solidarities with the people of Nigeria rising once again to be the carriers of their desires and amplifiers of their voices. We shall not only speak for the 133m Nigerians who are multi-dimensionally poor but shall also seek platforms to lift the shackles of poverty from the shoulders of our people. We shall once again be the true champions of the Nigerian people; crying their cries and jointly waging our wars against all forces of impoverishment and misery.
The news of the take-over is delightful for me for two reasons. The first is personal. When I was the permanent secretary at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity, I was concerned with the issue of how to develop a new national productivity model for the Nigerian state. And one of the major impediments for this grand objective is crafting a reform for the industrial relations component of the productivity framework. This is where I came in contact with Comrade Ajaero and his many sidedness as a labour leader. He was the grand personification of aluta agitation so much so that he reminds me of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole. Ajaero’s diminutive frame is inversely proportional to the immense strength he brings to the able defense of matters that affect workers’ condition and welfare. And yet he demonstrates the new generation essence of a self-effacing, civilized, humane, humble and cosmopolitan leader, the type that Nigeria’s democratic experiment needs at a time when it becomes imperative that the Nigerian state must compellingly self-discover and redirect her development agenda if her latent greatness would not be eventually submerged in the backwaters of history. My experience as a permanent secretary with Ajaero and others convinced me about the extent to which this new generation labour leaders invest in learning and knowledge as means by which to understand the task of moving workers’ welfare and well-being forward.
And this is why it becomes imperative to take seriously Comrade Ajaero’s commencement speech and the ideological signature that connects his labour objective with the plights of Nigerians. Ajaero’s insistence on reconnecting Nigerians to the core objectives of labour movements immediately signals to me the willingness of this new leadership to take on the debilitations of elite bargains that disconnect Nigerians from the benefits of, say, developmental democracy that the elite could achieve for them. If Comrade Ajaero could subvert this elite bargain and bet on development, then he would have procured a very solid legacy that would write his name and that of the NLC in the annals of Nigerian history.
Ajaero’s determination to “reconnect more strongly to build greater solidarities with the people of Nigeria” contains a huge historical content that locates him already in the trajectory of the role the labour unions played in Nigeria’s fight for independence and democratic governance. From the Nigerian Civil Service Union (NCSU) to the Railway Workers Union (RWU), trade unions were forceful in their nationalistic contentions for Nigeria’s freedom. However, the fundamental significance of trade unions goes beyond just agitating for the welfare of workers. I have argued that the existing labour praxis that connects with the Marxist dialectics of class war requires a serious reconceptualization to enable the trade unions to be at the forefront of larger issues like that of labour productivity in the dynamics of economic progress.
We have, as a good example of the failed praxis of militant and radical unionism, in the recent travail of ASUU and its confrontation with the Nigerian government that kept students at home for eight solid months. ASUU did not only lose out in the face-off, it also unfortunately frittered away the hard-earned historical credibility that connects it with Nigerians. Thus, a reconceptualized praxis has the potential to transform the labour unions into strategic partners in rethinking Nigeria’s dysfunctional developmental trajectory and in instigating the harnessing of Nigeria’s rich human and material endowment for sustainable and inclusive growth through a productive workforce.
This is where Comrade Ajaero’s ideological posture resonates with one of the critical pillars of my public service institutional reform model: the imperative of ensuring a paradigmatic shift from an adversarial to a developmental industrial relation in Nigeria. Why is this important in Nigeria’s national development predicament? Nigeria’s economic development has been stagnating for long, and the development agenda has failed to take off in a sufficiently clear manner that signals redemption for Nigerians. And most importantly, the Nigerian public service system has been complicit in the failed attempt, since independence, to facilitate the reengineered transformation of the development agenda. On the one hand, the Nigerian state, since it ascended in the 70s into the commanding height of the economy, signed on for a profligate legacy, and this was especially guaranteed with the discovery of oil in 1962. Flushed with petrodollar, the state’s welfarist policy with the Udoji recommendations of 1974 took a bad turn. And the failure to take seriously the institutional reform components of the recommendation implies that the oil boom-instigated institutional multiplication and redundancies would continue and become endemic and unchecked. The culture of waste that began with the discovery of crude oil has now pervaded Nigeria’s institutional dynamics, and has insinuated itself into the public sector administrative culture in ways that have increased the cost of governance.
So, on the other hand, the public service ossifies a bureau-pathology within which “too many are doing practically nothing” (a case of unwarranted and wasteful redundancies), “too many are doing too little” (which translates into an under-capacity utilization), and “too few doing too much” (an instance of unfair structuration of the system). And so, the policy space becomes too clogged to allow for the high-end policy intelligence and administrative IQ required to facilitate strategic decision-making. It takes a short leap of mind to see how a bureaucratized public service would automatically impede performance, and hence productivity. And then who would expect the trade unions to keep mute and watch as their members are sacrificed to uncritical downsizing efforts to tweak the productivity curve by government? No responsible trade union will watch as the governments, that had hitherto facilitated the patronage-weakened public service, now suddenly realize the imperative of productivity and make moves to attend with policy ignorance to the overloaded workforce.
And so, the strategic response of the trade unions to government’s insensitivity not only to the welfare of the workers, but also to the urgent need to right-size the public service has always been an adversarial relation that perceive the government and management as enemies to be stopped at all instances of industrial conflict. And then, quite unfortunately, the Nigerian economy keeps losing billions in manhour losses due to strike actions. The labour unions are right to hold the government in check over the latter’s commitment to neoliberal capitalist economic policies that oftentimes are to the detriment of the people. And so far, the government’s fixation with the Washington Consensus and its many economic conditionalities implies that industrial relations will continue to be adversarial to the detriment of the national development.
And yet, as noted earlier, the trade unions are strategic partners with government in facilitating performance and productivity that instigate infrastructural development that improves the well-being of Nigerians. I am sure that this is one thing Comrade Ajaero has in mind in his desire to connect the NLC to the yearnings of Nigerians. I have a few more suggestions that could facilitate that noble objective. There are a three-pronged and correlative strategic programme of reform action that both government and labour can contribute to which can shift the industrial relations from adversarial to developmental. One: Nigeria needs an urgent assets management policy that will serve as the first condition for a maintenance culture required to undermine redundancies in the public service. The humongous cost of governance derives from the breakdown of the maintenance culture through a profligate expenditure dynamic. A new waste management system demands that we give attention to inefficiencies and redundancies.
Two: this leads directly back to the imperative of implementing the Oronsaye Report on Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies. Nigeria’s overcentralized federal system makes it possible to multiply redundancies and fragment development policies through inefficiencies. The Oronsaye Report is therefore meant to downsize the 36+1 bureaucratic cost centers that are draining scarce resources through waste multiplications. This is what Margret Thatcher did when she employed Sir Derek Rayner in 1980. By the time Rayner would be done with his scrutiny of government and all embedded inefficiencies, ninety multi-departmental reviews and 266 scrutinies were done, over 600 million pounds were saved, and more than 16000 posts were axed. However, a responsible industrial strategic partnership between labour and government must insist on restructuring with humaneness. This demands that both partners must agree to a social assistance package that eases downsizing and resettles those affected.
Three: there is the urgency of implementing a new national productivity model. This requires the critical unbundling of the national expenditure through a rigorous audit system in ways that re-situate the capital-recurrent budget fixture, and hence frees up resources for real serious development projects funding. This demands a significant disciplining of the policy formulation and implementation process through (a) the retraining of the workforce after job evaluation/regrading/pay reform with the objective of building a re-professionalized service managed by a new generation public managers; and (b) strengthening a policy-research nexus, backstopped by a significant data culture, that facilitate a tight policy and change management needed for the development agenda.
I hope my friend finds these recommendations and inputs useful, as part of an ongoing conversation with a partner in institutional reform and development, and as Comrade Joe Ajaero make serious sense of his desire to reconnect Nigerians back to the revolutionary dynamics of labour movements in Nigeria.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa
Retired Federal Permanent Secretary
& Professor of Public Administration
