NLC And Labour Party’s Marriage Of Convenience

In recent weeks I have watched, at least twice, the President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Mr. Joe Ajaero, struggle to wriggle out when a television interviewer confronts him with the contradiction thrown up by the labour union’s support of the Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, in the last election. In each of those interviews, the labour leader could not provide any convincing answer to the question as to how the NLC, a civil society body that should stand in opposition to the government, can combine this duty with open and official partisanship in favour of one of the political parties. The interviewers had painted a scenario where LP wins the presidential election and which will inevitably put the NLC in a very difficult moral dilemma as to how to carry on with its role of opposing government policies perceived as inimical to the welfare of workers. Ajaero surely couldn’t provide any reasonable answer. He merely resorted to begging the question – what philosophers call the fallacy of IGNORATIO ELENCHI.

This did not help him at all as the contradiction and dilemma were glaring. The NLC and TUC are a critical component of the civil society and simply must not descend into the arena of partisan politics if it will continue to effectively play its civil society role.

The subsidy question most vividly illustrates this fact. In the buildup to the 2023 elections, some people had pointed out the ideological contradiction between Peter Obi’s manifesto and the philosophy and aspirations of the labour movement regarding the petrol subsidy regime. The NLC, since the days of Adams Oshiomhole, has stoically opposed subsidy removal and this position was clearly stated on its website. The position was the sam even at the time Obi, like Atiku and Tinubu, was going about telling everyone that subsidy is an organized crime and must go. So one wonders what the NLC and its sister union the TUC would have done if Obi won the election and fulfilled this pledge of his.

I am one of those who have never been persuaded by the frantic attempt by our political elite to delegitimise subsidy by presenting it as wasteful and foregrounding its corrupt aspect. Subsidizing energy to lessen the economic burdens of the citizens and stimulate economic production is a strategy that has and is still being implemented in many countries including the US and the UK, and cannot be labelled wasteful. Secondly, when such policy is found to be characterised by corrupt, the government should fight the corruption in it to clean up the implementation process. Fighting corruption is one of the components of governance for which leaders are elected. Choosing to end a good initiative because there is corruption in it is akin to abdication of governance. Should our leaders also end the police force, the judiciary, the courts and the civil service because they are all corrupt? Should governance itself be ended in Nigeria since our government has been known to be historically corrupt?

The NLC, in its stance against subsidy removal, has always challenged this argument of corruption being raised by the political elite. Peter Obi, as a member of this elite, has strongly lent his voice to this flawed argument, and on this point, he is ideologically apart from the NLC. This leads me to the conclusion that the alliance between him and the labour movement in the 2023 election was merely a marriage of convenience and never grounded in ideology.

Ajaero, in one of the TV interviews, also stated that the NLC and the TUC do not control the Labour Party; in other words, they are not part of the day-to-day running of the affairs of the party, even though the two unions are represented in the leadership of the party. He said the NLC founded.and owns the party but does not control it.

The incongruity in the above submission is too obvious to be belaboured. If NLC does not control Labour Party, how does the claim that it owns it still stand? In truth, NLC does not control that party; the party has since been under the control of politicians, majority of whom were mere opportunists who defected to use the party to run for an election and then abandoned it as soon as the election was over. It is these politicians that have been funding and steering the party and never NLC. So pray, how does the NLC own the Labour Party? In an ideal situation, a workers’ party should be funded by workers and never by outsiders if it will maintain its ideological discipline and operational independence.

In a bid to deflate the challenge that the NLC’s official endorsement of a political party contradicts the principle of non-partisanship critical to effective functioning of a body of its nature, Ajaero equally mentioned that members of the NLC also belong to other political parties and must not support the Labour Party. If this is so, then it doesn’t seem morally correct for the NLC to officially endorse a political party knowing that some of their members have different political affiliations. If the NLC decides to take up the funding of the party (as ideally should be), it will be legally and morally wrong to do it from the contributions made by members who do not support the party.

Truth be told, the NLC had since abandoned its interest in the Labour Party which it founded in 2002 to promote the socialist ideology historically associated with workers’ welfare. Today, the party belongs to the labour movement only in name. It has since become like any other Nigerian political party which politicians see as a mere vehicle to power and not as any ideological umbrella. The NLC has never had influence on determining who leads the party or flies its flag in any election. It is the money of the politicians and their usual politicking, moral and immoral, that determine this. Little wonder the NLC left its own party to support its former leader, Adams Oshiomhole, when he ran for the Edo governorship on the platform of Tinubu’s ACN in 2007. Neither Oshiomhole, who as the NLC president, played a leading role in founding of the Labour Party, nor his comrades-in-struggle saw the need to keep faith with their party. In fact, as indirectly admitted by Ajaero, all individuals who had affiliation with the NLC who contested and won elections in the past did this on the platforms of other political parties, particularly the APC and PDP.

So why did the NLC suddenly in 2023 remember that it actually owns a political party? The answer is opportunism. Peter Obi’s defection to the party following his limited chances in PDP greatly boosted the chances of LP in the last elections. In fact, it was Peter Obi who did favour to Labour Party and not vice versa. This has been the trend in the past when politicians with clout and money defect to the party to give it some boost ahead of an election. Olusegun Mimiko did it to win the Ondo governorship in 2007. Andy Uba did it in the Anambra governorship election of 2010 after he was ditched by the PDP. The list will be endless. But the effect of Obi’s defection is phenomenal and unprecedented, hence the party has reaped a lot

So when Ajaero was affirmatively making the point that LP is the party of the common people, the only party where even an “okada” rider can run for an election and win, he was conveniently overlooking the fact that this was merely the effect of Obi joining the party. Once that disruptive moment gave way, things were never going to be the same. The Imo governorship election saw the Labour Party initially charge as much N25 million for its nomination form which was later reduced to N15 million following public criticism. “Okada” and “keke” riders have become relegated to where they belong; the hurdle of obscurity that had since prevented the party from assuming its true self as one of the elite’s vehicles to power has been removed. By the time the party wins the presidential election, the cost of forms will surely become even more prohibitive for the worker.

The way politicians who lost primary elections in their former parties were flooding into Labour Party gave the impression that the party is not different from all others. There is nothing ideological about the sudden attraction it holds for politicians and neither is there anything ideological about the criteria for deciding who flies the party’s flag in an election. Anybody can, no matter your antecedent and what you believe in.

It is my thesis that a labour union must never be part of electoral contest by way of sponsoring a candidate, as this places it in a very difficult position vis-a-vis its principles and roles. I see nothing wrong in labour supporting any candidate it feels represents its ideals of advancing the interest of workers and common people in general, irrespective of the candidate’s political party. The fact that it can support a candidate of another political party tomorrow means that it is not tied to the partisan umbilical cord of any particular party whom it must support no matter the candidate it fields and how he performs when he gets into power. Not subscribing to any political party gives the labour movement the freedom to support whomsoever it wants and discard him when he begins to go contrary to the commonly agreed principles. This indeed will make labour a stronger bargaining force in the polity.

The NLC and the TUC have said they’re supporting Peter Obi because they believe in his ideals; imagine a situation where Obi leaves LP tomorrow, will they find the moral grounds to continue to support him in another political party? That’s the dilemma. What if tomorrow the party throws up another candidate whose ideals do not appeal to the labour unions, will they jettison their party?(Remember the unions do not determine who flies the flag, the politicians and their intrigues do). Here lies the quagmire.

Karl Marx, in espousing his historical materialism, predicted that when workers come to power, what will ensue is the dictatorship of the proletariats. The workers will impose their autocracy. What Marx didn’t foresee is that, like all dictatorships, that of the workers will be no different in terms of its dehumanizing effect on the same common people it has come to save. The experience of the USSR after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 is very instructive. History has amply recorded how ordinary people, like Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, who committed their lives and risked everything to overthrow the bourgeoisie and impose workers’ rule, immediately turned into worse oppressors of the poor than the said oppressors they had overthrown.

This historical experience sufficiently drives home the point that the civil society, including labour, must not seek to take the place of power, but must remain in its role of opposing power. Power, by virtue of its internal logic, is hegemonic, self-preserving and self-expanding, it seeks to occupy every inch of space unless it’s checked. This is why wherever there is power, there must be opposition to power to achieve democratic balance. So, when the labour movement seeks to follow the prescriptions in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO of Marx and his friend Engels by seeking to replace those in power with themselves thus ending opposition to power, it must have merely replaced dictatorship with dictatorship. This is left for Ajaero and his colleagues to ponder.

Peter Obi was my preferred candidate in the last election. I voted for him and not for the Labour Party. Like every other political party in Nigeria, there is nothing convincing about the party. For all other offices, I followed the same pattern of voting for candidates and not party, and incidentally, none of those I voted for was of Labour Party. Even Obi himself knew that the Labour Party was merely a vehicle to power and never any ideological rallying point.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.