Baba Aye's

An emergency meeting of the National Executive Council (NEC) of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) held on Tuesday December 15, 2009, and considered the report of the Committee on Deregulation it set up on November 12, 2009. After due deliberations on the report, NEC arrived at the following resolutions: 1. That NEC-in-session has taken note of all the submissions made to Congress organs and to the Committee on Deregulation. 2. That NEC is convinced that the petroleum sector needs a holistic restructuring in order to ensure stability of production, distribution and even pricing. 3. NEC also observes that corruption is endemic in the sector and immensely contributes to the problems of the sector. 4. NEC as a result of the above further resolve that while agreeing to the issue of restructuring of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry for effective delivery, it is unequivocally opposed to any increase in the prices of petroleum products and that government, as a matte...

Introduction   The Labour Party, LP, Nigeria’s fastest growing and ideologically rooted party, held its 2nd regular National Convention on Saturday, December 12, 2009 at the main auditorium of the Labour House in the Central Business District, Abuja.  The convention commenced with two lectures, in line with the party’s appreciation of the importance of education for a social-democratic party’s ideological development and cadres’ mentoring. Senator (Prof) Jonathan Silas Zwingina, Chairman, Centre for Legislative Development, presented the lecture on “Electoral Reforms as a Recipe for Good Governance”, while the second paper presented on “Curbing Corruption by Political Leaders: Challenges and Prospects”, was prepared by Justice Mustapha Akanbi, CFR, pioneer Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission. The Convention was addressed by eminent personalities including: the first Executive Governor elected on the platform of the Labour Party H.E. Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, G...

"Human development is first and foremost about allowing people to lead a life that they value and enabling them to realize their potential as human beings" – UNDP 2006, Human Development Report Introduction The human race has come a long way from its humble beginnings when men and women were primitive gatherers of fruits, hardly understanding nature, not to talk of mastering it. Over the last three millennia, humankind has come to transform its environment and as well itself. Empires have arisen and fallen, so much wealth has been created by labour and several social-economic formations have been forged only to crumble. The last two hundred years after the industrial revolution, first in Britain however mark the historic leap of the possibilities of human development. In these centuries of the modern industrial society, more wealth has been created than that created in the preceding three thousand. Large-scale manufacture as the heart of industrial production has created mor...

1. Introduction The first multinational corporations were the East Indian Company established by the British in 1600 and the Dutch East Indian Company established in 1602 (Cf: Bowen et al, 2002; Glenn, 2007). These started as private corporations chartered by the states of their respective countries. These early multinational corporations were not only fully supported by their states and administered other lands under their countries’ flags, when the Dutch company ran into bankruptcy and would be liquidated, its debts were socialized, i.e. borne by the Dutch state, while its profits had always been private (Cf: Ricklefs, 1991). Since their not so humble beginnings four hundred years ago, multinational corporations have been a key feature of capitalist development as it spreads its fangs across the world. The globalization discourse in the past few decades has however given added fillip to the need for a deepened understanding of what multinational corporations are, what they do and ...

1. Introduction On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers, which had held over $600 million worth of assets, collapsed, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States . This marked a turning point in world history, similar to the Wall Street Crash of October 29, 1929, that had signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. Once again the material crisis of the world capitalist economy has brought human kind to a point of transition where ideas and forces behind these engage in an attempt to forge or re-forge a new order, re-formulate policies and construct new (or re-hashed) paradigms for the disciplines and practice of economics, politics, finance and international relations. Concepts and processes of ‘financialization’, ‘corporate governance’ and ‘globalization’ which have come to assume front burner positions in the last thirty years of neo-liberal globalization of capitalism, now take on even more critical importance. The different views on what they entail and the consequence...

Reading the Maps: 'I did a lot of work when I was able': remembering John Saville, 1916-2009 Excellent biographical post on John Saville....one of the richest minds and committed socialist fighters in the 20th Century.

It's thirty three years today since Hastings Ndlovu, Hector Pieterson and twenty one other children were mowed down by the hat-filled bullets of the apartheid state machine, in the South Western Township (Soweto) of Orlando, which had produced the Mandelas, and Sisulus then in prison. Their crime was refusing to be taught with what Desmond Tutu described as "the oppressors language" in line with the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974. Over 500 persons were to be shot dead or never to be seen again from the violence that rocked the apartheid enclave for days after this. It was actually the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime as within and outside the country the visible "fire in Soweto, burning all my people" (as Okosun rightly sang) became a clarion for action Sam Nzima's picture of 12-year old Hector carried in the arms of his cousin, with his sister running along distraught by trauma, became a prick on the conscience of humanity (although of course w...

Myths are stories that acquire larger than life dimension and which many persons in a society could tend to believe as having something to do with reality. Indeed more often than not, myths could have that smoke if not the fire of historical facts, in them. Indeed, like the axiom of there being a fire wherever you find smoke; some myths tend to amount to falsities, moving with every motion forward even further from the half-truths they started as. A particular myth in Nigeria’s recent history is that of June 12. Quite a few Nigerians stood, sat and even ate (as in ‘chopped’ money) on June 12 while both its struggle and its gravy train subsisted. Just as the Daniel Kanus of this world swore that they would neither eat nor drink without Abacha succeeding himself, so did a number of NGO careerists push Abiola, as some would say, to an early grave, insisting on the validation of June 12. I am actually less disturbed by this or the fact that business is now going on as usual with proposals...