Baba Aye's

1.0 Introduction It gives me great pleasure to present this paper for several reasons. NUPENG is definitely one of the most important unions in the country today, due to the strategic place of oil in the economy, nationally and globally. It has also, along with its PENGASSAN sister union which I have had much closer training relations with , played very progressive roles in the trade union movement, and national polity, over the last three decades, in different ways. This is the more reason why the theme of this workshop and the topic I am to speak on is very germane, for which I commend the leadership, and education department of NUPENG. I have taken the liberty of re-phrasing the topic somewhat in two different ways, which have key significance for our discussion. First, I have replaced “government” with “state”. The former is more temporal, as we can talk of the governments of Babangida, Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan for example, while the latter is the structure that governm

The would-have been 3-day warning General Strike of the Nigeria Labour Congress in demanding an implementation of the new National Minimum Wage across board appears to have come and gone, ending as an anti-climax. Representatives of organised labour reached an agreement with those of the Federal Government led by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation and former Senate President, Pius Anyim, after an earlier marathon session with the National Governors Forum. As I write this at dawn after a sleepless night of coordination with the Joint Action Forum Secretary, Comrade Arymson, the details of the agreement are just becoming clearer. Yet, as scores of activists and Nigerian workers across the country who through calls and text messages with which they have bombarded us and rightly so over the last couple of hours can see, a lot of questions rise from the aftermath of where we now are. These questions include, in my view, but as well go far beyond the particular matter of the c

The inauguration of Nigeria’s fourth, democratically-elected President, Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, has come and gone and he now seems to be on the pathway of defining his place in the history of Nigeria. The 53-year old zoologist, it would appear, is not one to allow such mundane things as humble backgrounds to dampen the heights of such definition’s horizons. Born into a fishing community in Otueke, within Ogbia Local Government Area (where crude oil was first discovered in commercial quantities in Nigeria, at about the time of his birth), he has risen on the scripts of what many consider as “good luck”, inscribed for good measure as his name. Leaving the university to join the Peoples Democratic Party at its inception in 1998, he emerged as a humble, lacklustre deputy governor the following year, beginning the fairy tale of becoming governor by default, a humble Vice-President who once again by default became President on the death of an el-Cid of a President that Yar’Adua was, he i

It would appear that Nigerians are set for the inauguration of President Goodluck Jonathan, as I write this piece. A lot of expectations might be borne by manner, but not a few citizens of our great country have gotten used to the disillusionment that is certain to follow faith in our politicians as night follows day. While the political euphoria of inauguration hangs in the air, a very economic germane question remains very much unresolved thus far. We are heading into the middle of the fiscal year, but, wither the annual budget? It borders on absurdity for the government of a country that claims it aims at becoming one of the twenty leading economies in the world in eight and a half years time to run its economy without a clear-cut budget for five months. It is a reflection of the absolute lack of a sense of planning on the part of our rulers, under any condition that, the appropriation bill, if at all passed by the 6th National Assembly, would have been done only during its twili

It was the great Afrobeat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, or Abami Eda, for those that used to gyrate to the soul-lifting rhythm of his comprehensive show at the Africa Shrine, many years back, who sang that evergreen song; Teacher. He was of the opinion that government is the teacher of citizens, while “culture and tradition” are the teachers of government, but finally declared to the teacher that; “make you no teach me, I go know. Person you teach finish, yes, abi e don die o”. Looking closely at where most governments in the so-called Third World get their teachings from (and many countries in Europe are now getting similar lessons, in the “post-crisis” classes of the Great Recession), one cannot but see the rather surly faces of the two evil twins of Bretton Woods; the IMF & the World Bank. The lessons they teach come in the high street language of neo-classical economics, but at their crux are diagnoses and prognosis that they claim are unfaultable. The main reasons why cou

The murder of Osama bin Laden by the United States government at Abbottabad in Pakistan on May 2 was a drab farce, after the tragedy of 9/11 and its aftermath (and coming in the wake of the Arab awakening it does seem rather placid). The US government in its self-imposed position as the world policeman invaded the territory of Pakistan to kill Osama within what Barack Obama described as the longest 40minutes of his life. An unarmed bin Laden, as the US reported, was shot dead for putting up resistance. With what, whence he was unarmed? Your guess is as good as mine. But just perhaps the Uncle Sam realised an Osama bin Laden’s trial could bring much more embarrassment for it than the justice it took to him. The farce was not over with the murder. After Islamic rites for the dead, the corpse of the bearded Sheik of terror was bundled with a huge stone and “buried” in the North Sea to become food for fish. This is the American story about Osama’s death. The Iranian state declared it has

Introduction The 2011 general elections in Nigeria have come and gone, leaving a lot of questions behind, the answers to which will shape the emerging future of the country. The elections were staggered, with those for the National Assembly held on April 9, the presidential ballot, which not surprisingly was the most contentious, held on April 16 and polls for governors and states houses of assembly held on April 26. The general elections have been declared as the freest and fairest in the history of the country since Independence in 1960 by the mainstream national and international media and elections observer groups. This is despite sharp bursts of violence, the bloodiest of which were in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections, in several states in the northern parts of the country. In the wake of these, more than 500 persons lay dead and some 60,000 were displaced. There had been, bomb blasts and associated rampages during the national assembly polls as well with no