Tools and skills for trade unions’ engagement with the state’s policy cycle process
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