Baba Aye's

It has now been 15 years since we lost Teslim “Samore” Oyekanmi. He was a fearless revolutionary, versatile unionist, brilliant activist, and unrepentant Mayist who lived life to the fullest. But alas, sickness took him away from us in his prime. And this was barely two years after we lost his partner, Zainab, a revolutionary Mayist in her own right. Teslim was Secretary General of the LASU Students Union towards the end of the last century. Zainab would later serve as Vice President and then Ag. President of the same union in the following session. I met Tes in the run-up to the election, where he emerged as SG of LASUSU. While I’d started full-time work in the trade union movement, I kept in close contact with the student movement, spending many an evening on campuses like LASU. He was recruited into the May 31st Movement (M31M, the precursor of today’s SWL) when he was a LASU union leader. And he remained a lifelong member of the movement. He was quite critical of a number o...

INTRODUCTION The West African Health Sector Unions’ Network (WAHSUN) occupies a pride of place amongst the five sectoral networks of Public Services International’s affiliates, on the African continent. This is largely because it was the first to be formed. We do feel privileged that the Network has been invited several times by our sister networks and the PSI, to throw some light on the experience of building WAHSUN. This year’s English Speaking (East & West) Africa Sub-Regional Advisory Committee (SUBRAC) meeting provides yet another veritable platform for us to present perspectives on the origins, growth and development of WAHSUN. We shall equally seize that opportunity of looking at where we are and how we got here, to rub minds on what might be the next steps to take in building on the initiative, drawing on earlier discourse in this direction. This is particularly important as the 2 nd Biennial WAHSUN Conference is scheduled to take place in barely two months’...