Baba Aye's

The living conditions of working-class people in Nigeria keep getting worse, while a handful of rich people keep getting richer. The situation has pushed us to the edge of existence. We cannot continue like this. The hardship we are facing is human made. It is the result of the policies that the government has put in place. Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared that “fuel subsidy is gone” the day he was sworn-in. Ever since then, fuel pump price, electricity tariffs, telecoms tariffs, prices of foodstuffs in the market and virtually of all commodities have all gone up. Our meagre salaries cannot buy anything substantial in the market. We struggle to send our children to school, and many have dropped out of school because parents can no longer afford the cost of tuition. Youth suicide is rising, driven by a spike in the number of students who die from suicide because neither they nor their parents can continue to bear the rising financial costs of their education. We are afraid to fall ill as we c...

The "June 12 struggle" was an interesting period in Nigeria's history. The story of the struggle goes beyond the election that was annulled and its custodian. And the story of the election and the roles different personages and organisations played in the high drama starts well before the six-year democratic revolution unfurled with the annulment.  I've written a bit about this important, somewhat tragic, somewhat farcical, but none the less definitive moment in Nigeria's history. One of the two articles one might be interested in looking up are " Nigeria: the six year revolution " which which was first published in 2008 in the Working People's Vanguard and again in 2015 in the Socialist Worker . The other is " The shadow of June 12 : June 12, the left and Nigeria's democratic revolution", which was published in the Republic in 2022 and which has been republished in its latest special print issue "Nigeria Imaginary", marking t...

With increase in kidnapping and other crimes, the Afenifere leaders have just suggested a multi-level policing in the country. To what extent do you agree with the Afenifere leaders? Do you see this yielding meaningful results considering the existing Police structure? Kidnapping has become a major industry of what you can describe as the insecurity sector of the national economy. You might want to recall that in the first half of 2021 alone, over N10 billion which amounted to $19.96 million at the time, was recorded as ransoms paid to free over 2,000 kidnapped people. This did not stop the deaths of about 10 percent of these victims. We thought things were bad at that time. But compared to now, that was child’s play. This nefarious industry now has different scales, large-scale, medium scale, small scale and even micro. You tend to hear of those big women and men or increasingly so middle-class people that are kidnapped. But even welders, cobblers, barbers and other poor artisans ...

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’...