Ondo students rally for Ribadu
  
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Students’ union executives from different tertiary institutions in Ondo State yesterday converged on the Ribadu 2011 Campaign office, along Oyemekun road, Akure, to drum up support for the former chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission [EFCC], Nuhu Ribadu.
At the meeting, which lasted for over two hours, the students resolved to support the candidacy of the former EFCC boss because they see him as the most credible among the aspirants from various political parties who are eyeing the presidency.
The students also resolved to set up various committees to work for the presidential ambition of the Action Congress of Nigeria (CAN) candidate.
The national vice president of National Association of Ondo State Students [NAOSS], Ogundano Olugbenga, who spoke on behalf of his colleagues, explained that the committees would form a team of vanguards in all the campuses to sensitise students on the need to support Mr. Ribadu.
“The major obstacle against Nigeria’s development is corruption. I am very sure that Ribadu will tackle the problem if voted into power,” Mr. Olugbenga said.
“Everybody knows that students and youth groups are the most vibrant in the country. We will use this forum to sensitise other professional bodies, market women, artisans, and others, on the need to allow a youthful personality with unblemished credentials to rule this country for a complete change from the past,” he said.
No to bad leaders
The coordinator of Ribadu for Presidency in the state, Bola Ilori, said Nigerians are tired of bad leadership.
Mr. Ilori, a leader of ACN, said age, vision, and sound antecedents of Mr. Ribadu give him the edge over all other aspirants for 2011 election.
“The issue of money will be played down completely in next year election, while vibrancy of the candidates will be the yardstick. Formidable groups under the auspices of NANS and NAOSS have been formed to sensitise students, youths, and other stakeholders, particularly within various campuses across the country,” he said.
Strike action, often simply called a strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work; it does not refer to a missile strike. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became important in factories and mines. In most countries, they were quickly made illegal, as factory owners had far more political power than workers. Most western countries partially legalized striking in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.Strikes are sometimes used to put pressure on governments to change policies. Occasionally, strikes destabilise the rule of a particular political party. A notable example is the Gdańsk Shipyard strike led by Lech Wałęsa. This strike was significant in the struggle for political change in Poland, and was an important mobilised effort that contributed to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
A season of strike
A season of strike
NEXT Editorial November 12, 2010 01:51AM | print email |
Suddenly we find ourselves in a season of strikes. Although the Nigeria Labour Congress mercifully terminated a three-day run after the first 24 hours, threatening to resume next month, Lagos doctors are still on strike and the industrial action by university lecturers in the south east, and at Lagos State University, is ongoing. True, there are slight differences in detail, but essentially, the overriding reason for the strikes is a demand for better wages.
This is of course not the best of times to be demanding for increased pay. The global economic meltdown apart, the 2011 elections will no doubt pump too much money into the economy and inflation is bound to rise to indecent levels. With the Independent National Electoral Commission getting at least N80 billion and politicians gearing up to spend otherworldly sums on campaigns, a new minimum wage for workers will certainly be bad for the economy right now. And while the federal government can afford it being, as labour leaders say, just N1,000 more than the minimum wage it just began to implement last month, most states certainly cannot.
This said however, there is no doubt that it is critical to review the salaries of Nigerian workers, especially with some states still paying a minimum wage of N6,500. In a country with hardly any kind of welfare programme to support indigent citizens, such a wage is abominable. It is impossible for anyone earning such money to pay school fees, hospital bills, electricity and water rates, transportation and take care of all the humdrum aspects of life. The fact that we have a highly underdeveloped insurance system has not helped at all because it means that almost everything we need has to be paid for in cash. So to survive, you simply must be able to earn more than the minimum wage of N17000 a month and yet even that is a luxury that only federal government workers can have.
It is no mystery that over 70 percent of Nigerians still live on less than one dollar a day.
A running theme in the complicated negotiations between government and workers has been the issue of trying to establish a plan in which workers in the states earn the same amount as those working for the federal government. Labour leaders have argued that everyone goes to the same market and pays the same price for goods, so the idea of differentiation in salaries is both unfair and unsupportable.
This has been the bane of discussions between authorities and university lecturers in the south east who have been on strike for months, demanding that they be paid the same salaries as their counterparts in federal universities. We suspect too that the one month grace period given by labour for the National Executive Council to approve a minimum wage of N18,000 naira for workers will expire without any agreement reached, if union leaders insist that all workers in Nigeria must have the same minimum pay.
As we have noted before, it is neither feasible nor appropriate for civil servants to insist that they earn the same amount wherever they work. In a federal system, each state decides what it can afford to pay its workers, and it will not necessarily be the same amount that the federal government is paying. Already, some states carry such a huge wage bill that to ask them to pay more will be detrimental to their economy. The argument that civil servants constitute a small percentage of a state’s workforce and therefore should not consume a disproportionate part of the recurrent expenditure bears repeating here.
In the end, it is not more money that workers need, but a governm ent that works; that provides basic necessities like good transportation networks, steady power, quality public schools and hospitals. It is also impossible to make workers see the point in collecting poor pay when the government daily squanders billions of naira on inanities, and their elected representatives earn outrageous incomes.
These points must be taken into consideration in any negotiation otherwise the strikes will never end.
On facebook.com link to DAMMDOS there is a discussion on STRIKE there
na them sabi
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