Why N1,500 is not the price at which fuel is sold in Nigeria – NLC

According to the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Nigerians are not purchasing a gallon of petrol at N1,500 because of Comrade Joe Ajaero, the Congress President’s unwavering stance.

The NLC has also pushed on assuming control of the Labour Party from the National Executive Council, or NEC, which is led by Julius Abure.

In an exclusive interview with Vanguard, Comrade Benson Upah, the NLC Head of Information and Public Affairs, stated that the government was cautious in raising the gas pump price because of Comrade Ajaero, the president of the Congress’s strong character.

In addition, he noted that the government’s N35,000 salary award was the responsibility of the Ajaero leadership and that the NLC is dedicated to making sure that the next national minimum wage will be enough to send workers home.

According to Comrade Upah, the NLC President is ensuring that discussions are completed on schedule so that workers can receive benefits that would address the nation’s inflation and misery.

“So the most important thing is that he is insisting that the minimum wage conversation be consummated within the appropriate timeframe,” he said.

When asked about the advantages that employees had experienced under Ajaero’s leadership in the roughly twelve months since he was elected NLC President, Upah responded, “Wage award is the immediate gain, but there are other perks as well.

“We signed two MoU’s (Memoranda of Understanding) with this administration (of President Bola Tinubu). The first was on the 5th of June 2023. The second was on the second or third of October 2023. Look at the contents of those MoUs. The wage award, the decision of the government to restore or to accept to pay the withheld salaries of the four university-based unions, NASU, NAAT, SSANU and ASUU, was part of it

“I also want to tell you: but for the resolute stand of NLC under Ajaero, Nigeria should have been paying a much higher tariff for petrol, by now, it wouldn’t have been N700 or N800. I tell you we would have been paying N1,500.

“But the government is being careful about crossing the threshold. It knows that if it does NLC will mobilize to the streets, NLC will mobilize the citizenry against it. So because of this, we are stuck where we are at six hundred and something naira and N700.

“The next thing which will be considered as his achievement is, that he has been speaking out, he has been making interventions on several issues including the state of insecurity, hunger in the land, anger in the land and what appears to be the shutting down of the democratic space. He never kept quiet he has been talking and acting.

“Quite unfortunately, when he does those things, some critics say oh he has a political agenda. It is because the Labour Party did not win the national election that that was the reason why he was behaving the way he was doing.

“Once again, nothing could be farther from the truth. The stage in which we have found the Labour Party in fact, comrade Joe met the Labour Party the way it is. I’m making this point today because people try to ethnicize quite several things. I mean that he does. They say it because he comes from the same geo-ethnic place as Peter Obi. I mean the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, that his sentiments were decidedly against APC, but it’s not true.

“At the time Obi crossed over to the Labour Party, Comrade Joe Ajaero hadn’t become president of NLC, he wasn’t. All that was done by his predecessor, a northerner. So for us, we don’t look at issues from the prisms of religion, or ethnicity. We look at issues purely from the prism of ideology. And we’re not guided by other sentiments. Our national interests guide us. We’re concerned about the security of this country, the sovereignty of this country. These are our stronger motivations. We love this country more than anyone

On Labour Party crisis

Speaking on the crisis in the Labour Party, he said: “The achievement of Comrade Joe in this direction will be that he is striving to recover the party from the wrong hands, from the Abure’s of this world who sees the party from the backdoor.
‘’What Comrade Joe has decided to do was to toe the fighting spirit of his predecessor, Comrade Ayuba Wabba, who also wanted to recover this party.

“So what Comrade Joe is doing is to ensure that there is an end to this impunity that there is an end to this illegality by saying let the content of the consent judgment be observed.”