Hardship: Our problems with FG’s 90-day relief plan —Labour

By Victor Ahiuma-Young In an apparent response to growing public concern and outcry over the high cost of living and the worsening economic hardship confronting Nigerians, the Federal Government recently announced a 90-day relief plan aimed at providing succour to workers and the wider population. However, rather than inspire confidence, the initiative has come under intense scrutiny from the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, which questions its transparency, effectiveness and capacity to address the underlying causes of the crisis.

The labour centre has described the intervention as a “confession, not a solution,” arguing that temporary palliatives cannot replace concrete measures to tackle rising living costs, declining purchasing power and widespread impoverishment. The NLC also demanded the disclosure of the details of the plan, alongside concrete action on wage awards, petroleum prices, tax relief and the review of the national minimum wage, arguing that Nigerians need practical solutions rather than another set of promises.

In this interview with Vanguard, NLC Assistant General Secretary, Chris Onyeka, explains the labour movement’s reservations about the plan, outlines its demands for urgent economic relief and challenges the Federal Government to move beyond promises and implement sustainable solutions to the hardship facing Nigerian workers and the masses. Onyeka said: “Our response to the federal government’s so-called 90-day plan to ease the cost of living is unambiguous.

This plan is not a remedy; it is a confession. It is the government’s tacit admission, finally dragged out of it by the sheer weight of popular suffering, that its policies of the past nearly four years have afflicted the Nigerian people rather than improved their lives. “For years, the government denied that its reforms were producing pain. Various Ministers told us there was no suffering while other official spokespeople insisted the economy was on the right track.

Now, with the announcement of a 90-day cost-of-living plan, the government has conceded the obvious; something is deeply wrong, and it was caused by the very policies it once defended. “But a confession is not a cure and, a plan cobbled together in panic is not a plan for the people. It is perceptibly playing politics with the genuine cries of Nigerian workers and masses. ‘We haven’t seen the plan’ “The truth is that we have not seen the Plan neither have any citizen It claims to help.

We know that the most basic demand of any democratic governance is transparency. Yet nobody; not us in the NLC, not civil society, not the Nigerian workers and masses facing the crisis of survival daily; has seen this 90-day plan or knows what it contains. Any genuine plan to reduce the suffering of Nigerian workers would be a welcome development. But it is our responsibility, as the organised voice of workers, to demand that the government put this plan on the table for all of us to see.

“Have we not been here before? Just a few weeks ago, the federal government came up with a 30-day selected fuel discount that was clearly a panic measure that amounted to nothing. It did not work in any way to assuage the sufferings of the people as it was tokenism dressed up as policy. “We would have loved to have been hopeful but we regrettably have no reason to believe the 90-day plan is anything more than a repeat performance; another promise on paper designed to hoodwink Nigerian workers and masses, just like the schemes and promises that came before it.

“In generating this plan, Government should be bold to tell Nigerians who it Consulted? That is the question the Government may not be able to answer. We must also ask; which stakeholders did the government consult before coming up with such a plan? Did it consult the trade union movement; the organised representatives of Nigerian workers? Did it consult the civil society organisations that represent the people it governs?

“There is no workable solution that can proceed from a government whose policy measures of the last nearly four years have only caused humongous hardship among the citizenry. Effective and sustainable solutions can only be founded when government learns to engage the people in creative conversations. It is not when you sit down in the corridors of power and hand down schemes to the people, instead of allowing them to conceive, design and implement the projects and policies directed toward solving their own socioeconomic problems.

“This top-down, elitist approach; the politics of imposition; is precisely why the policies fail. The people are treated as objects of policy rather than subjects of their own liberation. The 90 days are questionable days, designed once again to hoodwink Nigerian workers and masses for political gains. A palliative, not a solution “And we must ask the obvious question: even if whatever measures involved in the 90-day plan work, what happens to the people and workers after 90 days?

A 90-day palliative is n