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Femi Falana, Lagos based Hunan right activist, on Wednesday called on organised labour to demand from Federal Government detail account how the recovered loots worth N750 billion was utilized.
Speaking on the closing ceremony of the 40th anniversary of Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Falana alleged that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is not fighting the ‘real corruption’, but overwhelmed by scratching the surface.
NLC has a role to play to protect the interest of the Nigerian people. That is why whenever there is a problem in the country, people will be asking where is NLC. If you say you are fighting corruption, we have nothing to lose but to join them to expose themselves.
“The EFCC in the last two and half years recovered N750 billion. NLC must find out what will they do with the money. I told government publicly that what they are doing by saying they are fighting corruption is a tip of the iceberg. The real corruption is not been fought.
“I wrote a letter to the Minister of Finance and itemised how this country can recover about $200 billion. Therefore, they don’t need to go anywhere to borrow money. But what the Minister did was to write me back to acknowledge the receipt of the letter and that it is receiving attention. And up till now that letter is receiving attention.
“In 2006, the then CBN governor, Prof. Chukwuma Charles Soludo gave $7 billion to 14 banks and those banks have not pay back the money. Also in 2008, the the CBN governor, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi gave six banks N600 billion and up till now, the money has not been return. You cannot say we are broke, pay back this money.
“You also remember the N100 billion that was release for the revive of textile industry. But these textile companies are still moribund. Also in the last 10 years, over N400 billion was released for agriculture, but yet we are hungry,” the legal luminary lamented.
Falana maintained that Nigeria cannot be complaining of being broke, considering the huge public resources in private hands.
As part of strategy towards liberating the Nigerian masses from the crops of political elite, he admonished organised labour to put in place mechanism to revive the Labour Party with the view to bring succour to the Nigerian people.
He also passed vote of confidence on the Third Force Movement championed by former President, Olusegun Obasanjo which he described as a party of the working class that would protect the interests of Nigerians.
“The solution is for us to reorganised the labour party so that it will not be a dumping ground for the disgruntled elements of the ruling class. This is because General Obasanjo said neither APC or the PDP has solution to the country problems, therefore there is need for a third force, that third force must be by the disgruntled people but of the Nigerian working people,” the activist noted.
On his part, Omotoye Olorode, an academia who spoke on the theme: posited the congress the labour movement had not forged any serious labour-based party since the 1950s and the 1960s, adding that effort to form a Labour Party in 1989 was squandered by some of the trade unionists when they ended up in bourgeois political parties.
He said: “Apart from the increasing hunger, insecurity, unemployment and general surrender to hopelessness, the constant economic demands by the NLC and the “civil society” groups—an increased minimum wage, opposition to deregulation of the down-stream sector of petroleum industry—show that the current democratic dispensation had dispensed with the welfare and future of the Nigerian people.
“Beyond those immediate demands of NLC and the civil society organisations, the general decay in the education and rural production sectors, in the quality of roads and environment, in power supply, health-care delivery services, public security, etc. are all dominant features of the present.
“As for democracy itself, the dispensation has simply turned out to be a blackmail which the ruling circles have appropriated in the sustenance of private primitive accumulation and progressive dispossession of Nigerian people.
“By 1998, it became clear to both imperialism and its Nigerian agents in uniform and the civies that accumulation could not proceed by means of direct military dictatorship or by civilianisation of the incumbent military administration.
“Imperialism, through a few murders here and there and retooling the solidarity among the surviving big soldiers and their civilian friends, settled for a civilian regime that will be led by retired soldiers and their civilian friends,” he noted.
In the bid to rescue the country, Olorode reels out seven point agenda.
“We must wage a new patriotic struggle for political and economic independence of Nigeria from the two vultures. Nigeria’s working people must take their country back by declaring that the masses, not a few rich and their foreign masters, own Nigeria.
“Our movement must insist that to wipe out poverty, inequality, illiteracy, violence and crimes, Nigeria’s economy needs planning and with market mechanisms controlled by the interests of the masses of Nigeria’s working people.
“We insist that to enable planning, maximise use of our human and material resources and stop wastes, public ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy in production, distribution and exchange had become necessary; education, health, water supply, housing and environmental protection must also be principally in the public sector.
“All the IMF- and World Bank-inspired policies of reduction of the public sector, devaluation of the naira, unending debt slavery, liberalisation of trade, removal of subsidies, sale and privatisation of public assets, etc. must be reversed immediately. Education, public health and agriculture must receive public subsidies as a priority.
“We insist that corruption is the product of the ideology of capitalist accumulation of private-sector-led economies. We see Chief Executives in handcuffs in USA and other capitalist countries almost every day; that has not reduced corruption there.
“Corruption will not disappear because a few scape-goats are disgraced or imprisoned! Capitalism produces and reproduces corruption because the rich also fund the ruling-class political parties!
“There are always members of the ruling circles that cannot be punished.
“We insist that only socialist economic planning arising from pubic control of the economy can cure an economy of the disease of periodic changes from ‘prosperity’ to ‘recessions’; there is no Policy Document cure for this disease under the so-called ‘market-forces’ economies!
“All of Nigeria’s public assets that were looted through what the call privatisation, concessioning, PPP, etc. must be taken back from the looters. Since no political party told Nigerians that public properties and assets would be sold or auctioned, all public officers and political office holders who do not accept a people-oriented organisation of the Nigerian economy as stated in Chapter II of Nigeria’s Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria must resign immediately!”
KEHINDE AKINTOLA, Abuja
