Ikeogu Oke
My 15-year career as a maintenance crewman in the defunct National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) was only in its second year the time the staff of the organisation embarked on a nation-wide strike. That was in 1986. I can remember, as I write this, that the government of the day, headed by the then General Ibrahim Babangida, had clamped down on the executives of NEPA’s Senior Staff Association who ordered the strike. Among them was the much loved, tall, huge, light-skinned, pot-bellied and avuncular K. E. G. Okoroafor, fondly called udu, an Igbo sobriquet that was as much a translation of his initials taken as one word as it hinted at his famous love for palm wine, a drink whose traditional abode is the keg. Okoroafor, now of blessed memory, worked with us as a Senior Manager at the Alaoji 330 KV Transmission Station, and his release from incarceration with his co-agitators fourteen months later was a great relief to his family and us, his admirers and colleagues.
The labour officials had called the strike to press for better working conditions, but the government of the day had accused them of economic sabotage, and the officials of the rival union for “junior” staff to which I belonged, called the National Union of Electricity and Gas Workers (NUEGW) at the time, had somewhat gloated over their misfortune which they saw as a consequence of their indiscretion in making that call out to their members, though their own members, I inclusive, would have benefited from the pay rise they had campaigned for if they had succeeded.
About 25 years later, from August 25-26, 2010, the staff of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), the organisation into which the defunct NEPA has been reconstituted, embarked on another nation-wide strike called by executives of the union for “junior” staff now called the National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE), headed by Joe Ajaero as Secretary General, a former newspaper reporter who has yet to work in an electricity industry. This time the reason given for the strike was that the workers needed it to compel the government to pay the backlog of their monetised benefits.
Unfortunately, this latter strike action was so contiguously anticipatory of President Goodluck Jonathan’s public presentation, on August 26, 2010, of the roadmap for the Nigerian power sector reform that it gave the impression that those behind it were sending a message of protest or resistance against the reform. To adapt a certain proverb, the strike (considering its timing) was one hand of a monkey that those behind it ought to have removed from the soup so it might not be perceived as the hand of a human being, with obvious consequences if it were so perceived.
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Besides, the integrity of the strike was questionable because, prior to it, government (as a publicly known fact) had released the sum of N57 billion to the PHCN account with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for paying the backlog of the striking workers’ monetised benefits which had accumulated for about seven years. In fact, 20, 640 PHCN workers were scheduled to have been paid, with due diligence, the day after the strike commenced, and 4, 800 had been paid at close of business on that very day. So by going on strike the workers became like the proverbial tortoise which spent nine days trapped in a ditch, and just as it was about to be rescued on the tenth day began to complain about the smell of faeces in the ditch and urge its would-be rescuer(s) to hurry.
There is a law, backed by a Supreme Court ruling, which forbids PHCN workers from going on strike in the national interest. It is even more intriguing that the PHCN workers and their union executives would comply with that law under previous administrations that could not pay them the monetised benefits only to flout it in the face of the Jonathan administration after it had taken irreversible steps to pay them. And it is remarkable that it is the Jonathan administration that did not clamp down on them for the affront and despite the law, even as it must bear saying that for the strike to have been called 24 hours to the unveiling of the roadmap is a grave and gratuitous insult to the office and person of the president, an act of economic sabotage that undermines national security.
approach of light. And it is to me understandable that if darkness could it would resist the advance of light to dispel it and reign in its place, though it is clear – and natural – that such resistance would ultimately prove ineffectual. In short, what we had on August 25-26, 2010 was, I dare say, a case of the primordial instinct of self-preservation trying to assert itself in the guise of a labour strike. And self-preservation is still the first law of nature, a law so fundamental that even darkness, such as PHCN has come to symbolise through its chronic inefficiency, deserves to be acknowledged as entitled to manifest its essence.
But one lesson that can be learned from the strike, by those behind the Nigerian power sector reform, is that – for reasons also bordering on self-preservation – some entrenched interests not unrelated to the PHCN labour union(s) and employees would rather not witness the success of the reform. And since for them self-preservation is the main issue, otherwise the fear of losing out completely after the reform, it might be in the interest of the reform and those behind it to devise a reliable means of allaying such fear. One way of doing this is by negotiating a guarantee of absorbing such individuals, contingent upon their proof of their competence and promise of good conduct, into the new, private-sector driven system of power generation, transmission and distribution that would evolve from the reform. Such a guarantee would of course be complementary to paying them their severance benefits, where applicable, as government has already expressed the desire to do, in which case it would amount to government bending over backwards to reassure them and remove any moral ground they might have for opposing the reform.
As a lone-ranging activist in my NEPA days, I made the close acquaintance of some of such leaders currently heading the two PHCN labour unions, and I can guarantee that they are not impervious to reason. I believe it would not need a sophisticated argument to convince them that employment is not charity, and that no employee has the right to insist on remaining on the payroll of an employer even when it is a glaring fact that his or her performance is abysmally unsatisfactory and hardly shows any prospect of improvement. Respectively, the PHCN and the Nigerian government are in such symbolic and unsatisfactory positions as employee and employer today that something obviously needs to be done by way of the latter’s resolve to embark on the reform of the power sector,in the greater interest of all stakeholders in the Nigerian power industry, beginning with the Nigerian people. And to oppose such a reform would amount to showing a cynical preference for the reign of darkness over light. I doubt that any normal human being would want to be identified with such preference.
