Peter Esele is the president of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in Nigeria. He bares his mind in a recent interview with TAIWO OGUNMOLA on burning national issues, especially the thorny issue of fuel subsidy and security.
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Comrade, despite resistance from Organised Labour, government is still campaigning for the removal of subsidy. What will you say about this?
Subsidy removal is again being brandished by government as the imperative to balancing next year’s budget and the cornerstone of our infrastructural upgrade that the entire nation has been clamouring for. Indeed, it is instructive that since 1986 when the first subsidy removal debate was ignited, government has been unable or unwilling to get the withdrawal of subsidy on petroleum products right.
The debate should therefore be focused on what needs to be done in the short and medium term and indeed the long term to ensure that competition is injected into the sector and the laws of supply and demand give Nigerians a realistic pump price as they will certainly do when government removes its soiled hand from the sector. From my position in the industry and from the organised labour think tank, a well managed deregulation that gets government completely out of the sector will give us a pump price in the medium term of less than the current pump price if crude oil prices were to remain at today’s prices. This should form the kernel of government policy and the related debate that we should be having between now and December.?
When government talked about withdrawal of petroleum subsidy, it was clear that as usual, it had not thought through the import of the problem that confronts it and the people. It was also evident that there was no clue on how to get itself and the people out of the mess that it has unwittingly created for everybody. Unfortunately, this is what we see happening in all other sectors, including politics where government usually act before it thinks. Hence, we are continuously going down with the fat cats continuously milking the system in all sphere of our national life to the detriment of the people! We must at least get this one right as it is very important to us economically. But let us understand what the removal of subsidy means to the government and the people before we delve into the substance of the debate. Take a look at this scenario:? A lady returning from the farm with yams for her young children has the yams loaded in a basket with loads of garbage (this garbage represents more than 50% of the entire weight) that weighs her down. The lady is now no doubt tired of bearing the weight of the basket. She could do four things.
Security challenges in the country seem to put everything asunder; what is your assessment of the nation’s security system?
I think the problem of insecurity did not start now; it is old? but requires new ideas and new perspectives of handling the issues, because most of the time, they buy trucks and guns to give the police or the military. The new challenge is that when you see the policemen with guns I call that hard policing. There is more soft policing now; you have police that you don’t know whether security is around. Everywhere you go in other parts of? the world I think that is what we should be doing – intelligence gathering. When I was growing up in Benin, it is easy for me to tell you that I live at no. 12 Agbado Street and you can locate it and the names are registered, whether you go to the local government itself. But where I live now, nobody knows anywhere and you just wake up sometimes and people even ask you the name of the street and who did the numbering. We do the numbering ourselves and there are no records and that is the primary policing and what it stands for; who is living in house no. 7, how many people are living there, what are their names and what do they do? Those are the primary policing and this gives you an idea that if this happens, this is where you go to.
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Is that all that is missing in the security set up in the country?
Not at all; the next level is the data base – finger prints – so that if anything happens, somebody will ensure that everything is put in place and they gather what they need to gather, get evidence and investigate it: they can just take the finger prints put it into it and the persons face comes up. That is another angle of taking care of security and we have enough ways of gathering this data we have finger prints that come out of cyber planting and that’s why I keep laughing because we just like going in circles. Now I heard the federal government wants to use another N30 billion for national I.D. cards; do you know the amount expended on national I.D card we had recently?? Do we need to do that? Why can’t we use the money to build a database and we just finished Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) registration and they said 75 million Nigerians registered – which is good number to build database. The fact is that we don’t always want to go through that means because it is not an avenue to make money.
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What can you say on how our police operate these days?
The question we need to ask ourselves is what insurance covers the policeman? If we look at policing and security in the country, we need to go down to the foundation because we have to go into the system and build the foundation. Let us look at Nigeria police in the past years; I keep going back because I spent my grown-up years close to the barracks; at that time, the Police get allocation for provisions twice in the month and they don’t pay for their uniform or shoes but now Nigerian police pay for his shoes. Then, all the police officers wear the same shoes but we don’t have that now.
There is no longer connection between the force and individuals because individuals get involve in police because there is no job. While I was eight or nine years, when a policeman loses his life, I have seen how they make effort to get his entitlements and also take care of his family; what we have now is complete opposite because nobody cares. The worst crime for armed robbers is to kill a policeman. Anini the late notorious armed robber was raiding Benin at a particular time like mad, but the day he made mistake to kill a police officer, within a fortnight, he was brought to book; so are we having that now? Police are being killed like rats.
Moving our security forward needs total overhaul. So many analog policeman who want to use the solution of yesterday to solve the problem of today can’t work; new solutions must be used for new challenges because the armed robbers are now more sophisticated. We are now having young educated men handling arms and you now have the old fashioned policeman – well, he will just hide under the chair when robbers come. At the moment the morale in the? police force is very low; so we should look for a way to motivate them. Military officers’ salary is also delayed. We are getting things wrong and our attention is not on the real issue; until we look towards the direction we continue to move in a circle. Setting up different kind of committee would not solve the problem because it will not move us to anywhere.
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Do you think there is a way out of all these problems – because government fails to attend to germane issues like power supply etc?
We look at wrong issues in the sense that it is the people that are not serious; not government. The first law of politicians? who come into power is survival but power resides with the people. They own the land and also have the power. Let’s say I have a gateman in my house, he opens the gate for me to come in, and I allow the gateman to take charge of my sitting room and also take charge of my house and tell me what to eat in my house, then who do you blame? It is me, but Nigerians keep saying it’s government. Don’t look at things that way; when I see Nigerians saying labour is not doing this or that, I look at them and laugh, what are they doing? At least labour is talking and also carrying out a march, but how many people come out when we call for an action? Last time, we went to Port Harcourt on privatisation of power sector and we marched from Otako to National Assembly and Nigerians were in the car clapping for us. At the end of the day, less than 10,000 followed us to National Assembly. Abuja alone has the population of two million, let’s say we got 200,000 people, government will know that if it failed to change something would happen but when all you do is enjoying and sitting down in your bedroom and criticising, but you don’t want to take your destiny in your hand this is what you get.