OGUN STATE TEACHERS’ STRIKE: WE CALL FOR IMMEDIATE PAYMENT OF UNPAID SALARIES
OGUN STATE TEACHERS’ STRIKE: WE CALL FOR IMMEDIATE PAYMENT OF UNPAID SALARIES
We of the Ogun State Chapter of the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) support the Ogun State teachers in their ongoing strike action over unpaid salaries since November 2014. We strongly condemn the failure of the Ibikunle Amosun-led All Progressives’ Congress (APC) government in the state to meet the very basic needs of workers such as prompt payment of their salaries.
We call on the leadership and members of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) in the state not to limit the strike to sit-at-home action but also undertake mass actions to push and mobilize mass support for the strike and their demands. We also call on the leadership of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) to openly support the demands of the striking teachers and organise solidarity actions in their support.
We also call on the teachers and the entire workers in the state not to invest illusions in the other anti-worker, anti-poor parties such as the Peoples Democratic Party, Labour Party and the Social Democratic Party which are posturing to take political power from the All Progressives’ Congress as they are all the same.
We hold that the non-payment of workers’ salaries is a foretaste of the imminent anti-poor capitalist attacks that are on the agenda of all the major parties contesting in the forthcoming general elections given the current economic maelstrom occasioned by the slump in global oil market and their subscription to a anti-poor neo-liberal capitalist program. Therefore, we call on the national leadership of NLC and TUC to begin immediately the mass mobilization of the working people and youths for mass struggles against austerity measures and anti-poor attacks that will be intensified in the post-election period by government at all levels.
We submit that the current absence of a genuine working peoples’ political alternative in the 2015 elections that can raise the demands of workers for payment of salaries is a challenge to the leadership of the labour movement to build a formidable mass working people party that can contest for power. We in the SPN combine the battle for our registration with the renewed campaign for the formation of a mass working people political party by the wider labour movement. We call on workers, artisans, traders and youths in the state to join the SPN which is a party that defends the interests of the working people and youth while at the same time offers and builds a working peoples’ alternative.