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Committee for a Workers' International

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Socialist Democracy March - April 2005

The Federal government has released a timetable on privatisation of some public companies and parastatals. Companies, which cannot be privatized immediately, are to be given out under concession to private companies to manage and commercialise. These corporations like NEPA, NITEL, NPA, Railway Corporation, the refineries, steel industries etc were built from the collectively owned wealth of the country and but now are to be handed over to private individuals, some of whom contributed to grounding of the public properties, at give away prices to exploit Nigerians more.

To the Nigerian working people, especially the workers and the poor, this policy of privatisation, commercialization and concessionism will be catastrophic. Thousands of workers and their families who manage to survive on meagre salaries will be retrenched when these public enterprises are privatized, commercialized or given out on concessions to private entrepreneurs. This, the entrepreneurs will claim is necessary because there are many redundant workers in the enterprises. In reality, the entrepreneur is seeking to make as much profit as possible and as quickly as possible. A case in point is the recent retrenchment of 150 staff of Daily Times of Nigeria after it was sold to a private entrepreneur, fewer workers to do the same job used to be done by many.

Those left to work will be forced to take less and less pay or they will be forced to leave too like their colleagues who have been sacked. Also, to increase profit, the entrepreneur engages the cheap labour (like casual labourers). In the private oil companies, casual or contract labour is what obtains even though these companies make huge profit from one of the most important resources needed in the world today, which is oil. In pursuit of profit, the privatized enterprises will continue to increase prices making it impossible for those who need their goods and services but do not have enough money to go without it. A privatized NEPA will make many families for instance to live in darkness. Many families today cannot afford things like cars, good accommodation, good and qualitative education, good healthcare, good food and complete diet, good clothes, enough and clean pipe borne water for their household etc as a result of the inflation and will be worse off when public enterprises are handed over to private entrepreneurs.

Combined with all the evils of privatisation, commercialization and concessionism painted above is the fact that crime rate will soar, prostitution will increase, child trafficking will expand, poverty will become aggravated, and more and more curable diseases will claim lives. It therefore behooves on the labour and the working people to oppose these neo-liberal policies.

But the roles of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) in this neo-liberal attack on the working people, is to say the least, very despicable. Adams Oshiomhole, NLC president sits on the National Council of Privatisation (NCP) the body that supervises the unwholesome sales of the public properties. The NLC like other labour centres, TUC and CFTU, supports the sales of those enterprises to the so-called core investors while turning a blind eye to the adverse impacts of the policy on the Nigerian workers in particular and the urban and rural poor in general. It is however not accidental that the labour leadership has joined the moving train of privatisation because they are as corrupt as the capitalist elite that plunder the wealth of country and subject the working people to suffer in the midst of plenty. They also lack an alternative worldview to the exploitative capitalist system, which is at root of socio-economic crises in the world over, particularly the neo-colonial third world countries like in the yoke of imperialism.

In the way and manner the struggle against incessant increase in fuel prices is waged, Workers should organise to fight the anti-people policy of privatisation, commercialization and concessionism and other forms of capitalist neo-liberal attack on the working people including retrenchment and education commercialisation. More importantly, they should with the support of the other oppressed strata (poor peasant, youth, students, artisans, etc) to form a genuine working people's party to wrestle power from the hands of capitalist thieves that are presently at helms of affairs at the local, state and national levels. Such a party must be based on rounded socialist programme and be aimed at facilitating replacement of capitalism with democratic socialist order through the workers and poor farmers' government. Under the said government, there must be re-nationalization of the already privatized companies and the public ownership of all the commanding heights of the economy placed under the democratic workers control and management to avoid the mistakes that led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union and other Stalinist economies.

Socialist Democracy March - April 2005