The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has harshly criticized President Bola Tinubu’s Monday speech to the country, claiming that it utterly ignored the terrible reality that the majority of Nigerians confront and failed to recognise the great pains and suffering they have undergone.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, NLC President Joe Ajaero stated that the President’s pledges and guarantees during the national broadcast were not the “silver bullet” that Nigerians expected.
“The speech appears to be out of touch with reality and anomalous in light of the hardship and suffering that most Nigerians are currently experiencing,” Ajaero remarked.
According to him, the NLC anticipates that the next line of argument would be how the current administration intends to resurrect public refineries that have been dormant. Ajaero claimed the grounded refineries were the major pain point in the whole subsidy narrative.
“Unfortunately, the entire speech by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was completely silent on the issue of the repair of our national refineries.
“Consistent with our perception of the misalignment of Mr President’s promises and offerings to the reality faced by millions of workers and ordinary Nigerians was the failure of President Tinubu to unmask those behind the looting of Nigeria’s commonwealth under the guise of petrol subsidy,” he asserted.
The NLC president said it was unacceptable for the President to lament like ordinary Nigerians about a group that he referred to in his speech as the “elites of the elites who have stolen so much from Nigeria that they have become so powerful as to constitute a threat to democratic governance”.
“What Nigerians expected from Mr President is a firm commitment to bring these economic saboteurs to justice and recover what they have stolen. Mr President’s statement on working with organised labour to review the national minimum wage is out of sync with what has played out since President Tinubu removed the so-called petrol subsidy.
