The Nigeria Labour Congress has strongly criticised President Bola Tinubu’s Monday address to the nation, stating that it completely disregarded the harsh realities faced by the majority of Nigerians and failed to acknowledge the profound hardships and suffering they have endured.
The President of the NLC, Joe Ajaero, in a release on Tuesday, said the President’s promises and assurances during the national broadcast were not the “silver bullet” that Nigerians expected.
“The speech indeed appears to be out of touch with reality and anomalous with the hardship and suffering that most Nigerians are going through now,” Ajaero said.
According to him, the NLC expects that the next line of statement would be how the present government plans to resuscitate public refineries, which have been lying comatose for so many years.
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.
