Deal with subsidy criminals, Kano NLC tells Tinubu

The Kano State chapter, Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC has enjoined President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to deal decisively with the criminal content of subsidy instead of exposing the ordinary citizens to avoidable pain and hardship.

The Chairman, Kabiru Inuwa who led the organized labour in the protest to present it position letter to the state government at the Kano State government house, however demanded the immediate reversal of all anti-poor policies of the government including increase in fuel price, school fees, VAT and among others.

According to him, “There is nowhere in the world where government leaves its citizens totally to the vagaries of the market without some measure of control and protection. The federal government should therefore deal decisively with the criminal content of subsidy instead of exposing the ordinary citizens to avoidable pain and hardship.

“As a matter of urgent National importance, it is imperative to fix all our refineries to be able to cater for the domestic fuel consumption. Further, Government should go after parties associated with corruption such as over-invoicing, under delivery of products, over-estimation of national capacity, crude oil swaps, smuggling, and make them to account etc;

“We are concerned that no Government acting reasonably, leaves its national currency to forces of the Market. Government’s so-called merger of exchange rates even when it has nothing to export other than crude oil raised our debt stock to N81 trillion from N72 trillion and puts enormous pressure on local manufacturing capacity utilization. It also impacts negatively the cost of locally produced goods and services as a lot of input are imported.

“Finally, to address the raging revenue crisis the government needs to deal decisively with crude oil theft and tax the rich progressively. It is time for the rich to make sacrifices. The poor have done enough; there is nothing more to give;

“So far, Labour has maintained her own side of the bargain, whilst government has shown little or no inclination to implement any of the agreements reached on June 5, 2023,” Inuwa maintained.

The Chairman said, “The purpose of the protest is to tell the govt to come and fulfill the promises they made during the sitting they held with the NLC and TUC where seven resolutions were reached. Out of the seven resolutions, none have commenced. The resolution includes, provision of palliatives, salary increment, salary wage awards, provision of CNG gas stations across the nation among others,” Comrade Inuwa insisted.

However, a mild drama occurred when the Secretary to the State Government, Dr. Abdullahi Baffa Bichi attempted to address the labour union midway to the government house but the workers snubbed him and proceeded to the frontage of the government house.

Speaking while addressing the protesting union members, Dr. Bichi promised to submit the request of the NLC to the State Governor for onward transmission to the Federal Government.

The protesters who chanted several slogans were seen displaying placards inscriptions such as “August 22nd will forever be known as the day we resisted bulaba’s anti-people policies”, “we want N200,000 minimum wage”, “fuel subsidy shouldn’t be removed”, “FG shouldn’t dance to the tune of IMF and World Bank”, among others

(Vanguard)