The President General of the Ohanaeze Ndigbo Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu has urged President Bola Tinubu to prevail on labour to shelve their planned strike.
Last week, organised labour had proposed Tuesday to begin a nationwide strike owing to the removal of subsidy on petroleum and the attendant impact.
While labour has maintained their stance about the industrial action, government authorities are urging them not to strike, a move the Ohanaeze chieftain believes should be ramped up.
“As I said in my earlier statement, every effort must be made to persuade the labour union not to go on strike. And you can only do it by giving them proper assurance because an average worker is very sad,” he said on Channels Television’s special Independence Day Sunday Politics show tagged Empowering Tomorrow.
Although President Tinubu had addressed the nation on his Independence Day broadcast and announced some measures including an increment in salary for low-grade earners, Iwuanyanwu said more needs to be done to dissuade the workers from going on strike.
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“The President is in difficulty. His speech has not given enough and I plead that people should give proper advice on what can be done because my worry is if the strike goes on, many things are going to go wrong,” he said. “If there is that strike, I don’t know where it would lead to.”
According to him, labour should give the government some time to meet some of their demands, maintaining that going on strike would compound issues for Nigerians.
His comment comes just as government authorities and labour unions met to iron out issues and forestall a shutdown of the country.
During the meeting, they reached some resolutions. Some of them include that “the issues in dispute can only be resolved when workers are at work and not when they are on strike.
Labour Unions argued for higher wage awards and the Federal Government Team promised to present Labour’s request to President Bola Tinubu for further consideration”.
“NLC and TUC will consider the offers by the Federal Government with a view to suspending the planned strike to allow for further consultations on the implementation of the resolutions above,” Minister of Information and National Orientation Mohammed Idris said in a statement.
