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Tinubu Has Crashed Expectations Of Nigerians, Says APC Ex-NWC Member

Published

9 months ago

August 14, 2023

Editor

…Lists 4 disturbing signals under new administration

The immediate-past National Vice Chairman, Northwest, of the ruling All Progressives Congress APC, Salihu Moh. Lukman has raised the alarm over what he tagged “disturbing signals” under the nascent administration of President Bola Tinubu.

This was as Lukman accused the president of crashing the earnest expectations of Nigerians who had hoped that having finally realized his lifelong ambition to be their president, that he would come up with a crack squad rather than the lacklustre ministerial nominations he forwarded to the Senate.

In an open letter to the president on Monday, Lukman said he decided to make the letter open “because having resigned my position as a member of the APC National Working Committee NWC, I don’t want to make any claim of having access to you in whatever form.

“Even as NWC member, it was almost impossible to access you after winning the election. Now, given that I resigned because I disagreed with your decision to nominate Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje to emerge as the National Chairman of APC, I don’t expect you to be amenable to meeting a ‘protestant’ like me”, he declared.

He said the disturbing signals, if not averted could produce bigger problems and irreversibly destroy APC’s electoral viability as a party.

Disturbing signals

Lukman said without attempting to question Tinubu’s authority and commitment to the wellbeing of Nigeria as a nation, within the short period since May 29, 2023 when he assumed office, there are decisions he took, which are very disturbing to many loyal party members.

He said; “To be honest, making Dr. Ganduje National Chairman of APC is the first disturbing signal. Many party members are yet to recover from that shock. With all the uncleared corruption allegation against Dr. Ganduje, you opted to nominate him to become the National Chairman of the party even when Article 31.5(i) of the constitution of APC clearly gave Nasarawa State Executive Committee the power to nominate who should replace Sen. Abdullahi Adamu. Given that Sen. Umaru Tanko Al-Makura is from Nasarawa State, and he has been very loyal to you, it was scandalous that you will opt for Dr. Ganduje with all the baggage of corruption allegation against him.

“Recall that before the March 2022 APC National Convention, Sen. Al-Makura aspired to become APC National Chairman and President Buhari was influenced to nominate Sen. Adamu over Sen. Al-Makura partly because he was alleged to be loyal to you, it defies every logical reasoning that you will ignore provision of Article 31.5(i) to nominate Dr. Ganduje even when the same provision of the constitution was used to nominate Sen. Basiru Ajibola from Osun State as replacement of Sen. Iyiola Omisore.

“The emergence of Dr. Ganduje as National Chairman of APC send the disturbing signal of being weakly committed to fighting corruption. This is very troubling and is neither representative of the interest of APC members, nor is it representative of the wider interest of Nigerians. If our democracy is to develop to the point of being capacitated to resolve our national challenges, the commitment of our leaders to fighting corruption must never be in doubt.

“That our leaders in APC accepted the emergence of Dr. Ganduje as APC National Chairman without much resistance produces the second disturbing signal. This is because the absence of resistance was more a reflection of fear, which is the new reality in APC. Once leaders and members of APC continue to feel threatened that when they express opposition against your decision, we may end up with the bigger danger of creating a police state. This may not arise from any conscious decision coming from you but will be produced from circumstances of having to rationalize or enforce your decisions, which may not be acceptable to party members and citizens. In fact, the first casualties of such reality will be fellow party members.

“Largely because of the atmosphere of fear surrounding the emergence of Dr. Ganduje as National Chairman, the wider debate of using the vacancies created to respond to the challenge of inclusivity given that we won the 2023 election with a Muslim-Muslim ticket was lost. Rather than even attempting to respond to that challenge and demonstrate that truly we only invoke the Muslim-Muslim ticket as an electoral strategy, in a very insensitive manner we imposed another Muslim-Muslim scenario in the party with National Chairman and National Secretary both Muslims. And we want to claim we are a progressive party? What is the brand of our progressive politics? Certainly, not the one which Nigerians expect, which endears us to citizens on account of which Nigerians gave us the mandate to manage the affairs of government since 2015.

“The third disturbing signal is the quality of your appointees. Sincerely, Your Excellency, throughout the 2023 electoral campaigns, one of the strong campaign points was that you know how to find talents. When it took you more than eight weeks to nominate your Ministers, the belief was that you were taking your time to identify indisputably proficient people. With due respect to all those you nominated, many party members and by extension Nigerians were disappointed. It is clear to any discerning mind that political consideration eclipsed any other factor. Definitely no argument about talent can be sustained. As it is, both as party members and as Nigerians, our expectation from your government has crashed.

“This leads us to the fourth disturbing signal, which is about the management of policy process. When in your inaugural address you declared that petroleum subsidy was gone, it gave many of us the confidence that you have assumed office ready to take all the hard decisions and initiate measures for accelerated national development. Of course, no one expected that process of accelerated development will produce immediate results, but many of us expected that the details of initiatives will be clear and will not be reduced to propaganda. As things are, Nigerians are still waiting to know what the agenda of government is with respect to managing the downstream oil sector beyond saving the amount of money that used to be expended for subsidy payments.

“The second issue related to management of policy initiatives is the exchange rate of the Naira. Some of us expect that decisions around exchange rate will be integral part of broader economic policy of government. Now, it would appear that isolated decision has been taken to float the Naira without any clear economic policy. The consequence is that the Naira is on a downward swing. Combined with rising cost of transport as a result of withdrawal of subsidy the inflationary pressure on the economy is very high. As a result, living condition is getting worse. At this rate, poverty incidence will be terribly high, beyond any rational expectations.

“Mr. President, you need to urgently address these disturbing signals coming early in your tenure. No one should deceive you into believing that party members and leaders, and by extension Nigerians are not worried with all these disturbing signals. It will be a disservice to your leadership and to our people if we don’t bring these to your attention. You need to act fast to start correcting these disturbing signals before they become defining attributes of your administration and by extension our party. It is either you correct them, or we sign off any prospect of winning any future election”, he declared.
VANGUARD

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Minimum Wage: Why We May Not Accept N100,000 – Organised Labour

Published

7 hours ago

May 20, 2024

Editor

The organised labour has told the government to perish any idea of offering N100,000 as the new minimum wage.

The labour has also told the government to be serious with the negotiations on the issue of workers wages, insisting that it used the lowest minimum in arriving at the N615,000 as new minimum wage.

Recall that the organised labour comprising the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC and the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, TUC, pulled out of the negotiation meeting last week Wednesday when the government offered N48,000 as the new minimum wage.

However, Chairman of the Tripartite Committee on the National Minimum wage, Alhaji Bukar Goni in a letter to the organized labour for a meeting tomorrow indicated interest that the government will shift ground and asked the organised labour to also shift ground.

Speaking to Vanguard in Abuja, the NLC Head of Information and Public Affairs, Benson Upah, said that the organised labour would honour the invitation tomorrow but he advised the government to be serious.

He said, “Our expectations are that the government should be serious this time around. We expect them to take more seriously the issue of wages of workers.”

On whether labour would accept N100,000 as being insinuated, he said, “Well, it will not be fair and these are the reasons. The first reason is that when we demanded for N615,000, we broke that down. In fact, we used the barest minimum.

“For instance we put accommodation for N40,000, we also use for feeding N500, tell me where you are going to get food for N500 with a family of six. As I said, we used barest estimate but beyond that, government hiked electricity tariff by two hundred and fifty percent after we made our demand and that has introduced new cost and expenses. So if government is serious, it should not be thinking about a hundred thousand naira.

“You know that when you create poor citizens, you create a poorer county.” On his part, a member of the NLC delegation on the Tripartite Committee, Prof Theophilus Ndubuaku, said it would not be kind of the government to offer N100,000.

He said, “I don’t think one hundred thousand naira is a kind of thing we want because it’s far below expectation, we will accept something that can at least keep somebody alive. I don’t think a hundred thousand naira will keep a worker alive in this country a man with a family of six because our computation is based on the size of family.

“So, if they come up with that kind of amount, I don’t think we will appreciate it. In the private sector even artisans are not taking one hundred thousand a month. Whatever we accept we will look what is the income, what are they collecting, what is available to government because if government is collecting one trillion naira, we cannot ask them to pay two trillion.

“We are responsible people but the same government should know that people are suffering they will have to agree with us that there is crisis, that something needs to be done to create wealth, that something needs to be done for Nigeria to be a producing country and not a consuming nation.

“Something needs to be done to reduce the cost of governance. We are supposed to be partners in governance, after all we are the labourers.”

Asked to give reason why labour may not accept one hundred thousand, he said, “If we see that that hundred thousand is affordable, if we see that they can afford more, we will reject it. They have to tell us why they cannot pay N615,000, the onus is on them to tell us why, then we will sit down and say okay you don’t have the money but we will also know why you don’t have the money because Nigeria is a country that is naturally endowed but something is wrong, how do you make sure you get the money so that when we come again in two years time, you won’t tell us the same story?

“What are you doing to create wealth, how are you going to partner with us to create wealth instead of being wasteful, how are you going to partner with us to reduce cost of governance. If a father comes home and says the only money he has is one thousand naira and you know that the father is not wasting the money, you will manage but if it is when the father comes and he is eating food bought from the fast food joint and it cost N10,000 and he gives one thousand to the entire family to go and look for food and cook for themselves, he may be beaten up, the family may refuse it.

“The letter they wrote to us they said that both parties should shift ground, that means they will shift ground and they are expecting us to shift ground but the question is, what ground are they shifting, are they going to shift ground by two naira or two thousand naira to make it N50,000 or are they going to shift ground by N62,000 to make it N100,000 or by N150,000 or N200,000 to make it N300,000 plus.

“The point here is, this thing we are doing is not rocket science, the government should sit down and calculate how much it will cost, what is a befitting wage for an average Nigeria? They should breakdown what they are giving us because even in salaries, you break everything down. So when you break it down, they will tell us whether they are going to put one thousand naira per month for transport and two thousand naira per month for food.

“That N48,000 they are offering, they should have broken it down so if there are certain things they don’t want to make provision for, for instance health, if they say if any worker is sick they person should go and die or they don’t want to make provision for food, let them just put standard things.

“The problem here is that, you asked someone to tighten his belt, you said there is no money but you removed subsidy. Since they removed subsidy, FAAC has been collecting almost three times of what they were collecting before subsidy. That money you are collecting, what are you doing with it?

“You now said you want to build coastal highway when the existing roads to the same location are not passable, you are budgeting trillions of naira, you want to build Lagos-Sokoto brand new Highway, you want to put billions for hajj subsidy, you bought 200 vehicles for Customs and this is somebody that is complaining that naira is having issues but you now want to spend hundreds billions to import Toyota cars for Customs, why can’t you buy made-in Nigeria vehicles?

“This whole thing doesn’t make any meaning, we don’t even understand it. They are behaving as if they have money but they don’t know what to do with it like General Yakubu Gowon said in the 70s. You bought 200 Toyota Jeeps for Customs, it means you really do have the money but you don’t know what to do with it. But one thing you don’t want to do with the money is to feed Nigerians, feed your workers, make your workers comfortable.

“And as you can see, they are not even giving anybody hope. There is no programme for agriculture, government is not declaring emergency on power, food security, transportation.

“So what we are expecting is that, if they tell us they cannot pay N625,000, they should tell us why they cannot pay, this is negotiation. If we have told them to pay N615,000, what we expect government to calculate how many workers that are expected to receive this minimum wage.

“We did our research, you now say each state has this workforce, this is what they are now getting as revenue forget the fact that some of them are not doing anything to increase their IGR. Whatever they are getting now from the money coming from the federal revenue account, the federal government should say, this is the number of workers that we have, this is how much that you are asking, at the end of the day, this is how much we are expected to spend as salary and this is how much we have.

“So, NLC please look at it, we don’t want to spend this percent on salary, we will then sit down and ask, if you don’t want to spend it on salary, you want to spend it by importing vehicles for Customs when you have locally manufactured vehicles that won’t cost capital flight.”

He, however said that if the government comes out with something”relevant “, the organised labour will shift ground as asked.

“We must discuss with them that the figure presented is realistic and based on facts and statistics as the organised labour has done,” he said.

He said, “For provision of food for one person, we put N500 but there is a survey carried out by the National Bureau for Statistics covering all parts of the country, NBS is the custodian of statistics and it came out with that in today Nigeria, the average you can spend for a meal is N900.

“But we went low, we took the minimum. Their average is N900 but we took the minimum of N500, that is you cannot go below the N500. So you can see how realistic we are. So we will insist that government breakdown every item. Food, hospital, accommodation, transportation etc.

“We don’t want anyone to come and say that the NLC and the TUC presented arbitrary figure.”
VANGUARD

News

BREAKING: CBN Withdraws Circular On Cyber Security Levy

Published

9 hours ago

May 19, 2024

Editor

The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN has withdrawn the circular directing banks and other financial institutions to implement the 0.5 per cent cyber security levy.

The withdrawal of the circular was announced via a statement signed by Haruna Mustafa, Director, Financial Policy and Regulation, Department and Chibuzo Efobi, Director, Payment System Management Department.

The circular stated: “The Central Bank of Nigeria circular dated May 6, 2024 (Ref. PSMD/DIR/PUB/LAB/017/004) on the above subject refers. ‘

“Further to this, please be advised that the above referenced circular is hereby withdrawn.”

News

JUST IN: Tinubu Appoints Spokesperson, Ngelale, As Special Envoy On Climate Action

Published

10 hours ago

May 19, 2024

Editor

President Bola Tinubu has appointed his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr. Ajuri Ngelale, as Nigeria’s Special Presidential Envoy on Climate Action.

This was as he established a 25-person committee to oversee the country’s green economic initiatives.

“Ngelale will serve in this role as part of a larger Presidential Committee, to be chaired by the President,” the office of the secretary to the government of the federation revealed in a statement signed Sunday by its Director of Information and Public Relations, Segun Imohiosen.

“Ngelale will retain his role as the Official Spokesperson of the President and Special Adviser to the President on Media & Publicity while serving on the committee,” it added.

The statement is titled, ‘President Tinubu establishes a committee to oversee green economic initiatives, appoints Chief Ajuri Ngelale as special envoy on climate action.’

Imohsien said the Presidential Committee on Climate Action and Green Economic Solutions will “coordinate and oversee all policies and programmes on climate action and green economic development.”

“This is to remove the constraints to coordination, foster a whole-of-government approach to climate-action programmes, provide an efficient governance architecture, and ensure that all relevant institutions in the sector are plugged into the President’s vision and are collectively implementing the Renewed Hope Agenda on climate action,” it further explained.

The new committee which has the President as its Chairman also includes the Minister of Environment, Mr. Balarabe Lawal as its Vice-Chairman, and Mr. Ajuri Ngelale as its Secretary/Special Presidential Envoy.

Members are the CEOs of, InfraCorp, Mr. Lazarus Angbazo; National Council on Climate Change, Mr. Salisu Dahiru; Infrastructure Council Regulatory Commission, Mr. Michael Ohiani, Nigeria Investment Promotion Council, Mrs. Aisha Rimi and National Social Investment Fund, Mr. Aminu Umar-Sadiq.

The committee also consists of the CEOs of the National Agency for the Great Green Wall, Mr Yusuf Maina-Bukar, Energy Commission of Nigeria, Mr Abdullahi Mustapha; Rural Electrification Agency, Abba Aliyu; CreditCorp, Uzoma Nwagba, the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure, Khalil Halilu Member, Solid Minerals Development Fund, Fatima Shinkafi; CBN Deputy Governor (Deputy Governor, Corporate Services Directorate) Mr Bala Bello; UN SE4ALL, Lolade Abiola; Member and an Adviser to the NCCC Adviser, Teni Majekodunmi.

Others are representatives of the Federal Ministries of FCT, Finance, Industry, Trade & Investment, Water Resources, and Agriculture & Food Security.

The committee also consists of representatives from the Federal Inland Revenue Service and the Nigeria Customs Service.

The OSGF outlined eight objectives of the Presidential Committee. They are to:

“Identify, develop, and implement innovative non-oil & non-gas climate action initiatives.

“Coordinate all activities of relevant federal institutions towards the attainment of all agreed climate action and green economic objectives and non-oil/non-gas ambitions of the federal government.

“Collaborate with all relevant government, subnational governments, non-government, and civil society entities towards the attainment of the climate action objectives and ambitions of the federal government.

“Collaborate with national governments and multilateral institutions towards the attainment of the climate action objectives and carbon market ambitions of the federal government.

“Monitor, evaluate, and guide the progress of all climate action and renewable energy projects and activities of the federal government.

“Track and guide the implementation of initiatives and developments conducted by the Energy Transition Working Group.

“Supervise the work of the Presidential Steering Committee on Project Evergreen and

“Prepare a half-yearly green ambitions update, covering all associated climate action achievements of the federal government.”