With the increase of fuel pump price to upwards of N1,300 earlier this week, the Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led APC regime has raised PMS price by 430% in in seventeen months. Considering the multiplier effect of petrol pricing on the cost of living of the people, this is a marked attack on the wellbeing and livelihood of the working people already living in poverty over 130 million of whom already live below the poverty line. It is thus not surprising that over the same seventeen months, the cost of living crisis in the country has worsened with geometric progression. Cost of living inflation is already over 40%. The poor masses can hardly breath; hunger has become our daily companion. This is unacceptable.
Socialist Workers League considers it important to put the current situation in perspective as a guide to action. The persistent increases in fuel pump price, and so-called removal of fuel subsidy, are part and parcel of the neoliberal agenda of capitalism, which benefits just a handful of people. The drivers of this agenda are the international finance institutions like the World Bank and IMF, local capitalists like Dangote, and the Nigerian government which primarily represents capitalist interests.
They do not simply push the bitter pill of these policies down our throat. They also insult us with lies. We are told that it is for our own good. They always claim that they will spend the monies saved from the removal of subsidies on social services. But, we have been hearing the same story for decades, since the structural adjustment programmes started in the mid-1980s, and with these, unending fuel pump price hikes. And what do we see?
The rich keep getting richer and the poor people remain perennially poor. Government officials receive huge amounts of money as allowances, buy yachts and aeroplanes with billions of naira. Meanwhile; poverty rates are increasing, unemployment is soaring and the hardship facing us has become unbearable.
This widespread hardship led to a wave of spontaneous protests in February and March. It also inspired the recent #EndBadGovernance wave of protests between August and the beginning of October. We cannot overemphasise the need to deepen resistance to the neoliberal policies and capitalist forces that have put us in this state of anguish. The social force with the greatest structural power to challenge the government and force it to back down from the fuel pump price increase and anti-people’s policies, in general, is the working class.
We all saw how in 2012, the entry of the trade union movement into the fightback against the sharp increase of fuel price by Goodluck Jonathan raised mass protests that had started spontaneously to the level of an uprising, forcing the government to make some a partial price reversal. And this explains why there have been calls on the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress (TUC) to lead a fightback to reject the recent increase in fuel pump price.
But we must go beyond this. Without pressures of workers’ power from below, it is unlikely that the NLC and TUC will do anything significantly different from what they have done since the 29 May 2023 “subsidy is gone” declaration, which is essentially nothing. An important lesson from the 2012 January Uprising is that, the trade unions were forced to take the action they took precisely because of such pressures from below.
We urge rank-and-file workers and the mass of working people to rise and fight, and to put pressure on their trade unions’ and organisations’ leadership to stand firm and resist the neoliberal policies that have made our lives an unending hell.
We are hungry, we are angry, and we must fight to overthrow the system that is the root cause of fuel pump price hikes and the generally pitiable state of our existence. Dare to struggle and dare to win!
Kunle “Wizeman” Ajayi (National Chairperson) & Amara Nwosu (National Secretary)
Issued: 11 October 2024
