NLC’s Invasion of MTN is a Fund Raising Exercise – Jimi Disu
Opinion by veteran radio presenter, Jimi Disu…
This particular NLC says that MTN doesn’t treat its workers well and that in any case, they don’t allow their members to join their union. I said to them, “that’s noble of you isn’t it, do you know how much the lowest paid person in MTN earns or are we going to say we don’t know how much they earn in telecoms, some middle level staff in MTN are paid even double what a permanent secretary gets, go and find out. That is one.
The idea of them unionising goes to the staff it’s not the employer that would tell the employee to go and unionise yourselves, have you had any dialogue with them? have you had any meeting with MTN staff?
Do you know what all this is about? The day you have a union in all the telecoms i think it’s about 5 percent or so, they call it union dues and it goes to the NLC. So that’s the name of the game, let’s call a spade a spade, to be honest with you i can say categorically that most members of MTN staff if you asked them they would rather be left alone than join one union that has never been there for anybody.
Now look at this; so you have the whatever of the workers at heart, have you resolved the minimum wage issue? No! Have you gone to picket all the state governors, the state government that are owing seven-eight months salary? You haven’t done that, but you want to go and picket MTN because you know how much would accrue to you.
Do you know why all this is happening again? baba no dey drop. By this time four years ago, you had a fair idea of what was going on in the labour movement and unfortunately, whether NUPENG goes on strike or not, you know Buhari is not going to drop a dime!
So as far as i am concerned, they went on a fund raising exercise. Now it didn’t just end there, If you are going to picket a company let’s just say for all intents and purposes, does it then mean that you must go on a destroying mission? You went in there and destroyed their properties. Here you are, our existence economically is somewhat premised on what we call foreign investment, now is this how you are going to treat companies that come? Nobody takes the NLC serious.
If the workers themselves took the NLC serious, they would have opted to form a union. I have not seen any evidence that says that the company told them that you cannot join a union. The same thing happens to the banks, the workers in these companies are the privileged ones, some of them earn 4-5 times more than their contemporaries on the same level in the public sector.
So I think what has happened is unfortunate, I think the police should be called in and if MTN can sure them, they should go ahead to sue them. You cannot go and destroy their property in the name of picketing. If you want to picket, what you do is, you form a human barricade. Why must you go on a destruction exercize, the pictures are there to see.
So I think we need to be careful, this action by the NLC, I condemn it because I have never really taken them serious for quite a while and we all know what goes on there. All this they say they are going to MTN, to Airtel, to Glo, to whatever, all this at the end of the day, is a fund raising exercise.
