Kaduna: Ogungbangbe on Youths and Labour

*says there’s no alternative to workers

By ISAAC OLUSESI

The coincidence of the totality of the youth business convention in Kaduna and this year’s global celebration of productive workers would surge huge investment potentials of the youths in the street who have refused to believe that government employ is the ultimate. And creatively, it would build the mind attuned to the incentives of the nation’s renewed hope agenda’s ‘access to capital’ and ‘inclusiveness’ to drive investments offered them in the business world, emphasis now on the private sector services, aimed at moving Nigeria forward.

Dr Thomas Ogungbangbe stated this in Kaduna State at a youth business roundtable, held in the mood of the world’s 126th May Day anniversary. The one-day event on the youth integration in the nation’s development through relative investments, had the youths exposed to various investment opportunities. He noted that the youths at the business talk had set an ambition and achievable future for themselves just as he remarked “a nation is measured by its youth demography, bound to the deployment of its intellect and energetic determination to do everything right.”

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at CITA ENERGIES Limited urged the brainstorming youths at the forum to let go off any illicit engagements and instead exert a firm grip of whatever legitimate business they may have found themselves as a stepping stone to higher industry. “For what I can see now, you have all demonstrated professionalism in business management, going by the accounts of intellect, integrity and qualitative experience displayed, relative to organizational skill, punctuality and business ethics. You are also part of the nation’s workers, productive ones at that with access to the fairer distribution of our common wealth, and your place in business is crucial and strategic in the survival of the economy of the our dear country, Nigeria. I commend you all, the critical human resource, self salvaged from the strings of the social malaise, otherwise, youth unemployment.

“I should let you know two things now, almost in the same breadth. Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will not at any time now or in the future, in favour of foreign business interest, relegate anyone of you at this business discourse or any other workers in Nigeria who voted him into office. And the other thing that should be of business interest to you is for you to know that Nigerian economy has broadly undergone policy changes from protection to regulation and back to deregulation, and the momentum is dictated by the public sector policy initiatives with the private sector to which your registered businesses belong once you get grown to qualify for the private sector operations and become compelled to comply with the public policy initiatives, Ogungbangbe, Chairman, Aviation Fuel Marketers Association of Nigeria (AFMAN), said.

He charged the listening youths at the business parley to take a retrospective look at the nation’s yearly budgets before now, and hinted that the private sector operators were hitherto kept in abeyance. Meaning that the public sector solely held the total reins of the economy then and the private sector, differently stood and more effective, with its concept of business as provider of needed or demanded services and products at market sustainable prices.

The business round-robin, sort of an economic summit, replicated by you as youths shouldn’t be seen as a mere talking show, Ogungbangbe quipped, asking the youths to give their discussions teeth by working out their decisions in their respective businesses. He however, declared that it is the public sector, the government, that reels out policies that guide business operations in the private sector and informal section; and correspondingly, it’s the government’s legislation and regulations that create enabling operating environment for businesses to thrive. The government as a critical factor in the context, he said, operates generative principles of participation, equity and sustainability as well as the rule of law to cause the progress of the people and move the nation forward.

But the long drawn global economic decadents with the come down financial tsunami on Nigeria has conjoined the public sector prerogatives and the imperatives of the private sector’s large funds, large employees and large management skills; and the complementarity subjects the public sector’s major policies to social dialogue to the great advantage of the nation’s economic turnaround. That fundamental shift to the public sector-private sector collaboration has had government’s involvement in the nation’s economy reduced to the barest essentials as economic policy formulations and provision of law and order as watchdog of societal activities and inequalities sine qua non to encouraging socio- economic development of the nation.

Ogungbangbe expressed his preference for productive economy with workers as the pull for the nation’s prosperity, raking earnings into the government’ coffers, increased tax and non- tax revenues in terms, to have salary and pension backlogs cleared and welfare package enhanced, including the new national wage benchmark instituted. “No government or any business organisations can function without workers as there’s no alternative to the asset service management provided by them, the most viable hands at ensuring a successful execution of government or corporate services and programmes for growth and development,” he said, noting that Nigerian workers remain the leading edge in service delivery. While it is supposable that government can run smoothly without political appointees.

But Tinubu is one consistently, diligently and tirelessly working out the very eight contending concerns on the renewed hope agenda to have sustainable economic fortunes and smash irreversibly impoverishment, indigence, or privation of this generation of Nigerians and generations to come after. “He must be commended on his #35,000 wage award to the federal government’s employees and his urge to the state governments to follow suit for ease of workers’ work, life and living, till the new national minimum wage, the 6th in the series of its kind in the history of labour struggle in Nigerian, is settled. I commend him also on the twin policy actions of the fuel subsidy removal and foreign exchange market reforms,” Ogungbangbe stated, pointing up that the commitment of the nation’s workers and government to the instruments of bargaining, social dialogue and compromise (BSD-C), had laid prostrate whatever were the deleterious, injurious impact or consequences, the two policy actions could have had on the nation’s industrial relations.

And the BSD-C accompaniment remain a paradigm par excellence for the understanding and management of industrial disputes, contrary to industrial distresses as layoffs, shutdowns, and downsizings, the offshoot of economic crisis.

*OLUSESI writes via isaacolusesi@gmail.com