Joe Ajaero’s Town Union, By Jesutega Onokpasa

It is obvious that it is those that have been feeding fat on the now rested satanic subsidy regime that are machinating the illegal strike, Joe Ajaero, Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, President, has called for Wednesday, June 7, 2023, even though Ajaero clearly has is own, not so hidden, ethnic agenda, quite apart from woefully failed Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, quietly egging him on, even though Obi, himself, promised to remove the same subsidy that is supposedly now the bone of contention!

SUBSIDY IS GONE AND GONE FOR GOOD!
Make no mistake: subsidy is gone and gone for good – it is not coming back, case closed!

Someone said that President Bola Tinubu is just trying to stamp his authority and engaging in mind games with the subsidy matter.

That person is a buffoon and does not know what he is taking about, even as much as he clearly does not know who Bola Tinubu is.

Our President is only doing the right thing for our country.

The law does not permit payment of subsidy, quite apart from the fact that the subsidy is really just a scam, hence the National Assembly did away with it vide the Petroleum Industry Act.

President Tinubu did not remove subsidy; subsidy had long been removed by an Act of the National Assembly and was only being illegally paid by the previous administration.

It is the obligation of every President to follow the law and President Tinubu just swore to a solemn oath to do exactly that just days ago when God gave us just the sort of President we have for decades longed for in this country.

OBIDIENT JOE AJAERO.
Joe Ajaero, a rabid partisan masquerading as a trade unionist, has finally turned the umbrella labour union of our country into the town union of his local village somewhere in Iboland.

This is not a labour strike – it is an “Obidient” prelude to “End SARS 2” and it must be firmly crushed.

TRIBALIST UNIONISM.
Does Joe Ajaero think he can fool anyone that he’s some kind of authentic trade unionist or genuine labour leader?

Joe Ajaero is nothing but a shameless partisan and shameful tribalist who has most ruinously politicized and ethnicized the NLC.

Mr. Ajaero is not any kind of democrat and cannot make pretentions to that category.

When he lost election to Ayuba Wabba, he refused to concede defeat just as Peter Obi is presently doing by pretending he won an election he couldn’t possibly had won.

Indeed, one has to wonder whether Ajaero would have called this strike had it been Peter Obi that had won and removed the subsidy as he kept promising, even more than President Tinubu, throughout the campaigns.

I guess they would have communicated in their local dialect and Ajaero would have come out to tell Nigerian workers in his semi broken English and rustic accent that this is a pain we must all have to bear!

But, since it is a Yoruba man called Asiwaju Tinubu that won and is President, the very same thing Peter Obi solemnly and repeatedly promised to do must now be demonized and opposed in the name of Nigerian workers when it is actually an ethnic script that is being played.

Do you think we are fools?

Rubbish!

WHERE THE SUBSIDY WE PAY ACTUALLY ENDS UP.
Do Nigerians even know where the subsidy we all pay by borrowing heavily ends up?

It ends up in the already over bloated accounts of a select few in this country, some of whom then use it to buy houses in Dubai, and in Europe and America for their girlfriends that you would never bother to chase if you met them along the road!

Let the average man on the street approach these rogues feeding fat on subsidy and ask for just fifty thousand to help pay their children school fees – they will tell him to go and work hard, while they are actually servicing their concubines from the subsidy he pays.

Trust me, it is that bad.

That is where your subsidy payments go, yet we all still have to finally cough it all out because it is principally debt on top of our heads, our children’s heads and our children’s children’s heads.

That is how diabolical the subsidy regime actually is.

PRESIDENT TINUBU KNOWS WHAT TO DO WITH SUBSIDY REMOVAL.
Reno Omokri, though in support of subsidy removal, has opined that “savings” therefrom should be deposited into some special fund similar to Sanni Abacha’s Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF.

I totally disagree.

Quite apart from the fact that Abacha’s kleptocratic approach to governance does not come highly recommended to me as it apparently does to Mr. Omokri, there is really absolutely no need for a special fund to be created for managing the “savings” from subsidy removal.

In fact, and clearly unknown to Omokri, there aren’t really any savings, as such: what we have been mostly doing for years now is to borrow heavily to fund a subsidy regime through which humongous sums of money end up in the pockets of a few while the debt overhang keeps piling up and threatening to crash down, any moment, on our heads!

When President Tinubu spoke of applying what is expended on subsidy for the greater good of the greater number of Nigerians, he was referring more to the fact that he is going to boost our national revenues and can’t be expected to offload same into the pockets of subsidy thieves, more so when payment of subsidy is patently illegal under the law.

Reno Omokri is a lawyer and should know that unlike with a military dictatorship, there is no room for quasi-parallel government organs or extraconstitutional arrangements like the PTF under a democratic dispensation.

In any case, it is entirely up to Mr. President, himself, to determine how best to apply whatever savings arise from subsidy removal and he needs no lectures from Mr. Omokri or his ilk on how to best do that.

If anyone knows exactly how to apply the fiscus for the greater good of all, it is the Asiwaju, our President.

THIS STRIKE IS DEAD ON ARRIVAL!
This is a patently illegal and irretrievably immoral strike that Joe Ajaero has called and it is dead on arrival.

I do not know if Mr. Ajaero has ever engaged in petty trading like his hero and tribesman, Peter Obi, but he is about to find out he has finally met the wrong customer in President Tinubu.

Even as a lawyer, we are all basically members or, at any rate, stakeholders of the NLC but we do not all come from Obi and Ajaero’s neck of the woods and are most certainly not all “Obidients” by any stretch of the imagination.

Many of us thoroughly despise Peter Obi and could never have anything to do with his most abhorrent personality cult of a “one chance” movement.

Clearly, Joe Ajaero has merely been waiting for an opportunity to help his tribesman steal Bola Tinubu’s mandate and, not being a very bright man, he is foolish enough to think this is it.

He is wrong because he is only about to destroy his headship of the NLC even before it has properly taken off.

BOLA TINUBU, MY PRESIDENT, YOUR PRESIDENT, OUR PRESIDENT;
God help any rascal idiotic enough to attempt to enforce a patent illegality on Nigerians on Wednesday.

There is a new sheriff in town and his name is Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, GCFR, President, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Federal Republic of Nigeria.

To my delight, he is my President, but whether they like it or not, he is also Peter Obi’s President, Atiku Abubarkar’s President, Joe Ajaero’s President and, accomplished vote waster, Sarah Omakwu’s President.

President Bola Tinubu has come to stay and Joe Ajaero is too much of a little rat to do anything about that.

*Onokpasa, a lawyer, was a member of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council and writes from Abuja.