Nigeria: Thousands want strike
2004-11-04 10:16
Lagos - Thousands of people marched through Nigeria's biggest city in a show of support for an upcoming general strike against fuel price hikes - a shutdown that union leaders warn will freeze the flow of oil from the world's seventh-biggest oil exporter.
The march, which covered over 10km, terminated at a busy bus stop in the Yaba district of Lagos where union leaders addressed protesters ahead of the planned November 16 strike.
"The message is clear. On November 16 we're going to begin the fight against poverty, unemployment and dictatorship," Adams Oshiomhole, president of the Nigeria Labor Congress, told wildly cheering crowds on Wednesday.
Oshiomhole has led the call to strike to protest fuel prices that have risen 23% in recent months. The labour congress is the country's main trade union body, grouping 29 blue-collar unions.
Oil workers threatened
The union has vowed to launch the indefinite strike to shut down Nigeria's oil exports of 2.5 million barrels daily.
At Wednesday's rally, Joseph Eva, leader of the Ijaw Monitoring Group - an advocacy group acting on behalf of the dominant Ijaw tribe in the oil-rich Niger Delta - warned that his followers would attack oil workers who didn't comply with the upcoming strike.
"Any oil worker seen at a flow station will be attacked and kidnapped," Eva said.
Oshiomhole led the protesters, standing in an open-roofed jeep, as crowds milling around him chanted songs denouncing President Olusegun Obasanjo and the ruling People's Democratic Party.
Contingents of armed riot police followed the protesters from a distance but made no attempt to disperse them.
Mike Ozekhome, a human rights lawyer, said Nigerians had fought to end more than 15 years of brutal military rule resulting in Obasanjo's victory in elections in 1999 and 2003.
"Now we have a democratic government and Nigerians are suffering more than before," Ozekhome said, urging Nigerians to resist the government's policies on fuel pricing.
In a statement on Wednesday, Information Minister Chukwuemeka Chikelu accused union leaders of opting for disruptive strikes instead of seeking a negotiated resolution of differences with the government.
"The strike is unnecessary, ill-timed and ill-motivated. Nigerians should reject it," said Chikelu.
Obasanjo has defended several fuel price increases over the past five years as the result of the abolition of government fuel subsidies, and said the resulting savings would be used to fund social services.
Union leaders opposing the price rises argue the inflationary spirals stirred by the price hikes were increasing the burden of poverty on Nigerians, 70% of whom live on less than $1 a day.
- AP