Trade unions agree to cooperate

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), two of Africa’s biggest trade union bodies, have signed a cooperation agreement. The agreement, concluded on Thursday, marked the end of a four-day bilateral conference in Abuja between the two organisations. “Basically, we have agreed as the two biggest trade unions in Africa to co-ordinate our activities,” John Odah, deputy general secretary of the NLC, told IRIN. “This will be both at the level of our programmes in our respective countries and internationally, to see how we can learn from one another to strengthen trade union activities in the continent.” He said the two trade union bodies also used the opportunity to harmonise their views and have a strong voice for Africa at the upcoming conference of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which will be held in South Africa in April. The bilateral conference, which was encouraged by the governments of the two countries, was in furtherance of the Nigeria-South Africa Binational Commission, set up last year to improve relations between them. “When we thought of establishing a binational commission with Nigeria, we thought we shouldn’t just have official relationships at government level. We thought that we should involve people, the Nigerian people and the South African people,” the South African ambassador to Nigeria, Banguzi Sifingo, told the local Vanguard newspaper. At the opening of the conference on Monday, NLC President Adams Oshiomhole said the alliance with COSATU was necessary considering that governments and businesses “with all their enormous resources, are moving beyond their national boundaries, trying strategic alliances and relations to achieve their respective objecives”. COSATU President Mzhinti Williams, who described the two bodies as the “two most organised trade unions on the African continent”, said Africa was faced with great challenges posed by government instability, mass poverty, unemployment and killer diseases, which required their cooperation to tackle. COSATU had been in the forefront of the fight against South Africa’s apartheid regime, which ended with the election of Nelson Mandela as president at multi-racial elections held in 1994. At about the same time NLC was in the vanguard of opposition to military rule in Nigeria, leading to its ban, also in 1994, by the late Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha. The end of Abacha’s rule in 1998 saw the revival of the NLC as well as reforms that led to the election of President Olusegun Obasanjo and the improvement of strained relations with South Africa.