The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has come down hard on the ruling Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) leadership over what it described as the party’s indecisive and immature handling of the leadership crisis which almost ground the nation to a halt between when President Umar Yar’Adua took ill last November and had to be rushed to Saudi Arabia for treatment and last Tuesday night when he returned.
While addressing the opening ceremony of the Congress’ Emergency National Executive Council (NEC) meeting in Kaduna, on Thursday, held purposely to decide on whether or not to accept Federal Government’s plan to deregulate the downstream sector of the oil and gas industry, President of the NLC, Abdulwaheed Omar, said if the NLC had been as unwary of the inherent danger which the situation posed to national security as the PDP had shown itself to be; the labour movement would have bowed to pressure exerted on it by some unnamed “vested interests” who had urged the NLC to call out workers on a national strike to protest the vacuum in the presidency which Yar’Adua’s failure to transmit power to his deputy created.
According to Kaduna-born Omar, who spoke to the obvious discomfiture of the host state governor, Alhaji Muhammed Namadi Sambo, who is a member of the PDP and was present as the guest of honour, the congress had “noted with concern the role of the PDP in that entire crisis up to this moment as it failed to act timely and decisively to get the vice president, a party member to step in as Acting President. Clearly, the PDP has failed the country as a political party which should have an internal institutional mechanism to avoid the situation we found ourselves.”
On the contrary, he added that “while some vested interests wanted the Congress to go beyond soliciting for a constitutional resolution of the crisis by calling out workers to a massive protest rally or embark on a nationwide strike, the leadership of the Congress was very conscious of the dangers such massive civil disobedience would have on the country’s democracy.

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