Labour and Labour Crisis in Nigerian: The Implication of the Structural Adjustment Programme

Abstract

This Paper Labour and Labour Crises in Nigeria: The implication of structural adjustment programme, its aims at analyzing the effects of the structural adjustment programme (SAP) on the Labour and Labour crises in Nigeria. Through the economic policy programme, which among other objectives of the programmes includes, the privatization of public investment, retrenchment of Staffs, devaluation of the naira, deregulation of interest rates, reduction on government expenditure and Labour market adjustment. This paper also examine the Nigerian economy before the introduction of the Structural adjustment programme (SAP) which also give an insight about the Nigerian drawing rights from 1970 where the 90 percent of the nation foreign exchange earnings and more than 80 percent of the country’s population (53 million) were gaily employed by the agricultural sector. However, with discovery of Oil in the 70s Agricultural contribution to GDP started to decline from about 40 percent, GDP in the early 1970s to 20 percentage in the early 1980s. This decline resulted into untold sequences such as increased dependence on food imports. Now the government source of income solidly depend on Oil with 90 percent of the country exports earnings. As such revenue fell from $27.4 billion in 1950 to $ 11.1 billion in 1982. In the same vein, external reserve dropped from $757 billion to $5.5 billion. These effects resulted into external debt and massive borrowing. In order to find a solution to the problems the government decided to adopt the Structural adjustment programme so that it will dealth with the economic problems as at that time. This also brought about the idea of shifting the resources from undesired sector to more desire ones. Labour in particular is required to shift accordingly from Urban to Rural areas. Government intends to pursue this by applying relative price instrument like devaluation, freeing of urban wages and removal of subsidy. But unfortunately, this result was could not be achieved because of implicit model in pursuing the said objective is defective in many ways. The consequence of these leads to retrenchment of workers where this is not possible, workers were denied their basic pay for months, the Nigeria wage earner was left to fend foe his survival in order to sustain his life and those of his dependents. As such this leads to strike and counter strike which the Labour Union sought to be the only means of obtaining Union rights. Even though this was not effective, since the industries can not affords the exchange rate for their raw materials etc.