NLC faults alleged plan to sell TCN

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has faulted the alleged planned sale of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).

The NLC President, Mr Ayuba Wabba said this in a statement entitled:  “This Kite will not Fly’’ on Friday in Abuja.

“The NLC has learnt with great consternation, a surreptitious plan to sell the TCN.

“The report in The Guardian on June 17 merely burst open the behind the scene manoeuvrings of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE).

“We wish to place in the public domain that neither congress nor the sectoral affiliate union was officially contacted or even informally consulted on the alleged plan.

“Therefore, congress advises that if the report was planted in the newspaper and so designed to fly a kite, the paper kite is riddled with holes, sodden, clumsy and torn in different places, ’’he said.

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He said the NLC condemned with vigour the continued stripping and stealing of Nigeria’s economic assets.

He said that the current attempt to hand over the TCN to a few ‘privileged’ Nigerians was self-serving, obtuse, odious, morally reprehensible and criminal.

He said Nigerian workers and people were vehemently opposed to this plot and would resist the grand larceny.

“The TCN is a strategic economic asset of immense national security implications. This is because the TCN traverses all nooks and crannies of Nigeria.

“It will be wrong that our country will be deliberately exposed to an avoidable vulnerability and thus, provide an opportunity to others to restrain the Nigerian state.

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“This position flows from the ineluctable lesson of the historical incidences of allowing some private organisations of questionable intentions and antecedence to own and run strategic economic assets in our country,’’ he said.

The NLC president said thus, the story of the planned total divestment and ceding of the TCN was creepy and confounding.

He said the plan exemplified one in the series of unacceptable bitter pills forcibly pushed down the throat of the Nigerian people in pursuit of an ill-thought-out reforms policy.

“We apprehend that the planned sale of the TCN is only an attempt to further confound the people and concurrently raise electricity tariff. Unfortunately, this time around, Nigerians have had enough.

“ The government cannot promise improved power supply to consumers by the planned sale of TCN. The under-the-table scheming as transparent privatisation cannot pass muster.

“It is an unsavoury narrative for our country, that even the privatised assets, which have survived the rapacity of the new owners, have been turned into unrealisable collaterals for unpayable loans.

“This constitutes a bone stuck in the throat of financial institutions and sundry creditors,’’ he said.

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Wabba, however, urged the Nigerian people to make no mistake about the plot to sell TCN as it would only result in the continuation of the regrettable policy of heaping an unbearable burden on the ordinary people.

He said that the plan would also fundamentally weaken the security of the nation and above all, deprive the people of their age-old investments in the commanding heights of the Nigerian economy.

“ Congress reiterates that it is faulty to contemplate selling the TCN; it is an obvious misdirected and insupportable policy.

“This clandestine plot is like the kite squeaking in the dark with broken wings; it will simply not fly,’’ he said. (NAN)