August 2024. Nigerians took to the streets under #EndBadGovernance, demanding a reversal of subsidy removal, affordable food, fair wages, and an end to insecurity. The Tinubu government answered with repression: comrades arrested, detained, beaten, and dragged into a treason trial that stretched over a year before the Federal High Court finally struck it out for lack of diligent prosecution.
Two years on, nothing the state promised has materialised. The so-called ₦70,000 minimum wage cannot survive to the next payday, it is a dying wage in a country of rising prices and collapsing purchasing power. Formal and informal workers alike are exploited: they produce the wealth of this nation and remain poor for it. Insecurity stalks farms and streets. Hunger stalks homes. The demands of 2024; fuel relief, food subsidies, a living wage, an end to government waste, a state of emergency on public education and health, freedom for detainees from previous protests like #EndSars, remain unmet.
NLC and TUC owe workers more than silence. Representation must show in workers’ take-home pay, not just in communiqués and press statements. Rank-and-file members must compel their leaders; they must organise from below and mandate their unions toward strike action, for the elite only understands one language: organised, disciplined action. Two years after August 2024, the task is not memory — it is mobilisation.
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