Daily Trust - the online edition

The Action Congress (AC) has hailed Nigerian workers for their courage and perseverance at a time of untold hardship, just as the party expressed the hope that their struggles for a just, equitable and fair society would not be in vain.

In a statement issued by Alhaji Lai Mohammed, congratulating workers on the occasion of the May Day celebrations, the party’s National Publicity Secretary, also urged the workers to remember that their votes are the best instruments to change their current poor status for the better.

"The Nigerian worker has never had it so bad in the history of our country, with rising unemployment, massive loss of jobs, lack of electricity, a high state of insecurity of lives and property and a decrepit infrastructure, just to name a few’’, he pointed out.

According to him, ‘’the lesson from this development is simply: don’t vote into power those who have no clues on how to create jobs or secure existing ones, those who have no clues whatsoever to the fast descent into hopelessness that many Nigerians have been consigned in recent times’’.

Alhaji Lai further said that ‘’it is not enough not to vote for these clueless, direction-less politicians’’, adding that "workers must guard their votes jealously and resist the desperate resort to unbridled rigging by those bent on gaining power at all cost even when they don’t know how to use it for the betterment of the people.

Meanwhile, the party has described as panicky and a mere tokenism the decision of the federal government to import food stuff in response to the worsening food crisis.

The party said the answer to the crisis does not lie in engaging in massive importation of food, as the government has now done, but in putting in place measures that will boost food production and ultimately force down prices.

"Importing 500,0000 metric tonnes of rice, as being planned by the FG, is a disappointing throwback to a past better forgotten, when essential commodities became tools for punishing the opposition’’, the party said

According to AC, ‘’the quantity of rice to be imported at a whopping cost of 80 billion naira - is indeed a drop in the ocean for a country with a population of over 140 million people.

"In any case, the middle men and the economic mafia gang that have held Nigeria by the jugular will be the beneficiaries of this planned importation of rice, not the ordinary citizens, he pointed out.

"As we said in our earlier statement on the food crisis, the federal government should be interested in enunciating policies that will make it possible for Nigeria to become self sufficient in food production, rather than a dependent nation, Alhaji Lai Mohammed added.

"Unfortunately, this federal government does not have a clear cut policy on this and other critical issues, hence the quick resort to the easy way: massive food importation in this case’’, he lamented

"That explains why it resorted to fuel importation instead of fixing the refineries. Of course, once you begin to import, those profiting from it will never allow it to end’’, AC noted.