The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has used a religious holiday message to launch one of its most politically charged attacks yet on President Bola Tinubu’s administration, warning that millions of workers and poor citizens are being crushed by economic reforms—and that the ballot box in 2027 would be the reckoning.
In a Sallah message issued ahead of Wednesday’s Eid-el-Kabir celebrations, the NLC said the festival of sacrifice had taken on a bitter resonance for ordinary Nigerians. “The working class and the poor majority are bleeding under the weight of neoliberal policies,” the statement read, signed by NLC president Joe Ajaero.
The message adds to a swelling chorus of criticism from labour groups and civil society organisations over the economic fallout from Tinubu’s signature reforms: the removal of long-standing petrol subsidies and the liberalisation of the foreign exchange market. While international financial institutions have broadly welcomed those measures as necessary steps to stabilise public finances and attract investment, their human cost has been severe — stoking inflation, driving up food and transportation prices, and squeezing household incomes across Africa’s most populous nation.
The NLC did not spare the government on security either, citing kidnappings, bandit attacks, communal violence and rising urban crime as evidence of systemic governance failure. “The worsening insecurity that now threatens the existence of our nation — from banditry to kidnapping, from herdsmen bloodshed to urban violence — is a direct indictment of our governance model,” the statement said.
Ajaero’s union accused political leaders of demanding sacrifice from citizens while showing little restraint themselves in public spending and personal conduct — a contradiction the congress said made a mockery of the Eid spirit. “This season demands that our leaders search for themselves and decide to work for a Nigeria that will work for the majority,” the NLC said, “and not for the few who occupy high public offices.”
But it was the union’s increasingly explicit political posture that marked out this message as something more than seasonal commentary. With the 2027 general elections now firmly on the horizon, the NLC signalled its intent to mobilise workers, unemployed youths, traders and other marginalised groups into what it described as a united front against anti-people policies. It warned that it would not forget “promises not kept, the brutalisation of peaceful protesters, and the deliberate impoverishment of workers under the guise of policy hard choices.”
“We are entering a phase where every vote must be a weapon against hunger, insecurity, and exploitation,” the statement declared — language that suggests the federation is preparing to move beyond industrial action and into more openly electoral territory.
The union called on Nigerians to use the Eid period not merely for prayer and celebration, but for political education and grassroots organising — a call that will do little to ease tensions between the labour movement and an administration already facing mounting pressure from multiple fronts.
