A Lecturer in the Ignatius Ajuru University of Education (IAUE), Professor Alafuro Epelle, has said that education of workers remained a veritable tool to liberate the peasantised and annihilated workers in the Nigerian state.
Epelle stated this during the 24th Inaugural Lecture of the institution at the university’s main campus, Rumuolumeni, Port Harcourt, last Thursday.
Delivering his lecture titled ‘Between Father, Son and Ghost; Who Is Accentuating the Payment of Wages of Sin To Nigerian Workers?, Epelle noted with dismay the pauperised and peasantised state of the Nigerian workers despite their invaluable contributions to the building of the nation’s economy, maintaining that such was a fallout from the low level state of education of the workforce.
Epelle noted that a highly educated workforce will not only understand the place of the working class in history and their disadvantaged position vis-a-vis the ruling propertied class, but will also understand the virtue of conscientisation and effective mobilisation for a common purpose.
In his words: “The best tool that Nigerian Workers can leverage on to break out of the hamstring imposed on them by the state is education. It is only through education that they can withstand and overcome some of the measures(legislations and divisive tendencies) employed by the Nigerian state to peasantise and annihilate them”.
Epelle, who is a social and political scientist revealed that the lecture was borne out of the quest on why Nigerian Workers and their unions remained pauperized and perpetually miserable inspite of their efforts towards the growth of the country’s bourgeoning economy, adding that it would further expose the constellation of forces and factors arrayed against them and responsible for their despondent conditions.
“I intend to use the opportunity of this lecture to express my resolute commitment to the cause of the Nigerian labour movement- being a public servant and hence, a participant observer in the struggle for improved working condition for the country’s workforce. This lecture draws it’s impetus from my concern for the plight of the Nigerian worker”, he said.
The social scientist averred that the most basic need of a man is how to feed himself and this he must achieve through work, regretting however, that rather than the Nigerian Worker being paid adequately for his work, he has practically received little in return, a situation which he said “has resulted in grinding poverty, frustration, dejection and dissillusionment on the faces of many Nigerian Workers dovetailing in drunkenness, trauma, hypertension and the ubiquitous ‘Gone-too-soon’ obituary posters littering most street corners in the country” .