President, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Mr Abdulwahed Omar,  on Monday issued a New Year message, urging Nigerians to work toward enthroning good governance in the country.

Omar said the country needed rejuvenation and collective commitment to deepen democracy and enthrone good governance.

He said the collective will of struggle and patriotism of workers and other Nigerians would check the drift in the affairs of state in the interest of working families and the citizenry.

The president lamented that 2012 was characterised by incessant job losses, unemployment, insecurity and corruption.

The labour leader also recalled that the economy was characterised by a number of maladies, with dire consequences for workers and the Nigerian people. “The crisis of unemployment continues to be the greatest of these. Official statistics puts the unemployment rate at above 24 per cent. “As alarming as this would seem, it disguises the enormity of the unemployment problem given the huge pool of disguised unemployment and underemployment,’’ Omar said.

He said the incidence of unemployment among the youths was more alarming, as official figures indicated over 40 per cent of them as unemployed. “In reality about 60 per cent of youths remain unemployed. On average, graduates of the nation’s universities and polytechnics continue to remain unemployed four years after discharge from the mandatory NYSC scheme,’’ he said.

According to him, the underlying inflation in the economy has continued to erode the purchasing power of workers’ income, making the N18,000 Minimum Wage largely a poverty wage. “Aggregate inflation, which officially stands at 11.7 per cent in the third quarter of the year, might be misleading as the fuel price hike in January, the increase in electricity tariffs and the floods in the third quarter of the year have largely disempowered working families,’’ he said.

The labour leader said that as a result of these challenges, poverty remained endemic as increasing numbers of families and households were unable to meet their basic needs. Omar said to compound the situation, thousands of families displaced by the massive floods in various parts of the country now lived in refugee camps awaiting resettlement. He said the growth rate of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was an average of about 6.5 per cent based on data for the first three quarters of the year. The president said while this was lower than the corresponding rate for 2011, it was way above the global growth rates for comparable national economies.

The labour boss, however, expressed optimism that 2013 holds new hope and aspiration for the people. Omar said that the challenge should be to promote employment generating growth so as to break away from the malady of jobless growth, evolve a sustainable industrial policy as well as tackle high cost of governance and pervasive corruption. But he commended the positive developments to revive the rail transport sector following the resumption of rail services between Lagos and Kano.

He also flayed some states that breach the implementation of the National Minimum Wage, which was passed by the Legislature and signed into law by the President since March 2011.

The NLC president warned the affected state governments that they were in gross breach of a national law which they swore to uphold.