In today’s Nigeria, what kind of qualifications do you look out for in an NLC president?
It is a very interesting question and very dangerous for me to answer. But, to be honest, he needs substantial theoretical foundation to be able to deal with the complex issues involved in labour. At a certain level of training, you have the capacity to benefit from self-effort and you need to lead them with understanding. With economic journals, you can at least have some understanding even without being an economist. You can also be consumed by your emotions as to become incapable of mobilising positive arguments. But even more importantly is that you must have a willpower to say no to a president when it is in the interest of the people. You need both knowledge and courage. I used to tell my colleagues: if I must die, let me be killed by the bullet of the government than to be killed by my people because I am a traitor. If you die as a traitor, even your children will die as such. You must be courageous. If you are courageous and humble, it can make up for a deficit. You have the elected and appointed in NLC. The positions of the appointed are advertised and are employed based on their qualifications and competence. There are others like the secretary and a professor who heads our economic and research department. You could draw on those experts daily if you are humble to recognise your limitation. There are decisions I cannot pronounce on no matter my personal conviction until the body has met. Sometimes I take decisions against my wish.

A few weeks ago, the President said he was never a party to the third-term agenda. He claimed its defeat was victory for democracy. Do you really believe the President?
I think everybody that commented on third term, at least most press people, called it the alleged third term. Why the alleged? Because  you couldn’t pin the President to any place where he had said he was going for it or encouraging it.  There was also the general feeling that if he was not in support of it, he was not discouraging it. But I think what is important is the final conclusion. What does the defeat represent? I also believe that it was, perhaps, one of the most profound tests of the current democratic dispensation. If there is something that many people believe the President wanted, many people also believe that a lot of powerful people wanted it. And yet, it was defeated. I think, for once, we saw the import of separation of powers and the fact that the system is no longer at the mercy of any particular person no matter how powerful. I just imagine that if we were in a military dispensation and the President desires to stay longer, it is just a matter of signing a decree and it is done.

What is wrong with the Nigerian pension scheme?
There is nothing wrong with the scheme. The problem was that government did not fund it. Every year government hoped that they would appropriate it to normal annual budget. But, as more and more people got into pension and the level improved, it looked as if the scheme was not working. Our argument is that, all you needed to do is to fund it every month, as you pay salary, take out a percentage of the salary and put it in pension account and get a board of trustees to manage it. That’s what happens in some countries. But government came up with this pension scheme, which is basically a saving scheme. They now bring in the idea that private people should manage the fund. Our argument was that, if you bring in private people and they go under, who bears the responsibility? Under the law, the responsibility is that of the worker. If that is the case, then we needed to avoid that approach. But if we cannot avoid it, then we argued that the kind of companies that will manage it should be companies that are very big, which can weather the storm and should have a paid-up capital of no less than N2 billion. By the time it went through the House of Representatives and the Senate, they saw an opportunity to use the workers' money and make huge interest. They then decided to water down the requirement and reduce it from N2 billion to N150 million. After that, some senators ganged up to form a pension fund administrator, PFA. So, the result is that the security of workers’ fund is the big question. Our fear is that you cannot make a law and position yourself to benefit from it. You have N150 million share capital and then you are managing N20 billion; in the end, your total liability is N150 million if the company goes under.