Nigeria: Costs and Questions of Today's Strike

28 September 2020
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If the joint Nigeria Labour Congress [NLC] and Trade Union Congress [TUC] general strike and protest go ahead this morning, as seems very likely, who will sit down and calculate its cost to the public treasury, to businesses large and small, to families and to workers themselves? I have an idea: it depends on how long the strike lasts, how total it is, and how disruptive the protests are to economic and social life of Nigerians.

Two years ago when we had four days of public holiday within one week, some economists calculated that the national economy lost N1.7 trillion due to lack of work. Trust Nigerians; one local wag quickly responded, "If we lost N1.7 trillion this week because there is no work, where is the N1.7 trillion of last week when there was work?" Some Nigerians are bound to say that they did not enjoy any benefits when there was no strike, so why should strike make things worse?

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