President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Joe Ajaero, has declared that arrests, intimidation and harassment would not deter the labour movement from its struggle for workers’ rights and economic justice in Nigeria.
Ajaero spoke yesterday in Oslo, Norway, while receiving the 2026 Arthur Svensson International Award, one of the world’s most prestigious labour movement honours.
He accused the Nigerian government of deploying fear, arrests, surveillance and other forms of intimidation to suppress organised labour and silence workers demanding better living conditions.
Ajaero also recounted what he described as years of persecution, including detention, repeated interrogations, surveillance, allegations of cybercrime and treason, as well as attacks on labour activities, insisting that the labour movement would continue its struggle until Nigerian workers were free from oppression and poverty.
He said: “I stand before you today not as a man, but as a symbol, a true symbol of millions of Nigerian workers who wake up every morning not just to the smell of tear gas, the sound of sirens, and the cold silence of a state that preys on its own people but who go to work hungry and come back hungrier, more emasculated than before they left for work.
“I receive this Arthur Svensson International Award not as a trophy, not as a ribbon to hang on a lapel. Not at all. I receive it as a weapon, a weapon forged in the memory of a great Norwegian militant, Arthur Svensson, a man who knew that trade union rights are human rights, and that international solidarity is the only shield against the whip of rampaging multinational capital.
“Let me sound it clearly and let it echo in every corner of this hall and across the boardrooms of the world: the ruling class does not give you freedom. You take it, bloody-knuckled, with your lungs full of tear gas and your heart full of rage.
“In Nigeria today, to defend a living wage is to become a target of the state. To demand that a worker should not die of hunger in a country swimming in crude oil is to be labelled an enemy of the state.
“I and my comrades have been arrested like common criminals. I have been dragged before state agencies for questioning on trumped-up charges; charges of terrorism financing, cybercrime, criminal conspiracy, subversion and treasonable felony. Me, a trade unionist, financing terror? No. The only terror we finance is the terror that grips the heart of every exploiter when workers unite.
