'President's proposed $30b loan is dangerous' - Labour leader

dimeji akinloye

December 3, 2016 11:20 AM

The Labour leader urged the President to take the advice of late Fidel Castro on the danger of indiscriminate foreign loans.

Issa Aremu

The World Vice President of Global Industrial Union,

Issa, who is also the former National Vice President of the Nigerian Labour Congress, said the President should heed the advice of late Cuban president, Fidel Castro on the danger of indiscriminate foreign loans and credits.

Aremu gave the advice in Ilorin, the Kwara state capital during a press conference on the death of the former Cuban leader and the need for Nigerian leaders to emulate his exemplary leadership style.

He said: "His death is a shock coming just few months after the global progressive forces including the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Industrial Global Union marked his 90th birthday.

"Fidel Castro had long in his decade-long battle of developmental ideas made a case for self-reliance. He had compared the debt burden to that torment in Greek mythology in which a man is doomed to push a large stone uphill for all eternity, a stone that always rolls down again before reaching the top. Debtors, he maintained ‘don’t need new loans’.

"Fidel has since been proven right that most debts were unpayable and uncollectible.

"We must credit the series of debt cancellation of the two decades to audacious alternative views of Fidel Castro, not the astuteness of "negotiators" and so called altruism of creditors.

"President Buhari should emulate the selfless leadership of Fidel Castro because no country can develop through loans and credit. He must work his talk, if he is truly paying tribute to Castro and must withdraw his application for loan to the National Assembly.

"Buhari should not take us back to indebtedness and should be selfless. Buhari and his cabinet members should set example by using the state house hospital."

Aremu also criticised what he called the western media's posthumous distortion of history which presented Castro as a rebel and strong man who with iron hands muzzled the people of Cuban Island.

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He urged African leaders to ‎know their history and remember Castro’s contribution to Africa.

‎He also called on the Federal to State governments to emulate Castro’s selfless nature, especially the two-termed state governors, to stop collecting outrageous pensions allocated to them by the state house of assembly.

"The outrageous pension given to two-term governors call for concern because they are under-developing states," the labour leader said.

"Comrade Adams Oshiomole as a comrade governor, with his remarkable achievements having beaten other governors, should not join them because the money is unnecessary.

"If he does so, it will amount to the saying that ‘if you can’t beat them, you join them’ but he has beaten them with his achievements as governor.

"State houses of assembly should make laws for public good not for executive benefit‎. The danger of the pension law is that it is now getting addictive and spreading like wild fire to other states of the federation and to me it is pure legal robbing."

Fidel Castro is the iconic Cuban revolutionary leader who presided over the Republic of Cuba as Prime Minister from 1959 to 1976 and then as President from 1976 to 2008.

He died on Friday, November 25, 2016 in Havana, Cuba.

dimeji akinloye