Nigerian labour unions called for a two-day strike to protest against vote-rigging in last month’s elections, an umbrella body of unions said on Sunday.
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) did not give a date for the strike but said it would be before May 29, when outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo is due to hand over to president-elect Umaru Yar’Adua.
“The elections were fundamentally flawed and therefore unacceptable,” the NLC said in a statement after a meeting of its main leaders that lasted late into Saturday night.
“There will … be a two-day sit-at-home mass protest before May 29,” it said.
The polls were supposed to deliver the first democratic transition from one civilian president to another in Africa’s most populous country but international observers said electoral fraud was so widespread that the results were “not credible”.
The ruling People’s Democratic Party won a landslide victory, according to official results that the opposition rejected.
The NLC had already called for mass protests on May 1 and thousands of demonstrators gathered in the main cities, but the rallies were tightly controlled by security forces who arrested and tear-gassed scores of activists. Since then, popular protests have been muted.
Opposition parties and some civil society groups are calling for the elections to be re-run but there is no constitutional avenue for that to happen. It is unclear what the NLC hopes to achieve with the planned strike.
The NLC includes the blue-collar oil workers’ union and union leaders said they would co-ordinate the planned strike with another umbrella body, the Trade Union Congress, which includes the white-collar oil union.
However, previous strikes by the two oil unions have had limited impact on Nigeria’s crude exports, which are the eighth biggest in the world.