Nigeria Labour Congress President Joe Ajaero has declared that organized labour would intensify its resistance to injustice, expand organizing into informal and platform economy workers, and challenge every violation of international labour standards after receiving the 2026 Arthur Svensson International Award in Oslo, describing the recognition not as a personal trophy but as a weapon he intended to use in deepening the fight for Nigeria’s working people.
Ajaero’s acceptance speech was a searing account of the conditions facing Nigerian workers and a personal testament to the cost of union leadership in Nigeria’s current political climate, where he said he had been abducted, detained, and brutalized by agents of government for the sole offence of insisting on the implementation of agreements made to protect workers’ rights.
He described himself not as an individual standing before the audience but as a symbol of millions of Nigerian workers who woke every morning to the smell of tear gas, the sound of sirens, and the indifference of a state that offered them no protection while extracting their labour, going to work hungry and returning home more impoverished than when they left.
His message to the ruling class was unsparing. Freedom, he said, was never given by those in power but taken by those willing to bear the cost of claiming it, and the NLC would not rest until it had organized among workers across every sector of the economy, resisted every anti-labour piece of legislation, and exposed every instance of government non-compliance with ILO conventions.
He closed with an unconditional pledge that history was on the side of workers and that the congress would win the battles ahead, drawing on the legacy of Arthur Svensson, the Norwegian labour militant in whose memory the award was established, who had understood that trade union rights were inseparable from human rights and that international solidarity was the only effective shield against the global power of unaccountable capital.
