It was with understandable relief that the various transport unions and officials of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security emerged from negotiations over the weekend to announce the cancellation of a scheduled nation-wide strike action which would have begun last Monday.

The mere thought of the wide-ranging effects such a strike would have taken on the national economy and on the daily life of ordinary citizens sends shivering thoughts in many minds. The strike action was definitely going to inflict a deadly blow on the economy by grounding many trucks transporting goods from factories to sales points and other supplies to wherever there was need while travelling between towns and commuting within the various cities was going to be seriously hampered.

These strikes are coming up rather too often and we cannot continue to rely on last-minute face-saving meetings as a permanent solution. The demands of the aggrieved transporters are well known and have come up each time they have met with the public authorities. What is however not known is the fact that the same issues repeatedly come up as if they have never been addressed. Apart from better emoluments, the transporters have been asking for such facilities as registration with the National Social Insurance Fund just as is the case with other citizens.

They also complain about fuel prices and the non-application of the accompanying measures following the recent fuel price hikes. At face level, these are concerns which can be easily addressed and solutions easily arrived at, especially as many of them were prescribed by the President of the Republic in his desire to cushion the effects of the recent fuel price increase. Why then have the measures not been implemented? Could it be simply due to government red tape or the scarcity of means? Assuming it was the latter. In that case, a careful explanation of the situation was necessary and such an explanation could only be well understood within the framework of dialogue as was the case over the weekend.

The results of the weekend come together are sufficiently telling of the necessity for government to be in a proactive posture by pre-empting situations such as could have been caused by the projected strike. Very often, government has good intentions, but the difficulty in communication such leads to misunderstandings, pushing stakeholders such as transporters, in this particular case, to take to the streets. As the aggrieved transporters said, they have often been in the posture to discuss, but often find no one to talk with on the government side.

The success of the weekend meeting ought to incite government to make these dialogue sessions a permanent strategy in its interaction with its social partners because quite often, it has arguments that are convincing but, either in its arrogance or from its paternalistic stance, it doesn’t act early enough to avert situations that lead to a strike with its attendant denying effects.  

It is only in this kind of atmosphere, void of any suspicion, that the shared desire for prosperity on the government and transport sector side can effectively be attained. This is a successful experiment which should be used in other areas of conflict between government and its partners, lest the march to economic emergence which is the greatest ambition of the present government should be gravely compromised.