Recall that President Tinubu wrote in a letter to the National Assembly last week that a loan in the amount of $800 million be approved so that N8,000 would be disbursed to each of 12 million households to lessen the impact of the removal of the fuel subsidy.

The NLC claimed that the Federal Government was acting in a manner that can only be regarded as plundering the people of Nigeria to pay and feed the rich in a statement released on Tuessay by its president, Joe Ajaero.

The labour union said rather than reciprocate the goodwill of Nigerian workers, the Federal Government had “insisted on threading the path of dictatorship”.

The statement reads: “The proposal to pay N8,000 to each of the so-called 12 million poorest Nigerian households for a period of six months insults our collective intelligence and makes a mockery of our patience and abiding faith in social dialogue which the government may have alluded to albeit pretentiously.

“There is a committee in place between government and labour to work out the modalities. The government cannot set up the committee and go back to do another thing. This is unacceptable.

“If the government does not want to stop these fortuitous actions that it is pursuing in the name of palliatives, we will be forced to constructively review our engagement with the government on this vexatious issue and take matters into our own hands.”

The NLC added that the proposal to pay National Assembly members the sum of N70bn and the judiciary N36bn is insensitive, reckless and brazen diversion of the country’s resources into the pockets of public officers.

It added: “What this means all this while is that the government is seeking ways of robbing the very poor Nigerians so that the rich can become richer.

“There is no other way to explain the proposal to pay a misery sum of N8,000 Naira to each of the mysterious poorest 12 million Households for six months which amounts to N48,000 and pays just 469 National Legislators N70b or about N149m each while the Judiciary that has about 72 Appeal Court Judges, 33 National Industrial Court Judges, 75 Federal High Court Judges and 21 Supreme Court Judges and a total of about 201 Judges receive a total of N35b or N174m each.

“If these other two arms are projected to receive this, what members of the Executive Council will receive is better left to the imagination of Nigerians perhaps, the balance of N150b will go to them.”