Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, is absent from this year’s Workers’ Day Celebration.
  
The celebration held at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena, Onikan, Lagos, also witnessed low turnout compared to previous years.
  
The 2026 International Workers’ Day (May Day) theme, as highlighted by the International Labour Organization (ILO), is “Ensuring a Healthy Psychosocial Working Environment”. This theme highlights the need to address rising workplace stress, burnout, and mental health issues while ensuring workers’ dignity.
  
The deputy governor, Dr Babafemi Hamzat, who represented the governor, cheered workers when he arrived at the arena at 11. a.m.
 
The Committee of GIG Workers’ Unions of Nigeria (COGWUJ) demanded proper recognition and improved welfare in Nigeria.
  
Gig Worker is a coalition of 13 Gig Worker unions, which is made up of the Nigerian Union of Good Delivery App Transporters (NUFDAPPT),
 
Nigerian Union of Digital Personal Service Employees (NUDPSE),
 
Nigerian Union of APP-Based Home Services Employees (NUAPHSE) and others.
  
“As we celebrate this year’s May Day, the fate of Gig workers is nothing to write home about. We need proper recognition as WORKERS under Nigerian Labour Law and by our big-tech s employers. We need the right to s social protection and a pension.
Are you interested in this noble struggle?”
  
MEANWHILE, Socialist Equality Part(SEP), in political solidarity with
the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), while extending solidarity with workers and youth in Nigeria, said that working people in Nigeria now stand at an important crossroads of history.
  
“In less than eight months, working-class people would be queuing up for elections in which they have no party of their own and would be left to choose between their oppressors.

In 2023, the mis-named Labour Party, largely run by right-wing party bureaucrats as a money-making “commercial vehicle” for rejects from the dominant pro-rich parties, the People’s Democratic Party and the All Progressives Congress, stood an out-and -out ruling class member and leading exponent of anti-poor neo-liberal economic ideas, Peter Obi as her Presidential candidate, alongside other right-wing Members of House of Representatives and Senate.

However, between June 10, 2023 and now, most of these right-wing Members of the House of Representatives and Senate have switched to either the All Progressives Congress or the People’s Democratic Party.
  
“Obi, himself, despite the widespread illusions he enjoyed from trade union bureaucrats and some layers of working class and youth, has since moved to the African Democratic Congress (ADC), the latest gang up of pro-rich and anti-poor politicians, such as David Mark, Rauf Aregbesola, who ruined the welfare of workers in Osun State when he served as Governor, among others, now posing as
opposition to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
   
The truth is that the APC, ADC, PDP and their anti-poor ilk are the same. The Labour Party, unfortunately, does not have a clearly different fundamental character and programme from them. Working people need a party of their own, founded on a programme of socialism and equality.

The formation of the Socialist Equality Party is of a principled, not of a conjectural, emotional and pragmatic character. It is based on an analysis of the crisis of Nigeria and Africa within the crisis of world capitalism and an assimilation of the strategic revolutionary experiences of the working class and the international socialist movement.

We are building an international mass movement of workers and youth to defeat global capitalism. It is on this basis that we are in political solidarity with ICI, an international party of socialism resting on the ideas of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite the fact that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) listed the SEP as 177 Political Associations seeking registration as a political party in early 2026, it refused, neglected and failed to register the SEP as a Political Party. We are currently waging a legal and political campaign for our registration.