Organised Labour’s reaction to the fuel scarcity doesn’t sound good

Organised labour on Friday, threatened to embark on industrial action if the lingering fuel crisis extends to next year.

  • A press statement issued on Friday said it also commended the President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, for directing the Senate Committee on Petroleum Resources (Downstream) to cut short its recess to resolve the fuel crisis.
  • A NEC member of Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Issa Aremu, observed in Kaduna on Thursday, that the bane of the downstream sector was “abysmal absence of accountability, transparency and openness in the administration of the petroleum resources of Nigeria.”
  • He said only the parliament can make a difference in exposing the rot in the sector.
  • He adds that legislators cannot be in recess when those who elected them are groaning in filling stations.
  • The labour leader urged the legislators to demand for “consequences for the actions and inactions of petroleum sector operators in the product shortage scam”.

There is a deep-seated conflict of interest in the downstream sector; regulators are operators, regulators are importers, importers are products hoarders, regulators are also saboteurs, definitely we have a sector capture in our hands, Nigeria and Nigerians need liberation,” he remarked.

  • The labour leader who disclosed that “NNPC is the only public corporation that annually awards its directors long service incentives for no service at all, for non-functioning refineries” called for a “total ban on importation to reinvent domestic refineries and beneficiation to crude oil”.
  • Aremu, however, said if the intervention of the legislature fails to put an end to product shortages, labour may compel all Nigerians to return to street protests like in the past “to force the ruling elite to face up to the challenges of governance of the most populous promising but badly governed country in the continent.

The one-month long fuel shortage has further worsened poverty, put productivity on hold. We dare not enter 2018, new year with this recurring old mess,” he noted.

Strike action?

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Petroleum Resources (Downstream), Kabiru Marafa, had disclosed that following the directive of the Senate President, the committee has summoned the Minister of State for Petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu, the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Maikanti Baru and other relevant stakeholders in the petroleum sector to a meeting on Thursday January 4, 2018.

Means that Organised Labour and indeed all Nigerians will have to wait for the outcome of the meeting.

Any strike action before then ‘might not’ produce positive results.

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