BREAKING NEWS, Oil & Gas
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AGGRIEVED oil workers have shut down all offices and facilities of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, in protest of splitting of the state oil company by the federal government.
There are fears of fresh fuel scarcity as a result of the protest.
The government had on Tuesday, March 1, announced the unbundling of the NNPC into seven independent units.
Two major unions in the oil and gas sector had on Friday, March 4, rejected the planned splitting. Emmanuel Ojugbana, spokesperson for the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, said that the union was not carried along in the decision to split the company.
In the same vein, Igwe Achese, president of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, NUPENG, said the union would not accept the decision without knowing how the manpower that would operate in the 30 companies would be managed.
Announcing the unbundling on Tuesday, Ibe Kachikwu, minister of state for Petroleum Resources, said that the oil company had been split into seven independent units, namely Upstream, Downstream, Gas & Power Marketing, Refineries and Ventures, Corporate Planning & Services and Finance and Accounts.
Kachikwu also named heads of each of the units who would be called chief executive officers. Hence, Bello Rabiu was named CEO for Upstream; Henry Ikem-Onih, Downstream; Saudu Mohammed, Gas & Power Marketing; Anibor Kragha, Refineries and Babatunde Adeniran, Ventures.
He named Isiaka Abdulrazaq chief executive officer in charge of Finance & Services while Isa Inuwa is the executive head, Corporate Services.
The minister had assured workers that there would be no job loss. “The principle of restructuring approved by the president is that nobody losses work,” he said. “I do not have the mandate of the president to create a job loss situation, but to try to ensure that everyone gets busy, unless for reasons of bad staff performance and fraud. There is no mass attempt to let people go.”
He said the decision to embark on the restructuring followed an analysis of the number of staff, which revealed that the corporation was over-staffed, and therefore the need for them to be meaningfully engaged.
The only way to realise that objective, the minister said, was to create jobs for everybody in the system to him enable have something doing.
“We don’t want people coming to the office to read newspapers. We want everybody to get busy and earn money. If we do that we will realise that there would be adequate staff to man the different units, and that we don’t really have the problem of over-staff after all,” Kachikwu said.
— Mar 14, 2016 @ 01:00 GMT
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