BREAKING NEWS, Oil & Gas
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NIGERIAN oil workers have vowed to continue their strike embarked upon Wednesday, March 8, until they receive clarifications regarding the unbundling of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC.
Ibe Kachikwu, minister of state for Petroleum Resources, had on Tuesday, March 7, announced that President Muhammadu Buhari had approved the immediate restructuring of the NNPC into seven independent operational divisions.
According to the arrangement, the corporation now has five business-focussed divisions, namely Upstream, Downstream, Gas & Power Marketing, Refineries and Ventures, in addition to two service-oriented divisions, consisting Corporate Planning & Services and Finance and Accounts.
Each of the divisions is to be headed by a chief executive officer who would report to the group managing director.
But the workers expressed reservations about the whole exercise and criticised Kachikwu, accusing him of a secret agenda by taking a “unilateral and arbitrary decision” without consulting with all interested parties.
In any case, the announcement has prompted the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, and the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, NUPENG, to embark on mobilisation of members to reject the policy.
Although the protest recorded partial compliance on Tuesday, March 7, it was total shutdown at all the NNPC offices and locations across the country at the resumption of work on Wednesday, March 8, as the workers’ unions halted all normal operations.
Lumumba Okugbawa, acting general secretary of the PENGASSAN, said in an interview on Wednesday, March that the workers would not call off the protest until the minister holds a formal discussion with them on the new restructuring.
Okumagba accused the minister of being unilateral in his decision without recourse to the unions.
He argued that the minister could not restructure the NNPC when he was yet to take necessary legal steps to facilitate the process.
“If the minister says he wants to restructure NNPC, has he repealed or amended the NNPC Act of 1977? What happens to the PIB (Petroleum Industry Bill), which has NNPC restructuring as one of its key objectives? Has it been jettisoned, or is there a new PIB? These are fundamental questions that the minister has to answer,” he said.
Further, he alleged that the minister had gone ahead with the restructuring of NNPC without consultation and every attempt to get him to discuss the matter had been rebuffed.
In any case, Kachikwu had said that the oil workers had nothing to fear because the exercise would have a “zero sum in terms of job loss.”
Besides, the minister said he had no mandate 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.”
— Mar 9, 2016 @ 16:00 GMT
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