FG must negotiate with labour — NUPENG President

May 15, 2016

President of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, Dr. Igwe Achese, in this interview with MUDIAGA AFFE, speaks on the recent fuel price hike

Was the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers part of the meeting with the Federal Government and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to increase fuel price?

We were not part of the decision making process but we were invited by the Vice-President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, to attend a meeting without knowing the purpose why we were invited. When we got to the venue, there was a presentation by the Ministry of Petroleum and reactions. That was all. When we got there, we met the leadership of the Nigeria Governors Forum, the leaderships of the Senate and House of Representatives were also there. The Vice-President simply told us that he invited us to listen to the presentation by the NNPC and after that, arguments were made from the governors and parliamentarians. The arguments from their end were more of warning the Ministry of Petroleum to stop tampering with the excess crude oil funds so that they could generate revenue and run their governments in the various states. At the end, they gave us, the labour leaders who were present, the opportunity to speak. In my response as the forum chairman of NUPENG/PENGASSAN, I told them clearly that we had heard and that we felt the pains of Nigerians and understood the challenges in the oil and gas sector because they affected us too. We told them that we would take the issues back to our organs. That was what happened at the meeting. The leadership of the TUC and representative of a faction of the Nigerian Labour Congress also said the same thing. We thereafter left the meeting after exchanging pleasantries and a photo session only to arrive in Calabar for the National Executive Council meeting on Thursday and got the information that the price meeting had been done and the new price of PMS had been agreed upon. However, for us at NUPENG and PENGASSAN, we did not see it as a surprise. We also did not see it as something that was new. It is an issue that we have been discussing in the past eight years that the sector must be deregulated. We have said that the market economy of the downstream sector must be open and that government should stop paying subsidies to a few individuals. The things we mentioned as palliatives that should be done are to make the refineries work and also secure the pipelines.

Will you say the Federal Government and the NNPC are sincere or reasonable with the new price regime?

I will not want to talk about pricing because it is a regulatory issue. You can sit down one day and chose to regulate the price if it is on the high side. But as it is, compared to the international environment, I think we are the lowest paying country in terms of the PMS pricing. But let us not look at that as the basis for this issue. That is why we do not want to say whether the price is fair or not. For us in NUPENG and PENGASSAN, the basic thing here now is that the market is now deregulated. A few Nigerians cannot be taking trillions of naira meant for the nation. We have to return this nation into a viable economy. This is where we have based our argument. For us, within this short period of subsidy payment, the negligence and abandonment of the refineries had caused a lot of Nigerians to lose their jobs in the oil and gas sector.

For us, it is full deregulation that we have been yearning for and we are now saying that the revenue that will accrue must go back to create the expected impact in the oil and gas sector and other key aspects of the nation’s economy.

It is a common knowledge that when this kind of new price regime is pronounced, it does not come down to its original price. Will your union agitate for return to its original price if there are protests over the matter?

I do not think that Nigerians would want to go and protest on the road. I want to state something clearly, in 2012, I was the National Trustee of the NLC and we knew what really played out. Even when the labour force was on strike, NUPENG and PENGASSAN were not on strike but we were there watching out on issues and dialoguing with the people. Filling stations were open at that time in order not to create huge sufferings for Nigerians and I kept asking myself why would Nigerians keep lying to Nigerians? What has brought us to where we are is because government after government, politicians after politicians, keep lying to the masses. Unfortunately, the poor masses do not want to know the truth; all they believe is that they want to see the product. You will agree with me that during the period of the recent issue of scarcity, people bought the product for as high as N500 per litre. You can imagine the pains. For us as a union, we did make a promise that we would continue to haulage petroleum products to the nooks and crannies of Nigeria provided the products were available for us to haulage. We were able to sustain that. For those who felt products were not available, we took products to filling stations even though it was expensive. But here we are, our borders are porous; our Customs are not doing what they are supposed to do in securing the borders. The Immigration authority needs to be restructured. Otherwise we cannot be here hearing that from Sokoto to Adamawa people are moving hundreds of trucks loaded with products to Chad. What happens to our borders? And then because the product prices are higher there, everybody is smuggling it out to where they will make three times the profit. When these products go to the northern part of the country, hundreds of trucks are diverted and then you now begin to hear that the North has no petroleum product. We must help ourselves. The state governors must wake up from their slumber by securing their borders as the chief security officers of the states because it is their responsibility. For me, we expect to see that governors are working very hard to close their borders. Unfortunately, the security agencies know what is happening. Trucks are not invisible items; they are so visible that you see them moving past you. We cannot say the Police, Department of State Services, Joint Task Forces, National Security and Civil Defence Corps and Customs, among other agencies are not aware of these movements. But the challenge is, who will take the right decision to move the nation forward? But I think we are on track right now.

How do you think this will affect the standard and quality of lives of the people in terms of cost of living?

Definitely the cost of living is going to be high. It is going to be like the period when the Global System for Mobile Communication was introduced, the call tariffs were high and Nigerians were afraid that they could not afford it, but after a period when competition entered the market, the tariffs dropped and the people started understanding that if A could drop its price, B too should be able to. Thus, we are trying to open up this market which we yearned for in a long while. We are of the view that the NNPC should also compete in the global environment as a world-class organisation. As a world-class organisation you cannot begin to put price tag on products – let the environment determine the price. But the take off point is very key and fundamental. At a point we would now begin to consider what is reasonable and what is not reasonable in terms of pricing.

Some people still feel that the oil industry is bedevilled by the cabal that the last administration complained of. Is there really a cabal?

Of course there is a cabal. I want to say that the oil sector in Nigeria has an institution that works like a chain or cycle of people who do the business and it is interwoven. But with the current unbundling of the sector, you will now discover that the market will be open. The issue of lobbying to get product allocation from NNPC will not be there again. The issue of entering into agreement for the use of facilities will not arise again. Everybody will now want to be a player and the NNPC, for instance, will now select where to take its products to. It is going to be a competitive environment. But I have said that what labour must begin to focus on is to talk about the issues of a living minimum wage which we have proposed to the Federal Government that the least worker in the country should be paid N90,000. We are not unmindful of the fact that a faction of the NLC has proposed N56,000. Thus, you will begin to see why we used the range of N90,000. At the current range of petroleum product pricing, N56,000 cannot sustain a worker. Let us begin to look at N90,000 and see where we get to. Our position is that government should quickly call labour organisations for negotiations. These are part of the palliatives that can also move us in line with the change that the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration is talking of.

Do you think the government is doing enough to address this issue of militants that are destroying pipelines and crude oil installations?

The government is not doing enough I must be frank to you. We came up with an idea in 2003 when these militants were destroying facilities across the Niger-Delta region during the government of ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo. We did a proposal to the then president that he should apply truce to see if we could curtail the matter, but he disagreed. He called them and allegedly gave them money and told them to stay off the creeks, but the boys went back and started bombing again. But when Obasanjo left, late President Umaru Yar’Adua came and revisited the proposals and he developed the same proposal we presented to Obasanjo and at the end of the day he (Yar’Adua) bought the idea and applied it. That was how truce came through the amnesty programme. Today, the amnesty programme is being withdrawn and most of these young men are not being paid and a lot of vandalism is taking place in the creeks and waterways. But the simple question you will ask is whether these people are invisible or not. Is a vessel that will carry 15, 000 metric tons of stolen crude oil invisible? The answer is no. For me, government is not doing the needful in order to secure our facilities as expected. They need to do more to secure these facilities otherwise we will continue to have this challenges of sustainability of our oil and gas environment. Like you heard of the illegal bunkering going on in the creeks and I suggested to the Minister of State for Petroleum that we should think of getting those guys who are locally refining to know how they are developing their technologies. Instead of stealing the crude oil to refine, we should think of gathering them somewhere and borrowing the technology and developing it. By so doing, you have created jobs for this set of persons. The reason these people are carrying out the destructive actions is largely as a result of unemployment. These people are also afraid that the environment itself is not secured for them, but if you create a secure environment they will accept. I must say that the government must approach this issue with all the best diplomacy to resolve them instead of killing Nigerians like animals.

What is the way forward?

The government should quickly move into action by inviting Labour for discussions on the minimum wage. The current minimum wage of N18, 000 cannot sustain this price increase. Again, the government should make sure that the resources accruable as a result of the removal of subsidy are ploughed back into the nation’s economy. They should also put in place infrastructure that will create jobs to get the economy back on track.