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21 May, 2007
A peaceful protest by 1,000 members of ICEM’s two Nigerian oil workers’ affiliates – PENGASSAN and NUPENG – was met by 150 riot police last week, 17 May. The protest occurred at the national headquarters of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC) in Abuja, while privatisation bidding on two NNPC refineries was going on elsewhere in the Nigerian capital city.
Trade unionists blocked traffic in and out of the NNPC building for the better part of the day.
The unions were not objecting to the privatisation of refineries in Port Harcourt and Kaduna, but rather to NNPC ignoring a memorandum it signed with the two unions only last week allowing them to carry out independent audits of the refineries before the sales occur.
The concerns of the two unions centre on the loss of 4,000 jobs, with no plan on how to meet the pension commitments of sacked workers. “We are saying, yes you can privatise, but let us sit down and thrash out the labour issues,” Williams Ibiba Inko, NNPC’s union chair and leader of the protest, told This Day newspaper.
“This process is going to kill our pension. Most of the concerned staff has passed the employment age bracket,” said Inko, adding the memorandum calling for due process by workers’ representatives was signed by the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE). “We believe (the process) is being hijacked by the BPE to suit its purposes.”
As part of last Thursday’s protest, PENGASSAN and NUPENG also lodged stop-work actions at NNPC operations in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Mosimi, and Kaduna. All of the protests remained peaceful and no arrests were made.
Bidding on the federal government’s 51% stake in the Port Harcourt refinery, Nigeria’s largest with a capacity of 210,000 barrels-per-day, was awarded to a Nigerian consortium called Bluestar Oil, for US$561 million. Bluestar is composed of the Dangote Group, Nigeria’s biggest cement producer, Zenon Oil, Transcorp, and the Rivers State government. Sale of 51% of the Kaduna refinery, however, was not completed after the lone bidder, China National Petroleum Corp., failed to meet the reserve price. CNPC’s bid was US$102 million.
The BPE last week conducted privatisation bids on 18 public entities, including electric power, cement, and palm oil companies, as well as liquid petroleum gas depots, and coal and other mining blocks.
Meanwhile, PENGASSAN President Peter Esele is pleading with militants in the Niger Delta to stop committing violent acts in the region, since such acts hamper legitimate development. Esele spoke out after three oil pipelines of Italian company Eni were blown up during the week of 7 May in Bayelsa state.
“The effect of blowing up pipelines is grave,” he said in an interview with This Day. “It is very dangerous to the environment because it pollutes and it increases the costs” for development. PENGASSAN and NUPENG call for a truce in the unstable Delta region, so that development and investment can serve as a means to reduce poverty.