Emmanuel Ukudolo
March 09, 2016 – Nigeria is now set for a major fuel crisis that will worsen current economic crisis unless President Muhammadu Buhari as a matter of urgency steps in to resolve critical issues in attempt to unbundle the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation(NNPC).
Already the unions have shut down offices of the NNPC, nationwide and today prevented management staff of the agency from gaining access to their offices, a move which many see as a novelty in the history of the NNPC.
Sources in the NNPC told www.starconnectmedia.com that all offices of the agency were shut in Abuja, Lagos, Benin, Port Harcourt and other places all in protest against decisions taken by Minister of State for Petroleum and Group General Managing Director of the NNPC, Dr. Ibe Kachukwu to unbundle the agency into 7 units with each unit headed by a Chief Executive Officer, all in an effort to cut cost. Kachukwu initially said the NNPC would be unbundled into 30 agencies, before rounding it up to 7 on Tuesday.
We gathered that the grouse of the workers was the way the minister is going about the exercise without carrying management staff along.
“We should be informed about development first before others, but now we seeking information about where we work from outsiders’’, one of our sources said, and likened the situation to a married woman getting the decision her husband has made about the household from a third party.
Sources in the NNPC told our correspondent that the minister was advised to hold a meeting with staff to get their confidence by keeping them abreast of development before going to press, but that he ignored the advice after returning from a Presidential summon at the Aso Rock Villa and opted to brief the press without first meeting with staff who were very eager and already gathered to meet with him.
This situation, we gathered infuriated the union, who opted to shutdown operation until further notice to protest what the minister has done.
Already, the impact of the protest is being felt in Lagos where most petrol stations have simply locked up their gates for lack of products, while long queues are now visible in petrol stations that have the product.
Even the volume of NNPC trucks that frequent Lagos to load the product seems to be on the wane.
Babatumde Oke, spokesperson for National Union for Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN was not available for comment.
But a source in National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers(NUPENG) said Nigerians should prepare for the worse, stressing that most of the power stations in Ikeja have shut down for lack of gas, stressing that adding fuel scarcity with the precarious situation will obviously worsen the plight of Nigerians.
He said there will be no gas supply to power stations which could plunge the nation into total darkness.
