P.M. News (Lagos)
7 July 2004
Oil sector workers have begun wearing red or black clothes to the office in protest against the federal government's failure to repair the country's refineries.
The workers, under the aegis of NUPENG and PENGASSAN, decided on this mode of protest on June 24 at an emergency National Executive Council meeting in Benin.
The NUPENG President, Mr. Peter Akpatason, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos yesterday that the protest would be phased.
"We are starting this symbolic protest of putting on red or black to the office to give the government signals that we are fed up with what is going on in the oil industry," he said.
Akpatason said the symbolic protest would last for a week and later assume another dimension, if nothing was done at the end of the week.
"In the past we were easily predictable; they knew that if we were not happy with a situation we would embark on a full-blown strike but this time around, we have to change our strategy," he said.
On oil marketers' incessant increases in the prices of petroleum products, Akpatason said it was a shame that they could raise prices at will though there was an agency established to control them.
"If these marketers have the powers to increase these prices in a semi-deregulated environment, then they are telling us that the PPPRA and the NNPC are irrelevant; that our judiciary is in a mess.
"The court orders were very clear on the matter; I expected the Inspector-General of Police would have arrested and tried these marketers by now without labour prompting it again," he said.
Akpatason described government's silence on the matter as an aberration.
"I call it an aberration because it is not proper for the marketers to act on their own when there is an agency that is supposed to regulate them," he stressed.
The NUPENG President, however, disclosed that the Ministry of Labour had invited the union to a meeting today in Abuja.
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