BY: HighCelebritySquard
The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, yesterday threatened to shut down the economy without giving notice to the government, if the petrol pump price was increased again.
It also raised alarm over the alleged hijack of the duties of the Ministry of Labour and Employment by the Inspector-General of Police, IGP, and the Federal Ministry of Justice.
But the Presidency in a swift reaction, said President Bola Tinubu is concerned about economic hardship in the country and is working hard to ameliorate the situation.
This is even as oil marketers yesterday in Abuja, urged the Federal Government to act urgently to halt the consistent slide in the value of the naira against the dollar, saying the development had significantly impacted the pump price of petrol.
NLC President, Mr Joe Ajaero, issued the threat while responding to the advice of the Director, Trade Union Services, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Emmanuel Igbinosun, that Labour should explore due process in its agitations before embarking on strike.
Igbinosun gave the advice in his remarks at the on-going African Trade Union Alliance meeting holding in Abuja.
Ajaero warns FG on petrol price
Ajaero warned that Nigerians had suffered enough from the policies of government and will not take kindly any increase in petroleum pump price that would worsen the situation.
He said: “I commend the Director of Trade Union Services for his labour-friendly disposition and for finding out time to be here. We need to commend you. But I was feeling uncomfortable when you had legions of advice to the Labour movement. In actual fact, the centrality of your office is to advise government on some of these issues.
“Maybe I will advise that we engage you as adviser of labour, adviser of trade union services, since you appear to be closer to us than the Nigerian state who you are employed to serve, that we should concern ourselves with issues of wages, issues of employment relations but you didn’t say anything about those issues that depreciate our wage, those policies of government that reduce our wages to nothing.
“For you, those are exclusive preserve of the Nigerian state to take decisions probably to increase pump price of petroleum product and our wages will be next to nothing. You didn’t speak on it and maybe we should concern ourselves with those issues.
“But I want to plead with you that those bad economic policies by the state that make our wages next to nothing should be checked. If you check those policies that lead to inflation and the devaluation of the currency, even where we are, we will be comfortable.
“If naira is at par with dollar today, we will ask you to leave the minimum wage at N30,000, it will make sense. If inflation is checked to zero, we will ask you to leave it where we are but if inflation is flying, if even by the admittance of the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics, we have over 130 million Nigerians that are multi-dimensionally poor. I think you should address those issues.
If we go for even wage increase tomorrow, the inflation that will come up will destroy it.
“As we are here now, they are contemplating increasing the pump price of petrol and the Ministry of Labour for sometime now, will only go to Ministry of Justice to come up with so-called injunction to hold the hands of Labour not to respond.
Tinubu working hard to relieve situation — Presidency
Reacting to NLC’s threat, the Presidency said President Tinubu was working hard to ameliorate the hardship in the country.
The Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, while responding to the threat said: “There is no monopoly on the deep empathy that we feel as fellow Nigerians concerning the pain and economic hardship currently befalling Nigerian families across the country.
‘’The labour union absolutely does represent the interests of Nigerian workers and our role as a government and particularly is to ensure that every government action was aimed at the most urgent and the most efficient amelioration of those difficult conditions facing our people.
“With respect to energy cost and prices, let us be very clear that the deregulation of the market means that market conditions that are decided outside of the shores of any one country will determine the price of these commodities.
“The notion that government is controlling or is leveraging in anyway the cost of these commodities in the country is a total misunderstanding of the market dynamics in the petroleum sector.
Pump price may rise next week
The marketers also tasked the government on the need to fix the road networks in the country, stressing that it was having a heavy toll on the cost operations in the downstream sector.
“The route from Warri to Abuja is a no-go area. Our trucks are at a standstill, and our drivers are being kidnapped and killed. Our trucks are vandalized and the products taken away and this is a waste of money.
‘’We had this same problem last year in the same place, yet nothing has been done,’’ Korie added.
He lamented that the business environment had become stifling with several filling stations shutting down due to high cost of operations.
“If you go round, you’ll see a lot of filling stations closing down. If you were trading with N10 million before, forget about it.
‘’Someone who was trading with N100 million, you could buy one million litre of petrol in a month to sell but now, with N100 million you can only buy 150,000 litres in a month. You’ll also incur the same expenses when selling one million liters in a month.”
