 |
Photo: Sun News Publishing |
Labour and Productivity Minister, Prince Adetokunbo Ademola has sensationally revealed why the nation’s downstream oil sector may remain comatose.
In his submission at the resumed meeting between the Federal Government and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) to find a common ground on the planned deregulation of the downstream sector of the oil and gas industry on Wednesday, Ademola said government was aware of a mafia group in the sector which was unprepared to see the nation refining petroleum products in the country as they were the beneficiaries of the corruption in the sector.
“We are in a very serious trouble if we don’t change this regime.
Though, it will cause pains, when you look back at it later you will appreciate,” he had argued at the meeting held in Labour House, Abuja.
However, the Labour chieftains who said government was celebrating its failures demanded that it should name the mafias in the nation’s oil sector if it was actually interested in fighting the corruption in the sector.
Deputy President of the NLC, Comrade Irabor, said they had no confidence in the government as it had decided to re-circle the discussion without going direct to the point, adding that, “we have not seen any new thing in what government is saying. If we see any later, we will look into it.”
General Secretary of the Congress, Comrade John Odah, said they needed the government team to go beyond some of the arguments paraded by government because the arguments over the last 25 years.
Various Labour chieftains present at the meeting, who submitted that deregulation was not the solution to the nation’s problems in the sector urged government to quickly embark on projects that would alleviate the sufferings of the people get the refineries to work and bring the corrupt people in the oil sector to book rather than continue to talk about deregulation.
With the federal government and Labour adopting extreme positions with clear indications that none of them was willing to shift grounds, tempers flared and the meeting almost turned into a shouting match.
Meanwhile, the NLC has set up a ten-man committee headed by its vice president, Peter Adeyemi. The committee is to look at the union’s stand against that of the federal government, examine the way deregulation is done in other OPEC countries and what implications it would have on Nigerians.
Finance Minister, Mansur Mukhtar, who led government’s delegation had made laborious but futile effort to explain why Labour should support government’s deregulation plans but his submissions Labour held were quite unconvincing and unacceptable.
Labour, which had often stressed that deregulation was synonymous with increase in prices of petrol became very irked by explanations of the Finance minister, who bluntly declared that the deregulation was inevitable and that the price of petrol would certainly go up much higher than it is presently after the exercise.
“I cannot guarantee… nobody will guarantee that prices will not rise, prices will rise but after sometime it will also come down,” Muktar said.
Stressing that they had been involved in several fruitless meetings with Labour, the minister urged that the key thing was to see how they could narrow their differences and see how to move the country forward.
In his submission also, minister of state for Petroleum, Odein Ajumogobia, who acknowledged that a good system was for government to build its own refineries and refine locally said government was however fade up with putting over N1.3 trillion into the importation of over 18 million litres of petrol petrol daily for consumption in the country.
Stressing that government was going to pay about N600billion at the end of the year for petrol subsidy, Ajumogobia who regretted that out of this amount not up to N200billion would be spent on petrol, disclosed that a chunk sum of the money goes into other expenses.
No comments:
Post a Comment