Dare Babalola
Dangote refinery has announced that the ongoing strike of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) will not cause petrol shortage in Nigeria.
This statement was made on Tuesday by a refinery spokesman, Anthony Chiejina, AFP says.
The spokesman said, “There is no fuel shortage, everything is going on.”
Furthermore, Chiejina denied the claim that its drivers were not being allowed to join a union, calling it “cheap blackmail”.
“It’s not true, nobody has done that and nobody has ever,” he said.
The refinery spokesman added that talks were continuing between the union, the government, and the company.
Recall that the union, on Monday, commenced a strike after the refinery insisted on hiring its own drivers to deliver gasoline to retailers, a move NUPENG says was made to weaken it.
Before last year’s opening of the Dangote refinery, with a capacity of 650,000 barrels per day, Nigeria had to import almost all its petrol despite being a major oil producer.
Critics pointed to years of neglect and mismanagement of government-owned refineries.
The Dangote refinery has driven down prices of petrol for consumers while also shaking up long-entrenched players in Nigeria’s oil sector, marred by decades of corruption.
But it has also sparked monopoly fears as it becomes a powerful player backed by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote.
Earlier, NUPENG President Williams Akporeha stated that Dangote’s actions demonstrate a lack of willingness to engage with workers who want a say in their employment.
“What Dangote has shown over time is that he’s not prepared to have workers that will have a say in his employment,” Akporeha told Arise News on Tuesday.
The strike has garnered significant support from local and international organizations. The Nigeria Labour Congress, IndustriALL (a global union based in Switzerland), and the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) network branch in Washington have all voiced their backing for NUPENG.
