01 January 2018, Sweetcrude, Abuja – The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, has said the protracted fuel crisis in the country was a reflection of “crisis of corporate governance in the petroleum sector.”
A National Executive Council, NEC, member of the Congress, Comrade Issa Aremu, made the assertion stating also that the bane of the downstream sector was “abysmal absence of accountability, transparency, and openness in the administration of the petroleum resources of Nigeria.”
“There is a deep-seated conflict of interest in the downstream sector; regulators are operators, regulators are importers, importers are products hoarders, regulators are also saboteurs, definitely we have a sector capture in our hands, Nigeria and Nigerians need liberation,” he remarked.
The labour leader who disclosed that “NNPC is the only public corporation that annually awards its directors long service incentives for no service at all, for non-functioning refineries” called for a “total ban on importation to reinvent domestic refineries and beneficiation to crude oil.”
Mr. Aremu however said if the intervention of the legislature fails to put an end to product shortages, labour may compel all Nigerians to return to street protests like in the past “to force the ruling elite to face up to the challenges of governance of the most populous promising but badly governed country in the continent.”
“The one-month long fuel shortage has further worsened poverty, put productivity on hold. We dare not enter 2018, the new year with this recurring old mess,” he noted.
