As President Obasanjo Assumes Chair of African Union
by Greg Moses
09 Jul 2004
http://austin.indymedia.org/newswire/display/17091/index.php
Labor agitation in Nigeria wins concessions as the financial press complains of incessant strikes and the Nigerian president increases his power in African affairs.
Nigerian oil managers won the right to serve as “production superintendents” for the European petroleum giant Total-Elf-Fina after an all-night bargaining session Wednesday that was reportedly brokered by the Nigerian ministry of labor.
After the agreement was reached, the company resumed its Nigerian operations, which account for ten percent of the nation’s oil output. Total-Elf-Fina had shut down its Nigerian operations on Friday, July 2, citing “safety concerns” over the labor impasse.
The prized management positions had previously been reserved for expatriate employees, according to the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSA), the “white collar” union of Nigerian gas and oil workers. According to reports from union sources, salaries paid to expatriate (foreign) managers were largely responsible for the industry’s rising costs.
The concession from Total-Elf-Fina follows complaints in the Nigerian Business Times that Nigerian labor has been guilty of “incessant strike actions” that “have had devastating effects on the economy of the nation.”
According to the Business Times report by Lucas Ajanaku and Odidison Omankhanlen, Nigeria has seen an unprecedented rate of strike actions during the past five years. A recent three-day strike over rising gas prices, “is said to have cost the nation consecutively N200 billion with at least, one life, lost,” claim the authors, who note that the loss of a single life is the lowest casualty rate for a strike in recent memory.
If the financial press in Nigeria is weary of labor action, other reports suggest that Nigerian civil society was angered by labor’s decision to call off the most recent protest strike after only three days. The Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC) suspended the strike after winning a court ruling that ordered the government to enforce price caps on gasoline.
As with the rest of the world, gas prices have been going up in Nigeria, but many Nigerians argue that the government should keep the gas prices lower through subsidies financed by windfall profits earned from sales of Nigerian crude. Nigerian citizens are aware that the government makes enormous profits from the “upstream” sale of oil, and they widely expect to see those profits plowed back into “downstream” subsidies for their daily consumption of gasoline.
In an article separate from the one mentioned above, Omankhanlen reports that one Nigerian activist who participated in NLC deliberations said there was, “no justification for suspending the strike, stressing that the government would take them as jesters, for the fact that the strike had not made any meaningful impact.”
“How could one ever contemplate suspending the strike,” said another activist quoted by Omankhanlen. “This was not our arrangement. People we have mobilised will take us as unserious people. I will never have anything to do with labour again. And remember, this is not the first time this is happening. We cannot afford to be fooled again.”
Earlier this year, the NLC negotiated with the government to set price caps on gasoline, but independent oil marketers have not adhered to the agreement. A July 15 hearing has been set to resume court deliberations on the matter.
Returning to the article jointly written by Ajanaku and Omankhanlen, the authors concede that there are few realistic alternatives to strike action in a nation where politics tend to follow the influence of oil money. In such a context, labor cannot effectively lobby against big oil in the legislature, nor can it rely on judicial or police authorities to stand up independently against multi-billion dollar oil interests.
“The pursuit of legal approach by labour as an alternative dispute resolution avenue suffers yet its own shortcomings,” write Ajanaku and Omankhanlen, “government hardly obey court orders while the process of obtaining justice in the country is rather long and unwieldy.”
The recent overnight bargaining session between unionists and Total-Elf-Fina reportedly took place at Port Harcourt, the city where Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged with eight other activists in 1995. “Nor imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory,” pledged Saro-Wiwa in his famous closing statement to the Nigerian Military Appointed Tribunal that sentenced him to death for his activism against Shell Oil.
“A worker without a future and a say in matters relating to his own growth is a slave,” argues PENGASSAN President Louis Brown Ogbeifun in a February speech.
“Time has come for labour to have a rethink and a rebirth, if we do not want to be swallowed by the negative impact of global processes,” says Brown Ogbeifun in the speech posted at the PENGASSAN website. “Staying afloat will depend on our strength, unity, focus and proactive fight against injustices and not against ourselves, for a house divided against itself can never stand. If the advanced nations want us to accept their pills of globalization, then they must be transparent, fair, just and objective in adaptation of globalization ideals to the reality of our background. They must come to equity with clean hands and stop seeing Africa as a dumping ground for imperialists left over.”
Exxon-Mobil this week replaced the manager of its Nigerian operations in a move that coincides with an impasse in that company’s labor negotiations. On July 1, the petroleum unions issued a 21-day warning to their Exxon-Mobil subsidiary and announced that workers would be wearing red, boycotting lunch, and engaging in a two-hour work stoppage as signs of solidarity in preparation for a strike, should one be needed.
Reporter Victor Ahiuma-Young, writing for the Nigerian Vanguard, quotes an un-named source as saying that relations between Nigerian unions and the Exxon-Mobil subsidiary had deteriorated since Mobil was taken over by Exxon. In addition, sources allege that a provisional settlement between unions and the company was scuttled by interference from an official of the government-owned oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
It is widely reported that Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo personally oversees the Nigerian oil business. Obasanjo last week was named chair of the African Union Commission during its three-day summit in Ethiopia. According to a summary report posted at the United Nations’ IRIN website, Obasanjo promised to take tough stands, “on hot spots like Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
“These issues demonstrate our determination to be proactive. Without peace, there is no development,” said Obasanjo,
Meanwhile this week, negotiations with Shell Oil were reported to be “going well.”
See also:
http://austin.indymedia.org/newswire/display/17062/index.php
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