PENGASSAN pickets Sterling Oil Management over alleged expatriate quota abuse
By Eberechi Obinagwam
Organized labour, under the aegis of Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff, PENGASSAN has called on the federal government to support them in the fight against expatriate quota abuse and unfair labour practices at Sterling Oil Management.
PENGASSAN President, Comrade Festus Osifo made the call on Wednesday, the day two of the picketing.
On Tuesday, members of PENGASSAN gathered at the headquarters of Sterling Oil Exploration in Victoria Island, Lagos to shut down its premises over alleged anti-labour activities levelled against the company.
Osifo who led the protest condemned the management of Sterling Oil for alleged abuse of the expatriate qouta system, leading to the discrimination against skilled Nigerian workers in the oil and gas sector and asked for federal government’s support in the fight.
According to him, if the government agencies are not applying to their responsibilities and do the needful, the protest has the potential of spurring into a national industrial action.
“Because for us, we think that government should be happy with what we are doing. It’s the responsibility of government to defend its citizens. It’s the responsibility of government to provide jobs for its citizens.”
Osifo decried the growing influx of Indian workers, who he accused of monopolizing jobs that Nigerians are qualified to perform. According to him, if they succeed in driving approximately 10,000 Indians packing, Nigerians will have jobs to do.
“If today, we send approximately 10,000 Indians packing, who are they going to employ? The Nigerians. Who will take credit for it? The Nigerian government. So the government must see this as a fight that they must partner with us. As a fight that the right thing must be done. That these people must go so that our brothers, sisters, cousins, the Nigerians that are literally in the streets looking for jobs, we have 10,000 jobs to do. On Saturday, the Nigerian government commissioned about 774 youth across the local governments in Nigeria for a particular task. 774 compared to 10,000. So we have already 10,000 jobs to be created in Sterling. So government must partner to ensure that this is done. If these people leave, we have Nigerians that will hit into this road within the next one month. So they should not deceive us to tell us that oh no, they have to train people,” he said.
He also disclosed that he received several calls from Sterling to come to Eko-hotel with Pengassan nationals yesterday, but they refused because they do not want any clandestine meeting. “Any meeting that must be held, the regulators and partners have to be there because they told us that they have bribed everybody in Nigeria. We don’t want a situation where we go and meet them in a Eko-hotel and they say they have bribed us. They are deceitful,” he said.
“They reached us on Tuesday night for a meeting for next week. We will never allow them to load until we have that meeting. We told them that the action will continue until we go for that meeting. And for us, comrades, the KPIs are very clear. When we go to the meeting, we will ask them, they should tell us how many Nigerians are panel operators. How many Nigerians are in their operations. They should tell us how many Nigerians do we have? How many Indians do we have? Then we will also go with the template that we have from other IOCs, from Total Energy, from Chevron, from Exxon Mobil. We will go with the template. And we will put the template on the table that if in these companies, we don’t have a single expatriate as panel operator, you have to demobilize these people immediately. So it is not a rocket science. Panel operation is not a rocket science. Oil and gas business is not a rocket science,” he said.
“Another thing they are not doing, is that they brought a contract, a manpower contract, where they enslave Nigerians completely. They told them that they don’t have a right to unionize. They told them that they don’t have a right to join Pengassan and they are paying them peanuts. That is against the Nigerian law. In Nigerian law, in the trade union act, and in the labour law, the right to unionism is guaranteed. The right to unionism is sacrosanct. So you cannot say some category of your employees, because you are subjugating them, that they cannot join the union.” he added.
