The Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) has vowed to oppose any attempt to privatise Nigerian refineries.
Its president, Festus Osifo, who spoke at the opening of the National Executive Council (NEC) meeting in Abuja, yesterday, also named the union’s conditions for the Federal Government to remove fuel subsidy.
He said: “Our take on it has been been very clear. Government should fix the refinery, we do not support the sale of any of these refineries. We will fight it with every arsenal in our disposal. We don’t support these things. Fix the refinery, once you fix it, government can now transit and become a minority shareholder. For example, the NLNG model is working today because the Nigerian government owns 49% of the shares and the private sector owns about 51% of the shares. So we can replicate the NLNG model because it has worked in the past, it is working today. So we can bring that to ensure that the refineries are working in the future.”
Osifo said at the NEC meeting in Calabar in May 2016, the union deliberated on the issue of subsidy and felt the downstream sector of the oil and gas industry would grow better if it is deregulated.
“And in the last seven years, we have actually maintained that stand, we have maintained a stand not minding some of the side effects. But again, if you look at the subsidy times, we tend to be trying to hold on to something why we are losing in some other areas. If you look at the cost of living, it has gone up drastically by over three times or four in the last two, three years. If you look at why the cost of living has actually moved to where it is today, it is actually because of the fact that our exchange rate has plummeted. Before now, exchange rate used to be somewhere around N100 to $1, but today, it’s closely around N800, it moved beyond it sometime last year. So why is this exchange rates moving up? Because we are not earning foreign exchange? Most of the money we ought to have earned as a country we are using them, and the oil gas sector is where we earn about 80 to 90% of our foreign exchange, but at the end of the day, this money is being used in a subsidy. So that has shrunken our dollar reserve.”
Osifo said the nation must look at domestic refining and issues bordering on subsidy in order to improve its foreign exchange reserve.
“If we address this Nigeria, the Nigerian government will earn more money from the crude oil sales and money will go into to CBN, here it will shore up our reserves and ease the pressure on the dollars and so when this happens, our naira will appreciate.”
Speaking on the union’s conditions for fuel subsidy removal, he said the government must commit to investing the money on key infrastructure like roads, schools, hospitals, among others.
“If you take some of these money and you use them to build hospitals, those hospitals will be everlasting. If you use this money to do quality roads, the roads will be there. If you use this money to address all the fundamentals that are affecting Nigeria, like the ASUU problem when you go to the universities and you address the infrastructural challenges that we have in our universities today. There will be there for a very long while.
“So we are not saying that government should just buy one or two buses and after one or two years, the buses fade away, that is not what we are saying. But put this money in infrastructure that Nigerians can reckon with; the things we can see, the things we can measure, not the ones that you tell us that you are transferring money that me or you cannot verify.”