FG Is Not Ready For Dialogue To Resolve Petrol Hike – Labour

The Organized labour has come out to blast the Federal Government for not being ready for a clean and honest dialogue that will solve the petroleum price increase and electricity tariffs.

The Deputy President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Comrade Joe Ajaero revealed this today.

According to him, the government violated the understanding reached by the two parties before the planned September strike was suspended and this is the reason why a walk-out was staged at their meeting on Sunday night.

He added that the recent strike was suspended based on certain understanding, but those understanding keep getting breached.

His words “Our strike was suspended based on certain understanding and those understanding were being violated, that was why we raised that alarm yesterday (Sunday) which led to the walk out.

“And this is in spite of the patriotic understanding of labour which has drawn the flak of the public which think we are not doing enough to protect their interests on the issues of petroleum products and electricity tariffs.”

“Our strike was suspended based on certain understanding and those understanding were being violated that was why we raised that alarm yesterday which led to the walk out.

“We can’t come in here to announce a strike or the next strategy as if its just a one man organisation

“Part of what we are doing in terms of engagement is to reach out and if every other means fails, strike is usually the next option for any union.

“We don’t just at any slightest provocation start declaring strike, I think that is not what is on the table now but there are certain disagreements which we are trying to address.”

“If we say we can’t accept deregulation that it is import driven and that the refineries must work before you go into this and then you go into price fixing. Price fixing is not the same thing as deregulation.

“You can’t regulate in a deregulated market. If they have deregulated, the price of petrol in Sokoto it will not be the same in Abuja, there will be deviation so if they go into price fixing and call it deregulation, that is not acceptable to us.

“We won’t hold NNPC’s hands and stop them from announcing a new pump price but what matters is our response and even when we did a correspondence to them, that is an official correspondence and since we knew there was going to be a meeting, we had to bring it to the table.

“We had an agreement with them and not while we are still meeting you and before we could do the next meeting you increase pump price. The best thing for that discussion to go on in good faith was to return to the point where we were before we continue discussions and that was what happened yesterday.”