Senator representing Edo North Senatorial District, Adams, in this monitored interview, spoke about the resolved conflict between the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, and Dangote Refinery.
Oshiomhole criticised PENGASSAN for escalating the issue, saying there were better ways to have such a dispute without resorting to nationwide strike.
He also called for support for the refinery, noting that it was yet to reach maturity. Excerpts:
What do you think of the conflict between PENGASSAN, which has now suspended its strike, and Dangote Refinery, and the implications for labour union rights as well as Nigeria’s drive towards industrialisation?
It is a very complex issue on a good day. I am a labour man from the age of 18 up to becoming president of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC. I believe that it is not even a constitutional right, but a God-given right for human beings to associate in pursuance of their common interests. These are hard core values to which I subscribe, and they are also guaranteed in the Nigerian Constitution under Section 40. The trade union law recognises the right of an employee to belong to a union.
Over many years, we battled over whether it should be an employee’s right to contract in or contract out. The problem with the freedom of association is that it also includes the freedom to refuse to associate with a particular association, which is the way you balance it. Otherwise, it becomes something obligatory that you cannot contract out from. So the employer has his right. The employee has his right.
I do not have all the details. But what I am not sure is right is the ease with which PENGASSAN resorted to escalating the matter to a secondary level, what is called the secondary solidarity, to the point of shutting down the oil sector. I think that in seeking to protect a particular set of workers, you do not then risk the job of several other workers.
How do you draw the balance? We had a big battle with First Bank of Nigeria, where they decided that if a husband and wife were working in First Bank, even if one was in Maiduguri and the other in Lagos, one should go. I think Mr Alonge was then the Managing Director of First Bank. I said this was an outright family policy. We took a resolution at the convention and we wrote a letter to the management as a secondary organisation, which they didn’t take seriously. We had to find ways and means of shutting down First Bank. But we did not have to shut down all the banks, even though we had the capacity to do so. We recognised that the alleged sin of First Bank could not be said to apply to others.
In pursuing one right, you have to recognise that the tools you deploy must be such that they do not undermine other people’s jobs, which should also be of concern to the trade unions. For example, those people selling tomatoes who could not get fuel to buy because there was a quarrel between Dangote Refinery and PENGASSAN. Those are things I thought PENGASSAN ought to take into account.
Second, when dealing with a private sector employer, I come from a private sector background, and in the trade union movement you have those in the public sector and those in the private sector. In the private sector, when a new company is coming in, we allow them deliberately, just the way government grants tax holidays to encourage an employer or an investor to come in, we also allow companies a certain number of years to consolidate and then begin to make money. At that point, you can now organise.
Given the size of the business and all the controversies arising from crude, whether Nigerian National Petroleum Company, NNPC, sells, whether international oil companies, IOCs, can sell the crude overseas and then you pay a premium before you can get it, I thought that PENGASSAN should recognise that an employer has to exist, mature, and be strong enough to guarantee good paying jobs.
How can we strengthen unions so that they are restored to the glory days?
I also think that there is something missing, which is the role of government, the Ministry of Labour. If you look at the labour laws, there is enough room for the Ministry of Labour to ensure that the process and procedures are observed before you invoke that weapon. But oftentimes, this is lost.
For example, at what point can you involve people who are not directly involved in a conflict? Studies have shown that where you have unions, the countries are not necessarily less profitable than where you don’t have unions. So trade unions are not an obstacle to profit-making. Indeed, many sociologists have argued that when people have the right to associate and ventilate their feelings and have a channel to negotiate with the employer and have what seems to be an agreement, not just an imposition, there is a greater sense of belonging and therefore a more positive attitude to work, resulting in better productivity.
There are many things that I am personally disappointed about. For example, what is going on in much of the private sector, like the banking sector, shocks me that, as we speak, about 60 per cent or more of bank employees are contract staff. What it means is that these employees, who dress well, when they are thrown out, have no gratuity because they are contract staff. They are not employees of the bank.
The bank, in my view, illegally and immorally, I emphasise morality, because law cannot cover everything, set up a secondary employment agency. They also become a private sector employer. They use that vehicle to recruit and then deploy to their bank, invoice a certain amount of money, for example, half a million naira, in the name of Oshiomhole, as a worker of Bank X. And then the labour contractor is paid N500. He is paying me N200. And the labour employer pockets N300. And we find out who this labour employer is. It is the same owners and directors and shareholders or associates of the bank. Those, for me, are practices that must be stopped.
Worse is that before I left the NLC, I reorganised and we compelled at least two to three banks, I would not want to mention their names, to either allow a union to exist or we would do what we had to do. And when they could not escape, they accepted. But what I found out later is that they just pay what I call a protection fee. Every month, they issue a cheque to the unions. But the unions don’t really exist. They don’t have negotiating rights. Because if they did exist, they could not allow 80 per cent or 70 per cent of their employees to be contract staff.
The last time I had a conversation with the NLC president, I said to them that this is a protection fee. There is no union. The banks do whatever they want. There are several of them.
There are state governors who insist, and as we speak, are not paying the minimum wage. I can’t live with that. So there are a couple of things the union must do. You need them, but the union must be able to know the exact point to take a decision. And if we take this line of action, who will be affected?
What transpired between PENGASSAN and Dangote Refinery speaks to talent and training. Who is the head of these unions because it feels like other voices and interests are not being heard? There is also Festus Osifo, who is the head of two unions. Can you speak to that?
As president of the NLC, I had to resign my position as General Secretary of the Textile Workers’ Union. I am not sure of the status of Osifo, but I don’t think he is a full-time president of his union. I don’t think this is really at the heart of it. It depends on their constitution and relevant sections of the Trade Union Act.
There are the do’s and the don’ts. I keep saying that those national strikes that we organised, and I led them and I put everything into them, the issues in contention were issues that would affect every Nigerian. Therefore, there was already merit in asking every Nigerian to back those actions. In taking every means possible to ensure that, as much as possible, people complied. To a point that, on the streets of Lagos, people were playing football, which means people bought into the issue. And we had put them across to the public. We did not even have so many alternative media, which was also a challenge. But even within the small space the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, provided, we were able to prove that this is why we had to do what we were doing, and show how far we had gone before we got to this point.
So I think there is a huge gap in terms of the capacity to mobilise. I also suspect, I don’t have any proof, but my experience is that before you shut the gates of NNPC, there has to be a fight. So when I saw the NNPC gate effortlessly closed, all the other companies, government-owned oil companies, without any effort, closed, I thought to myself: if these were private employers, would they allow their company to close without any resistance, and they roll out their wages at the end of the month? I do not think so.
So why is everybody seemingly so helpless? That we are at the mercy of anyone. There are laws regulating this. Before you take those measures, you must be ready for a fight. And the workers, for them to follow, must see the linkage between their well-being and what is at stake. Not workers coming to work and saying, today there is no work, we have a problem. In terms of this particular issue, I really think that Dangote Refinery has faced too many pressure points that make me wonder. When people say Dangote is a monopolist, I ask: would you not prefer a monopolist that creates jobs in Nigeria than importing monopoly, which NNPC became? My disagreement with the unions in the oil sector is that we were with Peter Esele when NNPC was privatised by President Obasanjo. At a point, you have to start cutting your losses. It made sense to sell them as scraps. And the good news is, whoever buys them will put them to work.
Now, this was reversed by government. Why? NNPC promised they would put these refineries back to work within six months. If you ask Dangote, Governor Soludo and former Minister of Petroleum, late Rilwanu Lukman, I said, what has happened to your promise? You asked for $500 million, you have cut over $2–3 billion, yet the refineries were dead.
Now, I saw Osifo talking about the good pay in the oil sector. That has to do with the fact that they are privileged to manage that sector of our natural endowment. Everybody knows that the oil is God-given. And those who process it make huge money. So, if they pay good wages, that is very encouraging. But what is the wage level of those refineries that are not working? Because here we are talking about the refining sector, not those operating in the downstream who are doing extraction.
I believe there can be no question in my mind as to the inalienable right of people to be involved in unions, but we must also not kill employers. Now, I have never heard any statement or any attempt to condemn the management of NNPC and their agencies for mismanaging resources with regard to the huge outlay in the name of refining Kaduna refinery, Warri refinery and Port Harcourt refinery. Ministers after ministers gave their deadline, but was never kept. As a matter of now, I would expect the union to say, you are risking our jobs. And an NNPC manager was on record as saying that they have to keep importing.
What I know everywhere in the world is that unions support industrial policies that encourage local investment. Where they have located here and they have started producing, then their workers can be organised.
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