A peaceful protest by hundreds of Ijaw and Ilaje graduates has been quashed by a combined team of soldiers and policemen deployed in the Warri office of multinational oil company, Chevron Nigeria Limited.
The protesters, under the aegis of KOMBOT-Egbema/Gbaramatu Graduates Association and the National Association of Ilaje Graduates, have served the firm a week’s ultimatum to render a public apology to their manhandled members.
They also call for a high-powered parley between their leaders and the company’s management, failing which they threatened to cripple its operations in the creeks.
The placard holding protesters, who converged in the morning at the company’s entrance, demanded to meet with the company’s representatives.
Their plan was to express their displeasure over Chevron’s failure to attend to the issue of prolonged training for candidates from their communities, refusal to allow trainees from VTP5, OPT2 and VTP6 programmes convert to regular employment status.
KOMBOT-Egbema/Gbaramatu Graduates Association President Yabrade Moses and his counterpart from the National Association of Ilaje Graduates Ikuesan Ademola addressed reporters after the quashed protest.
According to them, appropriate authorities were put on notice before ther embarked on the protest, saying that the physical attacks on them would not deter their members from pursuing the course to a logical conclusion.
They described the alleged injustice they were protesting as a form of modern-day slavery, through which the company would continue to use the sweat of the Ijaw and Ilaje youths without any commitment to them.
The protesters alleged that the company had been employing youths from other places, who also went through the same programmes, but whose services had since be converted to proper employment status.
They said: “The protest is all about our indigenes that are working in Chevron’s Ogere training, the VTP5, OPT2 and VTP6. For a training of 18 months, they have been kept stagnant for about 4 years now, since March 2013. This is slavery.
“While those taken from the national, at Agbami, have been converted to permanent staff, those taken from our communities are not converted yet, using them as cheap labour or what we call modern day slavery because should anything happen to any of them, Chevron cannot be held liable and this is the major means through which our people can be taken into Chevron, the programme was designed to take our people into Chevron, but the company is trying to change the goalpost in the middle of the game.”