The National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE) has faulted the June deadline given to the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) by the Federal Government to stabilise power supply in the country, saying it is not feasible.
Its General Secretary, Comrade Joe Ajaero, said the workers were shocked by the ultimatum given by the Minister of Power, Prof Chinedu Nebo, arguing that the minister had earlier identified shortage of gas as the major cause of the instability.
He said: “If he knew the problem was gas, why did he hand over the sector to private operators? He should have addressed the gas supply problem first. Even within six months, will the gas problem be over, especially with the political siting of power stations in Nigeria? You site a power station at 200 or 300 kilometres away from the source of gas because you are a minister, you want a power station to be sited in your state.
“Rather than site the power stations close to the source of gas, they sited the stations in their states and you then construct a pipeline from the gas source to where the power plant is situated.”
He continued: “Every now and then, you will say the pipeline has been vandalised or sabotaged. So long as the distance between the stations and gas source are far, so long as we depend on gas, the mandate the minister has given them will remain a mirage. It will not be actualised.
“The same minister had equally said before that he was afraid whether some of the investors have the capacity to revive the sector or change some of the facilities sold to them. This has raised the question whether there was due diligence or whether they knew the capacity of these investors before selling the plants to them.”
He added: “Nevertheless, it is too late for all these. We have to live with these investors. We have applied a drug on a patient; we have to wait and watch the effect. I want to appeal to Nigerians to exercise patience and see the effect of this drug.”
On the plight of workers in the sector, Ajaero said it was serious.
“The issue of disengagement is happening daily.The kind of private sector you have in Nigeria is such that operators ask workers to go orally. It is a terrible private sector and we have tried to tolerate them for the first, two and three months because Nigerians would say, we disrupted their activities; that is why they are not performing.
“The poor power situation in the country would have been blamed on the union if we had engaged them mmediately they started all these anti-labour practices. But we are going to engage them from now. Wherever they are, from today, they should be aware that for every anti-labour policy they take, we are going to engage them.
“Some of them have the pedigree of being anti-labour inside out. With such people, you know that it is going to be very interesting. In the next few months, some of the stations would be very hot,” Ajaero warned.
He said for firms that refuse to recognise workers’ rights, the union would tackle them, adding that whether that brings any problem to power situation in the country will not be the union’s business.
He said: “We have given them time to stabilise, but not to distabilise or enslave the workers.
“However, in some places because of the number of workers sacked, they are equally re-engaging. In many places, they are reengaging. They have discovered that the job cannot go on because of the number of workers disengaged. It is a question of disengaging and reengaging with a whole lot of issues coming up.”
