But that meeting did not hold; and at the end of the day some union members felt that the government is playing lip service to this issue as critical as it is.
And as a union and as body we decided that we need to apply some force into the system because we know that this issue if not addressed at this point, the oil and gas industry will collapse.
And everyone knows that the oil and gas industry remains the mainstay of our economy currently.
Are you aware that in this particular oil and gas sector on daily basis there are rising issues of redundancy as most of the oil servicing companies are basically going under?
Our employees are being sacked on a daily basis.
May be a lot of Nigerians do not know the gravity of where we are now and that is why PENGASSAN at this point have decided to be courageous to take these steps to save the oil and gas industry.
Yes, there are plans by the government of the day to diversify the economy which is fine.
But ultimately we need to get to that point where the oil and gas industry should be self-sustaining until such a time the diversification can come.
Question: Comrade in this quest to rescue the oil and gas industry by way of this strike, doesn’t it seem to you that PENGASSAN may have been abandoned by its sister union NUPENG in the pursuit of this goal that ought to benefit all stakeholders in the industry when it decided not to join in the strike action?
Response: Well it is not about whether we are alone on this strike or not, but sincerely it is actually PENGASSAN that is worse hit by these cash call issues.
But if a critical analysis is done, on the long run it will affect everyone directly or indirectly involved in the oil and gas industry because anything that affects the IOC’s or upstream companies will ultimately affect the entire industry because if you look at the service sector companies who work for the IOC’s.
In the past many of them who operate up to 5 to 6 rigs now many of them operate just about 1 or 2 rigs, so ultimately those service sector companies that are operating on these rigs many of them have gone under and the rest of the services that they render.
Of course naturally the marketing sector of the industry will definitely be affected and NNPC and government agencies will also naturally be affected.
Yes, critically it affects the upstream sector, but ultimately the oil and gas industry will be affected and I want to add that the first time we articulated this it came from PENGASSAN.
So it isn’t really about trying to cripple the economy, which on our own part we are even trying to be sensitive about how we drive it, which ordinarily would have commenced since last week Monday.
But we looked at the holiday which would affect our Muslim brothers’ participation.
So we looked at it again and considered some of the things which probably we could have done to create additional impact on the strike so we decided to play down on some of them so that the hardship on Nigerians would not be much, but what is most important is for government to address the issue.
Question: Finally we learned that your leadership will soon be attending meetings with government representatives and security agencies soon, what are the recommendations that PENGASSAN is looking to put forward in the course of these meetings?
Response: What we are looking at is this, again some of the discussions we’ve had so far of course you know that the Minister Dr. Kachikwu have also assured us that ultimately the current funding arrangements is going to be replaced.
According to the Minister, it might even be in place by the end of this year, but what we are saying right now is this going forward.
Let the government work out a strategy to meet up the current cash call obligations to these companies.
Then we can now articulate on the way and manner of how government will pay the arrears owed so that these companies can remain in business.
I want to emphasize the fact that PENGASSAN is not defending the upstream companies, our interests is to protect the nation’s economy.
I am aware that in some of the discussions even NAPPIMS have claimed that some of the IOC’s have blotted the figures and so on.
But to us we are also saying that NAPPIMS should do the due diligence it requires to make sure that the arrive at the right figures and we really sustain the oil and gas industry.
By Uchechukwu Ugboaja