Offices of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) have been shut nationwide, according to reports as workers of the state owned oil company embark on strike.
There was no prior warning about the strike said to have been ordered by the two oil unions, NUPENG and PENGASSAN.
Workers reported for duty at the headquarters in Abuja Wednesday, only to find their offices under lock and key as workers are said to be protesting against the unbundling of the corporation ordered by President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday.
The re-organisation of NNPC was announced on Tuesday by Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, minister of state and group managing director of the NNPC.
The new units are Upstream, Downstream, Gas & Power, Refineries, Ventures, Corporate Planning & Services and Finance & Accounts. They will run independently.
With the announcement of this new policy road map, the realigned NNPC comprises of five business-focused and two service driven units.
The chief executives of the new units are: Bello Rabiu (Upstream); Sa’idu Mohammed (Gas and Power); (Anibor Kragha) Refining; Henry Ikem-Obih (Downstream); Dr. Babatunde Victor Adeniran (Ventures).
Others are Isiaka Abdulrazaq (Finance & Accounts) and Isa Inuwa (Corporate Planning & Services).
The new NNPC design is based on ‘FACT’ organisation which is Focused, Accountable, Competitive and Transparent.
According to NNPC, “the organizational realignment is not about staff layoffs, but about placing the right people in the right places to do the right thing”.
Two major unions in the oil and gas sector, Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN and the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) had on Friday rejected the planned splitting.
The spokesperson for PENGASSAN, Emmanuel Ojugbana, had said that the union was not carried along in the decision to split the company, while Igwe Achese of NUPENG, had said union would not accept the decision without knowing how the manpower that would operate in the 30 companies would be managed.
On the workers’ fears, the minister said the exercise has a “zero sum in terms of job loss”.
“The principle of restructuring approved by the President is that nobody losses work. I do not have the mandate of the president to create a job loss situation, but to try to ensure that everyone gets busy, unless for reasons of bad staff performance and fraud. There is no mass attempt to let people go.”
He said the decision to embark on the restructuring followed an analysis of the number of staff, which revealed that the corporation was over-staffed, and therefore the need for them to be meaningfully engaged.
The only way to realize that objective, the minister said, was to create jobs for everybody in the system to him enable have something doing.
“We don’t want people coming to the office to read newspapers. We want everybody to get busy and earn money. If we do that we will realise that there would be adequate staff to man the different units, and that we don’t really have the problem of over-staff after all,” he said.
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