Let’s Support Dangote Refinery – No To NUPENG, PENGASAN Harassment

The Dangote Refinery Limited, DRL, is a private business entity deliberately established to be managed under the principles of a commercial business entity – to operate not as a ‘salvation army’ organization but as a business to make profit.

About 97% truck tankers are owned by members of NUPENG and PENGASAN. They have combined to dictate and fix the prices of delivery of petroleum products from depots across filling stations across Nigeria at exorbitant rates!

I don’t see any cause for alarm that Dangote Refinery laid off her workers because of pressure from NUPENG and PENGASAN to unionize her workers. It’s a usual business practice by every employer of labour. Workers will be free to reapply for their jobs but this time on the basis of staff of the Dangote Refinery Limited. I’m sure the small letters in their offer of appointment letters will clearly state ‘I hereby accept to be a staff of the DRL without affiliation to any union’. Those who clamour for the unionization of Dangote Refinery workers by NUPENG and PENGASAN should feel free to establish their own refinery.

Is it not an insult that NUPENG and PENGASAN, Unions that arbitrarily increases the cost of delivering a liter of petroleum product with trucks owned by her members have the temerity to set ‘Terms & Conditions’ for Dangote Refinery, a private refinery, that is deliberately established as a business concern, and insist that drivers employed by Dangote must be members of NUPENG and PENGASAN!

It’s note worthy that NUPENG is spearheading the onslaught of efforts to cajole Dangote Refinery Limited to unionize her employees but PENGASAN is surreptitiously working behind NUPENG to force the unionization of workers on Dangote Refinery!

The fear of Nigerians that Dangote Refinery will dominate the petroleum market is unfounded. Nigeria has relevant anti-trust laws to check Dangote Refinery if it applies monopolistic tendencies to sell her petroleum products to Nigerians – the government can use these laws to take over the refinery and pay off Dangote for the cost of building the refinery.

NUPENG and PENGASAN are quasi-legal mafiosos – a bunch of rascals who hold the jugular of the nation at ransom for their personal greed and interests.

Can anyone point at the financial value that NUPENG and PENGASAN have contributed to the coffers of Nigeria albeit the huge union dues/levy they extort from Nigerian workers monthly? Their leaders live an ostentatious, opulent lifestyle that does not justify what they preach by preying on the gullibility of Nigerian workers. Make a visit to any petroleum Depot across Nigeria, you will find old, retired NUPENG and PENGASAN truck drivers in tattered, faded clothes, looking gaunt and unkept, not different from a beggar! So, what happened to the dues and levies that NUPENG and PENGASAN extorted from them during their active, youth, working days?

By the way, Depot Owners and Petroleum Product Distributors have joined the fray to fight Dangote. Is it not interesting that they are meddlesome interlopers sponsored to fight Dangote and frustrate his business!

By the way, NUPENG has all over the past years not challenged the NNPC and her subsidiaries for not testing imported petroleum products which are mostly substandard when compared to the quality of the petroleum products produced by the Dangote Refinery. It’s doubtful if the NNPC and her subsidiaries, today, have acquired a standard laboratory to test imported petroleum products by Depot Owners.

NUPENG, PENGASAN, Depot Owners and petroleum product marketers are jointly fighting Dangote Refinery – they should form a consortium and establish their own refinery if they are genuinely driven by passion to serve Nigerian consumers.

If not for Dangote Refinery, today, a liter of petrol will be selling at between N1,200 and N1,700 in Lagos, not to talk of other the soaring prices of petrol in other cities across Nigeria, fuel scarcity would have been the norm if Dangote Refinery had not come into the equation of refining petrol.

As for the NNPC, historically, it has become an open-ended organization that has become a conduit pipe of looting Nigeria’s treasury, no thanks to the unending repairs/maintenance of Porthacourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries!

It is overbearing that union organizations should be forcing workers of a private business to be unionized by NUPENG and PENGASAN, organizations that are not regulators of the petroleum sector.

As a private business entity, Dangote Refinery is not under any obligation to compel her staff to be members of NUPENG – the 1999 Nigerian constitution, as amended, guarantees the freedom of association. Drivers employed by Dangote will earn living wages, welfare benefits, insurance, etcetera, compared to the pittance that NUPENG and PENGASAN truck owners pay their drivers. If anything, NUPENG and PENGASAN truck owners are slave drivers, paying drivers peanuts, and without any good conditions of employment and life after retirement.

Finally, Nigerians should stand up and support Dangote in this proxy war sponsored by institutional forces to frustrate the Dangote Refinery. Also, the Federal Government should restrain the leadership of NUPENG, Depot Owners, petroleum products marketers and PENGASAN, to stop the harassment of Dangote Refinery Limited.

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