Yemisi Izuora/Ijeoma Agudosi
Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) has lamented massive and unprecedented loss of jobs in the oil and gas industry globally and in Nigeria.
The Nigerian oil and gas industry recorded a loss of about 150,000 jobs in the 26 months to February 2016, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria said.
National President, of PENGASSAN, Mr. Francis Johnson, noted that there had been a massive and unprecedented loss of jobs in the oil and gas industry globally and in Nigeria.
Johnson stated this in Abuja at the Save Nigeria Oil and Gas industry Roundtable Conference.
The PENGASSAN president, who was represented by the Chairman, of the Trade Union Congress, Rivers State Chapter, Mr. Chika Onuegbu, said, “At the last count, some 150,000 direct and indirect jobs have been lost in the Nigerian oil and gas industry between 2013 and February 2016.
There is also an increasing use of contract staffing, outsourcing and other precarious work forms as employers look for new ways to cut cost. We have also seen increasing conversions of regular jobs to contract jobs under all manner of guises. The threat to decent work in the Nigerian oil and gas industry is very serious and this has led to increased industrial unrest in the industry, thereby worsening the already difficult operating environment in the sensitive industry.”
Johnson also decried the state of the nation’s four petroleum refineries, which have a combined capacity of 445,000 barrels per day, saying they were operating at about 26% capacity utilisation due to many reasons from the obvious political interference in their management to the “preposterous” lack of crude to refine. “The result is that Nigeria now exports crude oil and imports refined petroleum products, and in the process it has led to a subsidy programme which started out in 1973 as a short-term measure supposedly aimed at assisting the citizens pay some part of the full cost of the imported refined petroleum products.
“Consequently, there is no incentive for private investors to build refineries and what we have seen is that the country is littered with investments and infrastructure for the importation of refined petroleum products like tank farms, fuel depots, etc. and a cartel that holds the country at the jugular manipulating the supply of refined petroleum products at the expense of the generality of Nigerians.”
He noted that between 1978 and 1989, the country built and inaugurated three refineries – Warri, Kaduna and Port-Harcourt II with a combined capacity of 385,000 barrels per day. “One therefore wonders why in the 16 years since the return of democracy in 1999, Nigeria has not attempted to build at least one refinery. Worse still, the existing refineries have been left to rot and functioning at far less than their installed capacities as successive governments are fixated on selling the government-owned refineries.”
The effect of the rout in the oil market is clearly filtering through to employment figures in one of SSA’s largest oil producers. Given the recent failure of talks to try and stem production, we do not foresee any immediate relief coming through to Nigeria’s oil producers and we thus expect more redundancies and weakness in the country’s labour market. Ultimately, with the country’s oil industry reform bill which has the potential to stimulate investment in the oil industry being delayed, things might get a lot worse before getting better and hence consumption and incomes will end up being affected negatively.