By Taiwo Adisa
While writing on this issue in her Funke Egbemode on Wednesday column in the Nigerian Tribune of September 10, my sister and prolific essayist, Funke Egbemode, chose to speak in parables. She talked of Dangote and his two wives and how the senior wife is refusing to perform her duties while placing a ban on the second wife from doing the same. A sort of turbo-engine trouble for the husbandman.
However, with the Department of State Services (DSS) intervening in the feud on Tuesday, sanity seemed to be on the horizon, as the differences between the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) and the Dangote Petroleum Refinery attempted to foist fuel scarcity on the nation once again.
Following the truce brokered by the top echelons of the DSS, the strike already embarked upon by members of NUPENG was called off. That was on Wednesday. By Thursday, however, the drumbeats from NUPENG had started changing. The union had again reverted to the language of threats, leaving the possibility of the disruption of the fuel supply chain a reality. There is no debate that such is not a burden Nigerians would want to bear at this time. The DSS knew that, and that informed the decision of its directors to put in all the energy to avert the earlier push by the union.
Now that the chicken is coming home to roost, the time has come to open the veil with which my sister, Egbemode, deodorised the broil. We must now go beyond the parables and look at the union and Dangote in the eyes. Eyeball-to-eyeball, as they say.
Let me start by stating that only the generation of Nigerians born either shortly before or immediately after the historic June 12, 1993, election would not know what it is to have the union called NUPENG bare its fangs. That union, under the leadership of the legendary Comrade Frank Ovie Kokori (now late), led the struggle for the actualisation of the annulled June 12 election in the fiercest manner anyone could think of. The union brought the nation to its knees under the regime of the man who used to hide his eyes behind dark glasses, late General Sani Abacha-a man who ruled with a real iron fist-making Nigeria a pariah nation. Abacha’s brutality knew no bounds. The streets of Lagos witnessed his rage first-hand, and his legacy was well evidenced in the long list of the jailed, hounded, exiled, assassinated, and bombed activists of that era. With bare hands, Kokori and his comrades at NUPENG faced the dreaded Abacha and brought the government to the canvass. Nigerians, both the cowardly and the valiant, hailed Kokori for his patriotism and for daring to square up with the lion right inside its cage. Though he suffered personal deprivations, Comrade Kokori had shown us all that when NUPENG sneezed, the nation’s petrol dollar economy must beware, or else it runs the risk of recession.
So, when the union called NUPENG threatened to ground the nation’s fuel supply chain last week, choosing to harass Dangote Refineries for refusing to allow its workers to join the union, a lot of adult Nigerians who remembered the nine-week strike embarked upon by the union from July 4, 1994, quickly urged caution. The leadership of the DSS in Abuja also got the message and mobilised all the parties to achieve a truce.
But the NUPENG of 1994 is a different variety compared to the NUPENG of 2025. Times have changed, and things have also changed. Prof Wole Soyinka wrote The Man Died, and that is exactly what happened to the union. The man in NUPENG died over the years. It has transformed from the lion-hunting Kokori era to a cockroach-hunted weakling, whose mission in the oil industry is difficult to decipher. Right now, neither the centre court nor the middle of it is holding together in the realm of NUPENG. From the glorious era of fighting the devil, the union is seeking to degenerate into a band that terrorizes the helpless and the innocent.
If the above will not expressly capture the face of NUPENG as presently constituted, I don’t know how else you want to define that union in the face of the feud between it and Dangote Refinery over the issue of unionisation, through which the body is seeking to punish hapless Nigerians with fuel scarcity.
The Dangote Refinery had announced months ago that it was launching a special fuel supply arrangement that would eliminate discriminatory fuel prices at the pumps across the country. It was launching 4,000-strong CNG-powered trucks that would lead the direct supply of fuel to marketers across the country. It’s something that would tantalise the business-minded. You don’t need to invest in trucks and also battle with the shenanigans of the drivers, motor boys, and all that to run a filling station.
Nigerians have been waiting patiently for the refinery to start the much-advertised fuel supply, but along the line came the NUPENG distraction. NUPENG members would go on strike because Dangote Refinery was disallowing its staff to join their union! And like play, like play, a pyjama is turning itself into an aso ebi for grand occasions. Pronto, a strike had been announced, and before our very eyes, NUPENG was turning what should be an occasion for joy into utter sadness.
I’ve read the contents of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) entered into by Dangote Group, NUPENG, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), the Trade Union Congress (TUC), and the NMDPRA. The kernel of that agreement was that unionisation is free and that Dangote Group would not obstruct the desire of any staff to join the oil workers’ unions. On Thursday, the union raised the alarm that it might resume the suspended strike because the refinery was obstructing the implementation of the MoU.
According to the union, its grouse with Dangote Group began with the accusation that the refinery was attempting to bar drivers of its 4,000 compressed natural gas trucks from joining any union. It was also alleged that, contrary to the freedom of association guaranteed by the 1999 Constitution and international labour conventions, the refinery’s management and MRS, owned by Sayyu Dantata, had compelled drivers to sign undertakings not to join oil and gas unions. Though we also heard that the Dangote Group had gone ahead to form a local association for its workers, there are no complaints from the affected workers that their rights or freedom of association were being violated.
I think we must look at the NUPENG in the eye and tell them to come down from this high horse of unionism and face the reality of today’s Nigeria. They should also be told to either resolve to work for Nigerians or forget any recourse to mindless activism. As much as the ideals behind unionism are good, we can’t also in our right senses compel anyone to join a union he or she doesn’t want to. The 4,000 truck drivers or is it 60,000 workers Dangote Refinery said would be directly employed in the process have not in anyway expressed displeasure that they are being maltreated in their workplace, so why is NUPENG engaged in anticipated cries, especially as we are unaware that a majority of (if any) the Dangote truck drivers are suffering from what the medical people would call hyposecretory condition or the dry-eye-syndrome.
Contrary to the claims by NUPENG, the Dangote Petroleum Refinery on Thursday came up frontally against the union, accusing it of peddling “wholly inaccurate” submissions in the feud. The refinery stated its commitment to labour rights while asserting that membership in trade unions is a voluntary right.
It stated: “Assertions that drivers are compelled to waive union rights are categorically false. Allegations of union suppression are unfounded and appear to be part of a broader narrative aimed at discrediting private sector progress,” adding that: “Far from threatening livelihoods, this initiative is expected to create over 60,000 direct jobs and many more indirectly. We launched about 4,000 CNG trucks and created jobs. Dangote did not take anybody’s job.”
I think the allure of securing check-off dues from the 60,000 staff the refinery claimed would be involved in the CNG initiative is already tilting the NUPENG chiefs into overdrive, making them see nothing other than the use of a sledgehammer to kill an ant. If workers of Dangote refuse to join NUPENG, I don’t think they would have violated any law in the land, after all, the Nigerian labour laws have been liberalised so that any other group can come up with alternatives to NLC and TUC and get registered. How long did it take Chris Ngige, as Minister of Labour, to get his lackeys in the universities to register a body called CONUA to rival ASUU, in the heat of Buhari’s government’s push to break the Academic Staff Union of Universities? Here is a NUPENG, which has seen Nigerians suffer severe indignities in the hands of oil marketers and governments in relation to fuel scarcity, imaginary fuel subsidies, and all that, and has kept quiet in the last two decades. Here is a union that has kept its lips sealed even as the nation wasted billions of hard-earned monies on moribund refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna Here is a body that has remained indifferent to serious allegations of sleaze hanging over the managers of the dead refineries all these years. Trying to flex muscles with a Dangote Refinery at this time is more of a misplaced bravado. Why can’t the union’s leaders engage the workers of the refinery and sell to them what they stand to benefit from being members of NUPENG? Why try to arm-twist the refinery to enrol its workers by fire by force? It would have been a good thing if we had continued to feel the impact of NUPENG in our lives after the heroics of Kokori and co, in 1994, but a body that kept silent in the face of multifaceted tyrannies suffered by the people cannot start receiving applause when it suddenly proclaims itself a messiah.
If NUPENG wants the ordinary Nigerians to take it seriously, it should batter the people less with the noise of its check-off dues and union stickers. It should play concrete roles in the lives of the people, the nation’s economy, and all that. Seeking to levy allegations that are rooted in emotional blackmail against a Dangote Refinery, which many have come to see as the liberator of the oppressed thus far, can only adorn that union a cloak of shame.
Culled from the Nigerian Tribune