Business
Buhari meets with NUPENG, PENGASSAN behind closed doors
President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday met behind closed-doors with the leaders of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, NUPENG and Pentroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN at the Presidential Villa, Abuja
Addressing the media at the end of the meeting, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, said the meeting was held to promote peace and harmony in the oil sector.
He said: “The meeting with the President was basically to review in the oil industry some of the concern areas that he himself is trying to find joint solutions and share thoughts.
“Like you know, His Excellency has too many constituencies; first will be politics, second army and the third will be the oil industry. So matter of this nature touches his heart very much. And this is the first opportunity that the unions have had to spend a bit of time with him as a father.
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“So we shared thoughts, areas of concerns and some solution potentials and agreed to collaborate and work together.”
On the areas of concerns shared with the President, the Minister said: “I will probably highlight a few areas of concerns. The PIB, the union wants us to obviously work harder than we do and try to get the PIB passed as soon as possible. They are worried about the fuel scarcity issue and want a long time solutions to finally resolve this issue. They are worried about the refineries and are thankful we didn’t sell the refineries without looking to work collaboratively with them to see how to make the refineries work.
“They are worried about the utilisation of depots and how best to do that, they are worried about all kinds of logistics issues that plague the oil industry.
“They are worried about job loss in the sector arising from the position of majors who feel that the economy is giving rough end of the sticks and then try to whittle down staff. And so we are going to be working with the oil majors to ensure to ensure that we do not experience the kind of job loss that we are hearing has the potential to occur in the sector.” He added
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