By Victor AHIUMA-YOUNG
TRADE Union Congress of Nigeria, TUC, has declared that there is no guarantee that the deregulation of the downstream sector of the nation’s petroleum industry will bring the much talk about investment in the sector.

President-General of TUC, Comrade Peter Esele, told Sweet Crude that argument such argument being forward by government was faulted because there were other factors attract investors to a particular industry.

According to him, “Diesel is deregulated, how many people have come in to say that they want to set up  refineries for diesel? Aviation fuel is deregulated, how many people have come in to say that they want to make it their primary assignment? You can also say you want to concentrate on these other products.

Government does not even know how many litres of petrol we consume in a day, and they went ahead to set the price at N141. How did they arrive at that price? First of all, are they not supposed to know how many litres we consume, and then take away the wastages from the system?

Even Ghana that everybody is talking about, how long did it take Ghana to deregulate? They were taking it away bit by bit. Ghana has just gone ahead to add to the price of petrol because they have devalued their currency. They also went ahead and put 20% of wage increase. But we don’t have anything like that here.”

“The N18, 000 minimum wages that we have been talking about for about two years, they have not yet paid. Yet they have gone ahead to increase fuel prices by 50%. The actual value of N18,000 is N9,000 now, because once you get a corresponding increase in PMS, that 50% will affect feeding, transport, school fees, and your salary.

Even if you have 1 million naira in your account now, the actual value is now about 500 thousand. Because once you touch the price of petrol it affects everything else. If President Goodluck Jonathan says that the only thing he wants to do now in this four years is to give us power, give us milestones. Before they used to tell us the amount of mega watts we had but nobody does that anymore. It is not done anywhere in the world.”

On the insinuations that government has but some buses to TUC and the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, as part of Subsidy Re-investment Empowerment Programme, SURE, Comrade Esele said, “that is not true. I saw a cartoon in one the papers that government was giving NLC 300 buses and TUC 150 buses, but that is not true at all. We are not part of this government transportation scheme.

What we did was to take a loan from the Urban Development Bank, a loan that we have been pursuing for about two years. Government said they are giving guarantee for the loan. We have been pursuing this loan since when Yar’Adua was alive.

They approved N10 billion for private sector and N5bilion for NLC and TUC. If the government was the one giving the loan, it should be free. But we are paying back to Urban Development Bank. It is not that the government has the buses somewhere and they want to hand over the keys to us.

We have brought in 150 buses. These buses came here before the strike. It is Labaram Marku that was saying these things; I am used to him saying things like that. Last time, he said we were being disrespectful during a meeting and nothing like that happened. Perhaps the Minister of Information is misinforming us.”

“The NLC buses are not here yet, and they went into agreement long ago. If they are telling us now that they want to give us buses, fine. But they have not given us the buses yet. As President-General of TUC I am not aware of any new buses that they want to give to us.