By Victor Ahiuma-Young,

LAGOS— ORGANISED labour in the nation’s power sector, yesterday, berated the Minister of Information, Mr. Lai Mohammed, over insinuations that workers were sabotaging the power sector and that government would deal with them, insisting that the minister was off the mark as far as power supply in the country was concerned.

Operating on the platform of the National Union of Electricity Employees, NUEE, labour noted that if there were people sabotaging the sector, it was the distribution companies that  allegedly refused to accept load allocated to them.

NUEE, in a statement by its General Secretary, Mr. Joe Ajaero, declared that any infringement on the rights and privileges of workers in the power sector would be strongly resisted despite the minister’s stance.

The union said it was shocked that the minister never saw anything wrong in the sack of about 400 workers by one distribution company and the continued abuse and denigration of workers’ rights and privileges by the DISCOs, but had risen to defend vested interests who had hijacked the power sector to the detriment of the generality of Nigerians.

According to the union, “we must remind Alhaji Lai Mohammed who the real saboteurs are so that he can go after them as promised. They are those who refuse load allocation from the national grid for onward distribution to our factories and homes so that they can continue the rip-off.

“Those that punish Nigerians with estimated billing, whether there was electricity supply or not, those that continue subjecting Nigerians to untold darkness without reason, and those that increase tariff every time with the support of people like Lai Mohammed are the real socio-economic saboteurs.

“Instead of looking for the so-called saboteurs outside who have borne all the errors of this government, we urge Lai Mohammed to look inward and stop using the apparatus of the government to cover up the heist and massive corruption that characterised power privatisation in Nigeria.

“We urge the minister to come clean and stand for Nigerians, at least for once, so that the evil that will manifest more and more in the sector is nipped in the bud immediately.”