- Declares protesting electricity workers as ghost employees
- N7b paid to labour as union dues from workers’ entitlements
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| Benjamin Dikki DG, BPE |
The Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) says labour has confirmed that it wants the refineries privatised, but with shares properly allocated to workers, a condition the government has accepted.
The Director General of the BPE, Mr. Benjamin Dikki told The Guardian, however, that the same labour had failed to put its house in order, necessitating divergent positions from some of its members across the nation.
He said: “Everybody accepts, including labour, that there is need to privatise. It is now the issue of what strategy we need to privatise. Labour is saying, we want the Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) model, which by implication means that they want to be shareholders in the privatisation of the refineries. We told them that we don’t have a problem with that.
“The National Council on Privatisation has a standing policy that staff should be given shares in the companies they are working. And we have a model which we tried successfully with Eleme Petrochemicals Limited.
“Staff were allocated shares in the company, and we organised them and they set up a trust. That trust went to the bank and borrowed money and the money they borrowed to buy the shares was paid from the dividend of the sale.”
On the planned sale of the refineries, he said: “We told them (Labour) that we could replicate that model. But unfortunately, we talk with the national level of the labour unions, and then next day we hear one branch saying they are against privatisation. The following day we hear of another branch saying they are against privatisation, and another set will say they are for it, and then another against it.
“There hasn’t been a cohesive voice from the labour unions. Of course, you recall when the issue was first mooted that labour threatened to shut down government. And no president will sit down and take a decision that could cripple the economy. So, because of that government put the issues of privatisation of refineries on hold.”
Dikki stressed that though discussions were still ongoing with the labour unions, it was difficult to achieve any meaningful results because of the alleged politicisation of government’s intentions.”
His words: “I am not sure we are gong to look at this issue of refineries till we pass this election year, because everything is being over- politicised. Even things that are good for the nation are being over-politicised.
“But we will continue to engage with labour and once we come up with an acceptable model, one that is acceptable to labour and acceptable to government, then we will consider privatisation, but as long as we are not able to be on the same page with labour, we will not be privatising the refineries.”
Meanwhile, the government has come out to brand electricity employees who have been protesting against alleged non-payment of severance packages as ‘ ghost workers’.
Dikki made the submission in respect of an inquiry by The Guardian about the pockets of protests in the country. He said that instead of protesting on the streets, the workers should submit themselves for biometric verification, as all those who have been verified have been paid.
He said: “ We are intrigued that people who participated in the process of verification and the payment of these staff, still go out and make ludicrous statements concerning the state of the payment exercise. One, the total number of staff given to us by PHCN, and by implication, labour, because labour is made up of staff of PHCN, was 47,913 workers and we said no problem, we are going to do a verification, and a biometric capturing, and that we were going to pay everybody, but we were not going to pay ghost workers.
“We had to go through a process that would assure us that whoever we give a naira to is a bona fide PHCN worker. This verification committee had labour officials as members. And we verified and were able to authenticate slightly above 45, 300 and all have been paid. This number has been paid their severance components which went into their own individual accounts, current accounts. They have also been paid their Retirement Savings Account ( RSA), which has gone to their own retirement savings accounts. If what we are saying is not true, go to the Pensions Commission ( Pencom).
“ Pencom verifies before it hits the RSA account. First of all, all the money goes into the pension custodian. From the pension custodian, Pencom comes and verifies before they now authorise for it to be credited to individual RSAs. Now labour knows all this.
“We were amused the other day when we saw people demonstrating in Ibadan, that they are staff who have not been paid or whatever. They are ghost workers! Up till today we are verifying. If any of them is a bona fide employee, instead of standing in the sun demonstrating, let them come and let us verify them. The money to pay every worker is there.”
He went on: “There are about 2,000 people whom they ( labour) gave us, whose records we can’t find. They don’t have record of service. They don’t have record of employment. We have asked that if they have any document to prove that they are staff of old PHCN, they should come and let us verify them and pay them.
“When the labour unions talk like this, they forget that there is a 2 per cent union dues which we deducted for them from the entitlements of staff, and we credited the union account with N7 billion. Now the same union leaders are rising up to say that people have not been paid.
“Now, if people, have not been paid, where did we get the N7 billion union dues deductions that we credited to their account?”
He again urged the labour unions to assist government with relevant information about the people, who were protesting against non- payment, alleging blackmail in the latest protests.
According to the BPE chief, “Labour is part of the staff of the PHCN. If labour has information about those 2,000 that they forwarded to us, let them give to us.
“Let me repeat. No amount of blackmail will make us pay anybody who is not verified. We are not going to carry government money and splash it to people so that labour can stop demonstration. We don’t know which drums that they are dancing to. But they are not dancing to the drum of truth or fact.
“And I want members of the union to question the labour unions and officials. I hope they are not trying to justify why they will spend that N7 billion they took as dues from the workers entitlements. Organising demonstrations, frivolous demonstrations so that they can justify spending that money is uncalled for. Let members of the union also wake up to their responsibility and find out from labour what they are doing with the N7 billion.”
Repeatedly, government has said that it is making remarkable progress with the privatisation of the 10 generating power plants built under the National Integrated Power Plants ( NIPP).
Dikki stressed that the sale agreement and other related pacts were being finalised for seven of the plants, while those for the other three were pending because of a court case.
He said: “Recall that three of the NIPP plants’ sale is subject of court case. The three are on hold until the court issue is determined. The other seven have posted their preferred bidders bank guarantees. Now, we are going to the stage of negotiating the sales agreement with them and then executing the sale agreements. Then they will be due to pay the 25 per cent and then the 75 per cent within six months. We are on course.
“All of them have posted their preferred bidders bank guarantee which now empowers us to go into negotiations with them to finalise the sale agreement, the performance agreement and other documents.”
Source: The Guardian
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