Divestment causing job losses in oil firms – Achese

Speaking at a press briefing in Lagos yesterday, he said the multinational oil companies were divesting their assets because of the new provisions in the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) which will increase their royalties and taxes to the federal government.
He said; “The casualisation/outsourcing of workers has become a cancer, especially in the oil and gas sector. The union will call its members nation-wide to withdraw their services without notice if industrial relations issues on outsourcing and negotiation of collective bargaining agreement CBA) for our members are not addressed by the multinational oil companies, especially Mobil Oil Producing, Agip, Chevron and Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC)”
He bemoaned the level of crude oil theft in the country, saying the development constitutes  serious threat to national security.
Igwe said the politicisation of the “petroleum host community” in the PIB should be stopped immediately, urging the NASS to use the opportunity of the PIB to order the genetic fingerprinting of Nigeria’s petroleum assets so as to stop the big oil thieves”.
He advocated the training of locals in the areas of security capability and use of technological skills for protecting the oil installations in their communities.
He explained that  it is important that the locals are brought to an appreciable level of knowledge of the relevant technology for mounting surveillance on such installations, dictating break points and perform intelligence gathering.
He noted that although the Section 8 of the Miscellaneous Offences Act provides for life imprisonment for anyone stealing crude oil or petroleum products or vandalising the pipelines, hardly has anyone been caught or prosecuted. He reckoned that “it is obvious the oil thieves have powerful allies in government. And worst still, the security agencies seem to be complicit as far as this menace of crude oil theft is concerned.”
“It is believed that rather than continue churning out products that would end up being stolen by some cartel, it is better to stop production completely, to stop oil from flowing through the pipelines, making products unavailable for theft. Though this is very logical but it has serious implications for the health of the oil industry and indeed the nation’s economy,” he said.