By Sarah NEGEDU
Unionised workers of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, NUPRC, in Abuja are threatening to pull out their members from terminals across the country if the management fails to address issues affecting their welfare in the next 24 hours.
The staff, who staged a peaceful protest at the commission’s headquarters in Abuja, accused the management of non-remittance of pension deductions, poor working environment, insufficient working tools, as well as non-payment of outstanding claims for staff medicals.
The workers, who are members of the PENGASSAN, also accused the management of outstanding payments of 2023 upfront allowances, unpaid staff on-call allowance, non-payment of outsourced personnel, among other welfare issues.
Branch chairman of the worker’s union, Comrade Okechukwu Anya, while speaking with journalists during the protest, condemed the non-remittance of pension deductions, adding that the action was an outright contravention of the Pension Reform Act (2014) which stipulates that monthly pension contributions should be remitted not later than 7 days.
The branch chairman, who accused the NUPRC management of outright disregard in resolving the lingering issues, regretted that all attempts to draw the management’s attention to the worker’s plights fell on deaf ears.
“We have been engaging them since January. We have written series of letters, held physical meetings both officially and unofficially and we’ve been met with paucity of funds. For every time we throw up these issues, we are told there is no fund but we know what is happening in the system.
“We know how they are awarding contracts and inflating these contracts. We know how money are being expended on unnecessary legal cases and spending huge sums of money on issues that are not supposed to be prioritized over staff welfare and that is why we are registering our concerns.”
He insisted the workers will be pulled out from the terminals if nothing is done to address the issues raised.
“We pull our staff out of the terminal with immediate effect. We have our staff waiting at the terminal waiting for the next line of action. We are putting management on notice if they don’t quickly comply with our demands and our welfare we will pull out our staff with immediate effect. We are giving management 24hours to respond to these issues or we pull out our staff.”