Daily Independent Online.
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Friday, June 11, 2004.
Reps propose
extra budget to subsidise fuel prices
By Uchenna Awom,
Sokoto and Don
Bassey, Abuja
As a cushioning measure aimed at
permanently solving the fuel price crisis, which has crippled commercial
activities in some cities in the last two days, the House of Representatives
has begun moves to pressurise the presidency to send in a supplementary appropriation
bill that will subsidise the prices of petroleum products.
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had last
week called for a nationwide strike over the latest price increase, which
raised the price of petrol from N43 per litre to N53.
Disclosing the move to newsmen in Sokoto on
Wednesday, the House Majority Leader, Abdul Ningi, said the leadership has
already fixed a meeting with President Olusegun Obasanjo to discuss the
possibility of the supplementary budget.
He said this has become necessary in the
light of the House’s handicap to ask the executive to dip hand into the
excess crude sales earning to subsidise the prices, because of the clause
inserted in the Appropriation Act, which bars anybody from touching the
federation account without the approval of the National Assembly.
However, Ningi expressed the hope that the
executive will not go ahead to increase the prices of the products further in
defiance of the public criticisms and the ruling of the High Court, which
ordered that the old price of N38 per litre subsists.
He also reminded the Petroleum Products
Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) that it was not set up to increase prices of
petroleum products but rather to regulate it.
Meanwhile, a member of the House of
Representatives, Mrs Nkechi Nwaogu, representing Obingwa/Osisioma/Ugwunagbo
Federal Constituency of Abia State, has hinted that the House might propose a
total review of the powers of NLC when it resumes from its recess next month.
In particular, the legislators would seek
to make it illegal for NLC and organised labour generally to involve or coerce
the private sector into partaking in future strikes when there is an industrial
dispute between it (labour) and the Federal Government or any of the 36 states
or local governments.
Nwaogu dropped this hint in Abuja on
Thursday while answering callers’ questions on an Abuja-based radio
programme. She faulted labour’s directives that banks, markets, petrol
filling stations and other private businesses should remain shut for the entire
duration of the strike.
Nwaogu, who is a member of five House
committees, including Appropriation, Women Affairs, House Services and
Information, said while organised labour reserves the right to embark on
industrial action to drive home its demands and pressurize government to review
all or some of its policies.
it lacked the power to coerce non-members
and individual businessmen and women from going about their normal activities.
Accusing the Comrade Adams Oshiomhole-led
NLC of being strike-thirsty, Mrs Nwaogu said labour’s resort to strike at
the slightest disagreement with government had led to the loss of several
millions of naira, a situation which she said was not the best for the
country’s economy.
Reiterating the House of Representatives’ position
that the increase in prices of petroleum products was unacceptable at the
moment, the former bank manager accused NLC of hurrying into a strike without
first exhausting the option of dialogue, adding that all stakeholders,
including labour, had subscribed to the deregulation of the downstream oil
sector since government could not continue subsidising fuel for ever.
