The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has warned that its members will stage a general strike from Monday in protest at recent petrol price increases, a move which could hit crude production in Africa's largest oil exporter.
A meeting in Abuja ended without agreement when the NLC protested that the government had sent only a low-level representative -- the permanent secretary of the labour ministry, Timiebi Korimapa-Agary -- to negotiate.
"If I am going to make contributions, the intention is to try to persuade someone else ... that person cannot be the permanent secretary of the federal ministry of labour," NLC president Adams Oshiomhole told reporters.
"The executive is absent from this meeting unfortunately and we do need to talk to the executive. We need a political solution; not price modulators, price fixers," said Oshiomhole.
The director general of the Nigerian Employers Consultative Association, Segun Osinowo, also complained about the level of government representation.
"The government should think of constituting a more highly powered team which will involve other stakeholders to take the issue on as quickly as possible," he said.
Both sides said that a smaller group might meet at an unspecified time later in the week, while the NLC was due to meet the Senate later in the day.
"I am very confident that if we put our minds together to it and quickly meet, we can still submit something to the government tomorrow morning for government to take on at a higher level," Korimapa-Agary said.
The NLC team is also scheduled to hold a meeting Wednesday with the Senate over the fuel price hike, unionists said.
Nigeria's powerful blue collar oil union, the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas (NUPENG), affiliated to the NLC, civil society groups and a coalition of opposition parties have pledged their support for the NLC on its planned strike.
The pump price of petrol is a hugely sensitive issue for the impoverished masses in Africa's most populous nation, and previous increases have triggered two general strikes over the past year.
Although the country is a prominent exporter of the type of crude oil that is best suited for refining into petrol, its domestic refineries are ravaged by corruption and mismanagement and Nigeria's road transport and industry relies on expensive imports of refined fuels.
On Wednesday, oil rose to 52 dollars per barrel for the first time, as a world economic recovery continues to drive demand and traders nervously monitor supply problems in the Gulf of Mexico and security threats in Iraq (news - web sites) and Nigeria.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has been trying to abandon fuel subsidies as part of a broader agenda of economic reform, but a recent 25 percent jump in fuel prices has brought him once again into confrontation with labour.
Previous strikes have done little to disrupt Nigeria's exports of around 2.6 million barrels of crude per day, but world markets are already jittery after a recent armed rebellion in the country's oil-rich Niger delta region.
The government has said the new, higher fuel prices were in line with a deregulation policy introduced in October last year, which allows private oil-product retailers to import refined fuel and fix consumer sale prices.
