ABUJA, 6 July 2003 — A dispute over three cents on a liter of petrol stood between Nigeria and the end of a six-day-old general strike yesterday, after union leaders refused to drop their demand for a hefty fuel price cut.
Strike leader Adams Oshiomhole, president of the Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC), told reporters that the crippling strike would continue until President Olusegun Obasanjo agreed to slash recently hiked pump prices by a fifth. This would bring a liter of petrol down to 32 naira (25 cents 21 euro cents) from its current price of 40, although Oshiomhole earlier acknowledged that the Nigerian leader was ready to meet the unions part-way, with a 35-naira cap. “The NEC believes that 32 naira is a reasonable compromise and is a sufficient sacrifice which the Nigerian people are prepared to make,” Oshiomhole said after a rowdy meeting of the NLC executive committee.
He said that the leaders of the NLC’s 29 affiliated unions had now given his leadership team the authority to call off the strike if it felt the government had moved far enough. But its room for negotiation is tightly circumscribed, and the final price could move “slightly, but only slightly... just to encourage the government to come down,” he said. Asked to explain what “slightly” meant in this context, a union official told AFP that Oshiomhole might eventually accept a price of 33 naira.
There was no immediate reaction from government to the unions’ renewed demand. Nigerian workers walked out en masse on Monday to protest a decision by Obasanjo to abolish a government subsidy on domestic fuel sales and to hike the price cap on petrol by 54 percent. Despite being Africa’s largest exporter of crude oil — with an OPEC quota of more than two million barrels per day — Nigeria suffers from crippling shortages of refined fuels such as petrol, diesel and kerosene. The first major decision Obasanjo has made since he was re-elected on April 19 has been to begin to deregulate fuel distribution. He hopes that by dropping the subsidy paid to the tottering state oil company and hiking the price cap, he will lure in private capital to refurbish Nigeria’s decrepit refineries, increase imports and generate competition.
In addition, he argues that the 250 billion naira ($1.95 billion, 1.7 billion euros) that he says his government spends annually on the subsidy would be better spent on health and education.