THE lingering labour crisis between Shell and the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), which has culminated in acute fuel shortage in the country, may have been resolved.
The development came as Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke assured that the ministry was ready to supply fuel to the country during the yuletide period.
The indication that normalcy would return to domestic fuel supply followed a statement issued at the end of a meeting initiated by the Ministry of Labour and Productivity between NUPENG, Shell and the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in Abuja on Wednesday.
The statement said both parties had resolved to work harmoniously on all labour matters in the collective interest of the sector and that court cases instituted by NUPENG and a Shell worker, Mr. Fidelis Okandeji would be withdrawn to make room for negotiation among other issues.
The statement read in part: "That both parties would work harmoniously and consult on labour related matters to ensure industrial peace; that based on the intervention of the Minister of Labour and Productivity, Chukwuemeka Wogu, Shell had reinstated the employment of Kingsley Enomate and NUPENG had called off its strike against Shell; that Fidelis Okandeji and NUPENG would seek the leave of the court to withdraw all pending cases instituted by them; that NUPENG would deploy its internal mechanism to address the issue of Okandeji to be facilitated by Shell; that both parties would continue discussions on outstanding labour issues and that both parties shall update the Ministry on the progress made on or before January 31, 2013."
The minister stressed that the NNPC had enough in its reserves to keep the country wet of products throughout the Christmas and New Year celebrations.
She explained: "Initially, the queues came out of the whole fuel subsidy issue and the fact of course that verifications of certain amounts and certain marketers' claims were being made very stringently and this had to be done. We cannot eat our cake and have it. We cannot keep calling out for transparency and accountability and pointing at corruption if we are not prepared to bear some of the hardship that will obviously come when you are trying to clean up a sector.
The verifications have been done, payments are now being made and like I said the queues are actually beginning to go down. We too on the NNPC side had pushed out a lot of our strategic reserve in a bid to ensure that people were not overtly put out in terms of fuel scarcity."
Now that Shell and NUPENG have resolved their industrial dispute, the minister expressed optimism that the long queues in most of the cities across the country would soon disappear.
