From Adanna Nnamani, Abuja
Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) has called out President Bola Tinubu over uncontrolled ministerial appointments.
Its President, Festus Osifo, made the call at the union’s Energy and Labour Summit 2023 with the theme, “Petroleum Downstream Deregulation and Gas Utilisation, in Abuja, yesterday.
Osifo, who is also president of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), claimed that the current state of the nation required shrinking the size of government in order to reduce costs rather than lavish expenditure on managing the operations of the nation.
He said it was unjust for Nigerians to be forced to suffer the brunt of the loss of fuel subsidies while the government carries on as usual, living in luxury.
“You cannot continuously do things the way it was done in the past and you are now telling the generality of the people that they have to tighten their belts and as an association, PENGASSAN, we must also come up with policy statements to hold government accountable, because government at the end of the day must cut and reduce the cost of governance because if you do not reduce the cost of governance, you will not have enough funds to be able to channel into the productive areas of the economy. We have seen the government of today, appointments are endless. You have a particular government as of today they have appointed nothing less than six aides in the media alone.
“So, we think that as government, what we should be thinking of is how to shrink the cost of governance. We have 48 ministers at the moment and some of these ministers at the end of the day, are going to recruit aides, they are going to recruit PAs and PAs to PAs. Before you know it, that government size is going to bloated as well.”
The labour leader added that over the years, the labour movement has been firm in its decisions regarding what should be done before deregulation by the government.
“A lot of the things to put in place have been stated in the past. For the short term, the medium term, and for the long term. These have been established, and also, yesterday you heard when the panelists came, they also made some far-reaching comments or proposals on what could be done in order to alleviate the suffering of that Nigerians are passing through today and you could see labor leaders both in the past and now, are all in sync with what could be done. In the short term, we should talk about palliative, in the medium term, we must be able to design a good transportation system for our country because that is key and that is necessary,