Labour Rejects Alleged Plan to Privatise Transmission Company

Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja

Organised labour, under the auspices of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), has opposed an alleged move by the Federal Government to privatise the Transmission Company of Nigeria.

It said the company is a strategic economic asset of immense national security implications that should not be handed over to few privileged individuals.

NLC’ also said that the Sales Agreement for electricity generating companies (GENCOs) and distribution companies (DISCOs) is long overdue for review.

In a statement signed by the NLC president, Ayuba Wabba, the Congress condemned what it described as the continued balkanisation, stripping and stealing of Nigeria’s economic assets.

It said: “The current attempt to hand over the Transmission Company of Nigeria to a few ‘privileged’ Nigerians is self-serving, obtuse, odious, morally reprehensible and criminal. Nigerian workers and people are vehemently opposed to this plot and will resist this grand larceny.

“NLC’ has learnt with great consternation a surreptitious plan to sell the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) by the Bureau of Public Enterprises, a body that has become synonymous with an unending swindle of the people of Nigeria.

“We wish to place in the public domain that neither Congress nor the sectoral affiliate union was officially contacted or even informally consulted on the alleged plan. Therefore, Congress advises that if the report was planted in the newspaper and so, designed to fly a kite, the paper kite is riddled with holes, sodden, clumsy and torn in different places. In a word, this kite cannot fly.”

In the statement, Wabba said the planned sale of the TCN is only an attempt to further confound the hardship people are facing and concurrently, raise electricity tariff.

“Unfortunately, this time around, Nigerians have had enough. The Government cannot promise improved power supply to consumers by the planned sale of TCN

“This position flows from the ineluctable lesson of the historical incidences of allowing some private organisations of questionable intentions and antecedence to own and run strategic economic assets in our country.

At any rate, Congress is hard put to find any serious country that would hand over her strategic energy grid to private entities, not even for commercial management let alone outright ownership in a potentially dubious deal.

NLC said the privatised assets have been turned into “unrealisable collaterals for unpayable loans, constituting a bone stuck in the throat of financial institutions and sundry creditors.”