Refinery workers join union strikes at Nigeria’s state oil company NNPC

Nigeria's petroleum minister said on Wednesday he would hold talks with trade unions to resolve a strike over restructuring at the state oil firm NNPC in Africa's biggest crude producer.

The protest did not affect oil output in Africa's biggest economy, a labor union official told Reuters, adding that workers had blocked the entrance to the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries, but oil insiders say both are not in production.

President Muhammadu Buhari has prioritized reforming Nigeria's oil sector, long mired in endemic corruption and mismanagement, as a sharp fall in crude prices has prompted the worst crisis in years in the continent's biggest economy.

On Tuesday, the minister, Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, who also heads the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), said Buhari had approved a restructuring of NNPC into upstream, downstream, gas power marketing, refinery groups, and ventures divisions.

The Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) said 7,000 of its members, including refinery workers, petroleum tanker drivers and maintenance staff went on strike at midnight on Wednesday.

"The main reason for this is that we are in the dark. These changes have created real apprehension among our members," said the union's acting general secretary, Lumumba Okugbawa, adding that no decision had been taken on the strike's duration.

Kachikwu said he was "concerned" by the industrial action, which PENGASSAN said also included members of another union, and sought to clarify the changes.

"We did not unbundle NNPC, what we simply did was a reorganization. NNPC has not been unbundled in the sense of breaking up NNPC into different institutions," he told Reuters, adding that the moves were a bid to provide proper stewardship.

"We are going to have a meeting with them right now. I don't want the industry shut down -- I am going now to resolve the issues very soon," said the minister.

An NNPC spokesman could not immediately be reached to confirm the industrial action, but a Reuters reporter said gates to the company's head office in the capital, Abuja, were closed as were seven NNPC fuel stations in the city. There were also protests outside the Kaduna refinery, witnesses said.

NNPC mega-stations in oil-producing Rivers and Bayelsa states are active, but some independent marketers have shut down.