• The old PHCN workers should not force themselves on the new power companies
Old habits, they say, die hard. That is perhaps the best way to describe the latest but needless tussle between members of staff of the defunct Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN) and the new owners of the entities. This time around, it is the workers making the stunt, with their resistance to the move by the new owners to shed excess weight. These workers, if we may recall, had collected their severance packages under the mutually agreed terms of settlement; the terms also set six months as cut-off date for the new investors to review the status of staff to determine their requirement. The workers, as it appears, would rather have it their way by holding on to the jobs even if the new business owners do not need their services.
We do not see the issues as anything but cut and dried. Were the issues about the government reneging on their obligations to these workers, their case would certainly have merit, not only deserving of sympathy but our understanding. Our understanding is that the parties – the Federal Government represented by the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) and the powerful electricity workers union have gone beyond this stage. Overall, a whopping N380 billion is on record to have been paid to the workers after negotiations that were as painstaking as tortuous for the parties. We also understand that the success of the process was what made the handover of the companies possible.
As it is, the bone of contention appears to be the question of the obligations of the new owners to these workers after the expiration of the six-month contract. Surely, the workers could not now feign ignorance about the implications of the deregulation of the power sector, both in terms of the changed landscape for service delivery and also in terms of the number of redundancies that would inevitably follow. This was after all the basis of their insistence on collecting every dime due to them before the new investors could take over. Any suggestion therefore to the contrary at this stage would smack of bad faith – or dishonesty.
None of the choices, we daresay, includes the narrow self-seeking path being championed by the workers. After eating their cake, the workers cannot be seen to be seeking to have it back. We cannot understand, for instance, why the same workers that delivered ‘crazy bills’ to Nigerians for decades would be wondering why same has not disappeared barely six months after the new investors took over. Just as we wonder why the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) that had all the while known that PHCN had casual workers for over 10 years would now be clamouring for retirement packages for them.
All said, we disagree that the new investors have any fresh obligations to retain any staff considered surplus to their requirements. That, obviously would go against the grain of the privatisation exercise. More than that, it is the surest path to consolidating the ancien regime of poor work ethics, poor service delivery, and corruption. Forcing the old, surplus hands on the new operators would certainly be akin to putting new wine in old wineskins. The idea of using their numbers to intimidate the rest of Nigerians must equally be seen as deplorable and archaic. If they have any issues, they should be sorted out with the government. Anything to the contrary would be seen as an attempt to entrench themselves in the system.
Clearly, the dwindling fortunes experienced in the sector in recent time have made the choices facing the nation rather limited. Top among the choices is the need to get the new investors to ramp up services and hence fulfill the yearnings and aspirations of Nigerians who have come to see the privatisation exercise as the long-awaited answer to the sector’s woes. They need to invest in new equipment and human capital; we expect to see injection of fresh blood into the system to replace the old, aging workforce, to move gingerly in the direction of enthroning the electricity consumer as king.
