Boys juggled soccer balls in deserted streets and cars jockeyed for position at filling stations Wednesday as Nigeria's labor unions launched a strike aimed at overturning government price hikes on gasoline in Africa's oil giant.
Nigeria is one of the world's leading crude producers, but virtually all of its gasoline is now imported after years of graft, mismanagement and violence rendered refineries inoperable.
Heavy government subsidies keep reimported petroleum products cheap in a country whose citizens complain they get little else in the way of services from a notoriously corrupt government. Unions launched their strike in hopes of forcing the government to roll back a 15 percent increase on automobile fuel.
"Our government makes us suffer too much. They never do anything to release our pain, they just keep piling on more suffering," said Funmi Olowu, a 32-year-old school teacher. "I support the strike, I want it to go on until the government completely reverses the increases."
Oil receipts account for some 80 percent of Nigeria's total government revenue and the unions are threatening to close the taps of Nigeria's energy industry, which is the biggest in Africa and the eighth-largest worldwide, sending crude prices toward nine-month highs on international markets.
While there were no immediate reports that the first day of the strike halted oil exports, the strike appeared to hold in all the country's regions. In the Muslim north, union workers enforced the shutdown by turning commercial passenger buses away from main cities and in the capital, Abuja, they blockaded a main road with tires and tree branches.
On the streets of Lagos, banks, schools and larger businesses were shuttered. While salaried employees could afford to stay home, many petty traders continued selling their dried peppers, roasted corn and smoked fish. For them, a day without earnings likely means a night of hunger.
"The strike is justified. We can't be taken for granted. The masses are suffering," said Freewheel Finesi, who had declined to join the strike. The 51-year old was hurrying through empty streets, his briefcase filled with spectacles. "I have to go to work. I'm an optician and a man needs his glasses."
With fuel deliveries mostly shut down and filling stations empty, most cars stayed off the streets, calming Lagos' notorious traffic jams - the furious, fuming pileups known as "go-slows" that typify the daily commutes in an overcrowded megalopolis of 13 million.
Boys converted empty streets into soccer pitches, sending shots between goal posts made of wooden stools that would normally seat the keepers of nearby market stalls. Others juggled balls alone, sending them bouncing from feet to thighs, to shoulders then onto upended foreheads.
Vehicles jostled for pole position at the few filling stations still selling fuel. Many customers cursed signs that still carried the official price - 75 naira, or about 60 cents, per liter.
Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo jacked the price up only days before handing over power on May 29 to Yar'Adua, who prevailed in elections rejected as rigged by the opposition and deemed not credible by international observers. Obasanjo stepped down because of term limits; Yar'Adua was the candidate of Obasanjo's party.
Yar'Adua's new administration, its legitimacy undermined by the accusations of a flawed election, engaged the unions and offered to roll back the 15 percent fuel price increase by about half - despite the drain on government coffers that the subsidy represents. The government is trying to liberalize the economy and abolish anticompetitive tactics.
But in a move widely viewed as a probing tactic to gauge Yar'Adua's strength, the unions insisted on a complete repeal of the new measures, which also included Obasanjo's last-minute sale of two refineries to a pair of rich supporters.
Many Nigerians treated the first day of the strike as a welcome diversion from their daily duties, but warned that irritation would increase if supplies ran short due to an extended work stoppage.
For Finesi, the optician, less work was the opposite of what his countrymen need. "Why can't the government put on the refineries?" he asked, rhetorically. "It's just poor maintenance."
Nigeria's labour unions insisted the strike which began Wednesday would continue, with Labour Congress President Abdulwaheed Omar declaring: 'There is no going back.'
The opposition Action Congress party meanwhile berated the government's attitude to the strike as 'insensitive and arrogant'.
The strike impacted heavily on social service, but did not immediately affect crucial oil exports.
Workers in the crude-oil production sector went about their normal businesses, but an official of Anglo-Dutch oil giant, Shell, said there was no guarantee the situation would endure.
Secretary to government, Babagana Kingibe, had accused labour of intransigence and being uncooperative to dialogue with government. 'Government's charges are untenable and diversionary, Omar insisted.
He commended what he called 70 per cent compliance to the strike directives by Nigerians and said labour would move out early Thursday to ensure that compliance was total across the country.
Omar said the refusal by government to invite labour to another round of talks was another indication of its ignorance and said government was daring the Nigerian people.
The opposition Action Congress party, in a statement issued in Abuja by spokesman, Lai Mohammed, slammed a statement by Secretary to government Babagana Kingibe that the strike was partisan and designed to serve political ends.
Mohammed argued that 'only those who neither buy fuel for their vehicles nor shop locally with their hard-earned money could author such a careless statement as the one credited to Kingibe.'
He expressed dismay that President Umaru Yar'Adua's administration would want to 'cast aspersions on the integrity of labour leaders for taking up the gauntlet on behalf of the toiling masses, who have been pauperised by the anti-people policies of the immediate past government of President Olusegun Obasanjo'.
'Matters concerning fuel prices and VAT touch everybody, except top government officials, whose huge foreign travel allowance allow them to shop abroad when they travel, and whose cars are fuelled at the expense of the government,' Mohammed stressed.
AC reiterated its earlier call on government to move swiftly to meet the demand of the unions by cancelling the inexplicable hike in fuel prices and VAT rates, quickly implementing the 15 per cent salary increase for workers and reversing immediately the underhand sale of two key refineries and the ?Egbin' power station in Lagos.
Earlier in the day, Omar led a protest march of labour to picket petrol stations and banks that opened for business.
In the march was a Deputy Commissioner of Police in Abuja, Ade Shinaba, who led a team of policemen to ensure peace.
Shinaba told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that 12,000 policemen and women were deployed to the march 'to ensure that hoodlums do not hijack the exercise to foment trouble.'
He commended labour for ensuring that its protest march was held peacefully.
The NLC, the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria and the Joint Action Forum, a coalition of civil society groups, had called an indefinite strike.
It was to demand for a reversal of pump price of petrol to 50 cents a litre, instead of the 59 cents a litre imposed by ex- President Olusegun Obasanjo 48 hours before he left office on May 29.
The strike was also to demand a reversal of value-added tax rate to 5 per cent instead of 10 per cent imposed by Obasanjo.
Labour also demanded a 15 per cent wage increase for government workers and the reversal of the sale of two of the country's refineries by Obasanjo.
President Umaru Yar'adua Tuesday conceded to the reversal of VAT rate, a 50 per cent decrease on the increase in the pump price of petrol and the payment of 15 per cent wage increase to workers, with effect from January.
Government, however, referred labour to the Bureau of Public Enterprises, in charge of its privatisation programme, for negotiations over the sale of the refineries.
Oil-rich Nigeria has no functional refinery and imports its petroleum products. In spite of its oil wealth, most Nigerians cannot make ends meet as they live on under one dollar a day.
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