Bloomberg
12 January 2012
From Businessweek
Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan will meet labor leaders in a bid to end a four-day-old nationwide strike against the lifting of fuel subsidies and avert a shutdown of the oil industry, a union leader said.
The meeting will take place at 5 p.m. local time today in Abuja , the capital, Peter Esele, president of the Trade Union Congress, told reporters. Earlier, the Pengassan labor union said it would begin shutting down Africa ’s biggest oil industry on Jan. 15, while the Nupeng union said it has withdrawn its workers from fields operated by companies such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc. The strike has limited trade in stocks and the naira, closed ports and banks and sparked street protests.
“If there’s a prolonged shutdown of oil exports, that would put tremendous presssure on the government,” Antony Goldman, the head of London-based PM Consulting, said by phone today. In the short term, “companies producing off floating production storage and offloading vessels can probably increase production” to offset initial losses, he said.
Jonathan, who won a four-year term in April, has pledged to use savings from the 1.2 trillion naira ($7.4 billion) subsidy to invest in power plants and roads in sub-Saharan Africa ’s second-largest economy. At the same time he faces an increase in religious violence in parts of the north where he has declared a state of emergency and says Islamist militants pose a worse threat to the country than the 1967-70 civil war.
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