‘We’ll work with government to ensure a seamless transitional electricity market’

As Nigerians await the physical handover of the successor companies created from the unbundling of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) to the new investors, Joe Ajaero, general secretary of the National Union of Electricity Employees and deputy president, Nigeria Labour Congress, in this interview with FEMI ASU, says there is need for a transitional agreement between government and labour to ensure a seamless transitional electricity market.

What do you think about the unbundling of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN)?

PHCN has been unbundled since 2005, so it is no longer an issue as at today. What the unbundling was all about was breaking it into companies such that we now have Ikeja as a company, Eko as a company, Enugu as a company.

Do you think it was actually right for it to have been unbundled?

If it was unbundled for efficiency, that would be okay. But if it was unbundled for the purpose of just selling it to individuals, then it was wrongly directed. You could unbundle a company for efficiency, especially when you have a kind of unitary reporting system.

Prior to now, there had been controversies about the number of PHCN staff to be paid severance benefits and the amount to be paid. Have the controversies been resolved?

We can only say it has been resolved when everybody who is working in the sector receives his or her entitlement. If somebody claims they are working there, you need to go there and verify whether he is working and find out why his name was omitted.

I think it was your union which recently dismissed government’s claims that over 70 percent of the workers had been paid their terminal benefits; what is the situation now?

I don’t even know why we are interested in the percentage that has been paid. Yes, they have commenced payment. If they have the money to pay everybody, they can pay them up within one week. And not every week, you say you have paid 70 percent, you have paid 100 percent. No station has been fully paid as we discuss now.

Most stations have not received anything. And of all the people paid, they have not received 60 percent of their entitlements, it is part payment. I now want to understand what is meant by 70 percent.

If you pay 70 percent of the people 50 percent of their entitlement, what percentage did you pay? Because somebody can just wake up and decide to pay 100 percent of the workers 10 percent of their entitlements and say they have paid 100 percent. The payment is aggregated into pension component and the gratuity component.

The gratuity component is what they have tried to pay in some stations, and they are saying 70 percent have been paid. Even when they pay everybody in PHCN 100 percent of their gratuities, it does not constitute 60 percent of the payment.

There are other payments and there are issues. By the Privatisation Act, the 10 percent of the shares is reserved for the workers and we have written them through our lawyer, Femi Falana, saying we want that our 10 percent. They should reconcile it.

The union dues deduction of 2 percent is part of it. It is being deducted but not being remitted. When you deduct my salary by 2 percent and you do not remit, where are you keeping it? It means if my money is 100 percent, you have only paid me 98 percent.

There are a lot of issues piling up and I think we should address them and taste this privatisation because they have told Nigerians that privatisation is the answer, it is the medicine that cures all ailments. So they should not disrupt the process, so that privatisation will cure all ailments.

Is there any agreement you signed with government as regards when the new investors can disengage the PHCN workers or can it be done immediately after handover?

The government did not want to have an agreement with us on this. It then means that jointly we have to look at a transitional arrangement that will not leave vacuum in the process and when we agree on that we will work on it to make it seamless so that there won’t be any problem in the process of transition and Nigerians will not feel any pain.

In the event that some PHCN workers end up being disengaged, investment and wealth management experts have expressed fears that the terminal benefits being paid to them might be frittered away as some of them do not have business or investment acumen, what is your take on this?

I think when you start work, one day you will stop that work. Everybody that is working must reflect that someday the job will end either through voluntary or involuntary measures. As we speak, some people are retiring. We have over 10,000 retirees already.

Anyone who fails to manage his terminal benefits well will suffer for it. Some others have already established something before they paid them their entitlements and those things are moving very well. And this entitlement is like bonus. Some will use it to add to what they are doing; some others will be swindled by tricksters. As a union, apart from moving round, I have sent circular round to tell them to use the money wisely. We will continue to do our best.

Is it true that the severance package being paid is not up to date?

Yes. I have written them on that telling them that when they calculated the entitlements, it was with the impression that they would commence payment by June 2012, but now we are in September 2013, a period of about 15 months, they have to compute this pro rata.

In that same letter, I said the last promotion was June 2012, and that promotion is conducted every May/June. They did not conduct this year’s promotion. When you were asking me about labour issues, I had told you there are a lot of labour issues. So they have refused address it and when we get to the appropriate point, we will settle them. I know that they will agree to settle it; nobody can say that we are talking nonsense. Maybe they want to pay off this one, so that the weight will not be much on them.

Besides that, since 2011, there are people who have retired normally from PHCN, their gratuities have not been paid and we computed it, to the tune of about N19 billion. And we told government that since this people have retired and they are on pension and their gratuities is to this tune, clear it first before paying those who are active workers.

They have started paying the active staff. The issue of the retirees is yet to be addressed, and it is part of the whole computation we made initially. A whole lot of issues are hanging around which I feel they should sit down to address.

 Do you think the entry of the private sector would bring about a turn around in the nation’s power supply?

Well, I want to be optimistic that the private sector will improve power supply, but if you see any improvement in power supply between now and the next five years, it is not the private sector. The Federal government has built power stations, sub-stations under the NIPP projects, which should have added about 5,000 megawatts to the system.

Now ask the government, why have they not added it to the grid? So, we have already 5,000 MW, power stations built, transmission network built by the government that is not investment of the private sector. They are now waiting for the private sector to take over for them to say that they did it. We should not expect the impact of the private sector to be immediate. An average gestation period of a power plant is about four to five years.

Given the labour issues you have highlighted, it appears we should not expect the handover to the new investors anytime soon.

These labour issues could be resolved in one week. It is a question of an agreement that has been reached, and government has said there is money. It is a matter of payment. The calculation has been done. The time it takes to resolve the issues depends on the government.