Nigeria's oil unions suspend strike

Nigeria's oil unions said Saturday they have suspended a two-day-old strike after the government met their demands over the proposed sale of two state-owned oil refineries.

"We have suspended the strike," Peter Esele, president of the senior oil workers union PENGASSAN, told AFP.

He said that the government has agreed to retain a 51 percent stake in the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries and only sell the remaining 49 percent to private investors. Previously the government wanted to sell 100 percent.

The government also agreed to a 15 percent wage increase.

Nigeria's PENGASSAN and NUPENG oil workers unions had began the strike on Thursday at the refineries, which have a combined production capacity of 210,000 barrels of crude oil per day and employ around 4,000 people.

"The sale of the refineries does not follow due process and was not agreed to by all the stakeholders in the industry," said NUPENG head Peter Akpatason.

"Some of these so-called investors are political in their activities, they may buy the refineries and keep them comatose to promote monopoly", he added.

Critics of Nigeria's outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo, who steps down on Tuesday, accuse him of organising a fire sale of state assets to his cronies in his final days in power.

Nigeria is world's sixth oil exporter accounting for about 2.6 million barrels per day of crude but production has been cut by a quarter due to unrest in the Niger Delta, where more than 150 foreign workers have been kidnapped this year.

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