The Dangote Petroleum Refinery has stopped paying the monthly salaries of engineers affected by its September restructuring dispute, prompting renewed engagement between the company and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN).
The halted payments affect workers who rejected redeployment to Dangote-owned projects in Zamfara, Benue, Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Ebonyi, and Borno states. The engineers were issued redeployment letters in October, assigning them trainee roles in coal mines, road construction projects, and agro-processing facilities.
A senior official of the Dangote Group confirmed the development, insisting that the company would not continue paying engineers who refused alternative postings.
“Those whose services were terminated were given an opportunity to work in our other projects, such as rice mills, concrete road construction, and coal mines. All those who accepted have started working,” the official said.
“If a newspaper terminates the services of an employee, and even goes out of its way to provide alternative employment, but the employee is not interested in availing the alternative employment, will it keep paying his or her salary?”
Affected engineers described the move as unfair, claiming the company had agreed to keep them on payroll until negotiations were concluded.
“We noticed a reduction in our October salaries. We were not paid for November when others have been paid. That’s clear victimisation,” some engineers alleged.
They also raised concerns about the redeployment sites, describing some as unsafe or non-existent.
“There’s no address to report to on that letter. No office to report to in the states we were posted to. If we accept the letters, we are basically terminating our employment by ourselves,” one of them said.
PENGASSAN, which shut down oil and gas facilities nationwide in September over the sack of the workers, said it was pursuing dialogue rather than another industrial action.
“Since our last national industrial action, we have been engaging them in a lot of conversations, but the issues are not fully resolved,” the association’s president, Mr. Festus Osifo, said.
“These issues should be resolved in mere jaw-jaw so that we will not go back to Egypt. Our preference is to get the matter resolved at the negotiation table.”
The Dangote Group maintains that it has acted within its rights. A senior management source said that while PENGASSAN is entitled to make demands, the company also has the authority to take business decisions.
“They have their privilege to ask. But we, too, have the privilege to state what we want,” he said.
The Federal Government previously intervened when thousands of workers were affected by the earlier shutdown triggered by the dispute. With salaries now withheld and redeployment offers still rejected, the fate of the affected engineers rests on ongoing discussions between the two parties.
For now, the workers remain caught between accepting postings they consider unsafe and risking permanent loss of livelihood, while the union works to prevent another national shutdown of oil and gas operations.
