NIGERIA: One dead as protesters take to the streets, unions plan "indefinite" strike and mass protests over the ending of a fuel subsidy

Record ID: 235441

  • Title: NIGERIA: One dead as protesters take to the streets, unions plan "indefinite" strike and mass protests over the ending of a fuel subsidy
  • Date: 10th January 2012
  • Summary: PROTESTERS RUNNING AND CHANTING
  • Embargoed: 25th January 2012 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Nigeria, Nigeria
  • Country: Nigeria
  • Topics: Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA309F16O1448PY4NNMKARAF8P4
  • Story Text: Thousands of Nigerians took to the streets across Africa's top oil producing nation on Monday (January 9, 2012), launching an indefinite nationwide strike to protest the axing of fuel subsidies.
    Nigerian police shot dead a man at a demonstration in the main commercial city of Lagos and wounded three others, witnesses and hospital staff said.
    Angry residents in Lagos's Ogba suburb said police had fired on a crowd to disperse it.
    Shops, banks and petrol stations were shut and the highways into Lagos, usually clogged with rush-hour traffic, were empty.
    ''This so-called subsidy removal -- when in the first place there is no subsidy -- has triggered off a particular incident that will make us call up the issues that have been buried for years in Nigeria," said Lawyer Imafidon Aimojie.
    Production of Nigeria's average two million barrels of crude oil a day carried on as normal despite the strike, sources at two international oil companies and the state firm told Reuters.
    Some of the protesters blocked the road with burning tyres and waved placards challenging the record of President Goodluck Jonathan, whose presidency is already under pressure from an increasingly violent Islamist insurgency in the north of the country.
    Jonathan has said he will not back down and the strikes will test his resolve. Strikes have forced previous governments into u-turns on fuel subsidy cuts.
    Son of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, Femi Kuti, demanded a minimum wage.
    ''If it is government of the people, by the people, no need to copy America, let everybody bring their salary to the minimum wage of 18,000 naira [110 U.S. dollars].'' Nigeria's fuel regulator announced the end of the subsidy on Jan. 1 as part of efforts to cut government spending and encourage badly needed investment in local refining.
    Economists say the subsidy filled the fuel tanks of the rich and middle classes at the expense of a poor majority living on less than 2 U.S. Dollars (USD) per day, fed corruption and siphoned off billions of dollars of public funds to a cartel of fuel importers.
    Removing it to cut costs has been a flagship policy of Jonathan and his economic management team.
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