NAIG places indigenous Itsekiri VTP5, VTP6 trainees on shutdown alert

The National Association of Itsekiri Graduates, NAIG has handed down a red alert notice to all indigenous Itsekiri VTP5 and VTP6 trainees of Chevron Nigeria Limited to prepare to shutdown the company’s operations in Escravos and other fields if they fail to engage them as staff before the contract runs out in June 2017.

While stating that “it is an insult on the Itsekiri Nation to keep our graduates as trainees for four years without employments”, NAIG demanded that “Itsekiri graduates in VTP5/OTP2 and VTP6/OTP3 are staffed without further delay” by Chevron.

The Itsekiri graduates’ body in a statement released Friday May 5 by its President/CEO, Comrade Edema Collins Oritsetimeyin, alleged that the OPITO certificates of the affected trainees are in the custody of Chevron to purportedly keep the trainees tied to the company, a situation the association claimed “it’s not being done in Richmond, Angola or those trainees in ‘National’ Programme”.

Comrade Edema Collins Oritsetimeyin

NAIG declared that the excuse of cutting cost being adduced by Chevron for non-regularization of the trainees “is not only a fallacy, but a dent to the integrity of CNL”, because the company “recorded a profit of $1.2 billion in the just concluded fiscal year” and “the EGTL train 1 and 2 are fully operational. Pure diesel, naphtha and LPG are constantly being exported daily”.

While stressing that Itsekiri people are host to over 75% of Chevron Nigeria’s onshore/offshore/ swamp fields under the over-lordship of the Olu of Warri, NAIG decried the attitude of Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara and Hon. Femi Gbajabamilia over their position of the Presidency’s directive for IOCs to relocate their corporate headquarters to the Niger Delta.

NAIG  added the action of members of the House of Representatives “only buttress our long held believe that the treatment being metted out to the Itsekiri by Chevron is because some people in the corridors of power, especially of the Yoruba stock are aiding Chevron to marginalize us without recourse to the fact that we host Chevron Tank Farm, Ugborodo”.

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