By Sunday Apah / Special Correspondent, Ughelli
The National Executive Council of the NigerianNational Fitters’ Association (NNFA) recently held a meeting in Warri, Warri South Local Government Area of Delta State with promise to overcome challenges facing the association.
National President of the association, Comrade Ambaiowei Abaye Ambaiowei, in his speech during the meeting, said that the greatest challenge facing the NNFA is the lack of government patronage.
Ambaiowei said some members who defected from the association to form a parallel association was also a major challenge facing the NNFA.
“NNFA has always lived with challenges and by the grace of God, we have overcome them. I am just barely three months old in office as president and inherited a lot of financial problems and it has been a lot of setback. The challenges of some members who decided to defect to form another association outside ours is another challenge.
“Beside that the issue of government patronage is also there despite the fact that we have contributed a lot to the Nigerian oil and gas sector, yet we do not have enough recognition from the government. I want to use this opportunity to appeal to government to recognise us. The Local Content Act has come to stay because Nigerians are now being patronise but most of these companies have no respect the local content law. All they do is to create strife between the communities and the professional bodies and the community will bring in quacks that do not know the job”, he noted.
Ambaiowei suggested that a monitoring body should be setup by the Local Content Board to give feedback to know if the companies are really complying with the law or not.
“Most of the time our members are not being engaged and the government is aware of it. We operate in 30 states but if you talk about oil and gas, it is mainly in the South south states and few states in Southeast and Southwest and maybe one state in the north. So we have offices in Kaduna, Kogi, Ondo, Ogun Lagos, Abia, Uyo, Akwa-Ibom, Cross Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers, Edo and other states and the national headquarters is in Warri”, he said.
Ambaiowei advised members in all the branches he has visited to ensure that government recognised them as professionals.
“We must discipline ourselves because there is a lot of indiscipline within the system which is also affecting the entire body”, he said.
Comrade Morrister Idibra, general secretary of the NNFA, on his part said, “NEC is one of the meetings where we formulate policies to move the body forward and the key issues are about our members who served the NNFA and upon the expiration of their tenure they decided to leave the association and form another association. NEC has affirmed our earlier resolution that we shall never be part of such a merger, although the matter is on the line for resolution and we want NSA to be fair and neutral. We don’t want NSA to take side on this matter; they should look on the facts and figure on ground before taking any decision”.
Idibra added, “If we have the Nigeria Welders Association and the Nigeria National Fitters Association, then members from these two bodies are forming a merger without following the due process. Ordinarily before mergers are done, declaration of assets and liability should have been done, and a delegates’ conference should have been held to make such resolutions. But all these things were not done yet and they are saying they have merged and NSA seems to be recognizing them and we are not comfortable with it.
“NSA on their own has said the recognition was given in error, so we hope they will do the needful by making a statement on the issue. Quackery is also a big challenge in the NNFA, communities are infiltrating with the help of some companies. This is a professional body, some persons who know nothing about fitting are hiding under communities and sometimes they are been employed as fitters and when on the field they cannot perform it will seem as if there are not qualified persons in the NNFA who can do the job”.
“We are calling on the government to recognise the NNFA when it comes to fitting, we have all types of fitters; mechanical, piping, structural, instrumentation and others. We need to redeem our image, when the quacks are being employed, it gave the companies opportunity to bring in expatriates and denying us the experts here our benefits. Members of the NNFA should have faith in the leadership of the association, we may be facing some challenges but I know we will soon overcome them in no distance time”, Idibra added.
Idibra advised the government to incorporate NNFA in the EPZ project to avoid the ugly experience they had in the concluding EGTL project.
“In that project a lot of quacks were employed doing nothing, and that gave a very bad impression about the profession and that was because of the kind of MoU entered between the government and the communities, excluding the professional bodies. So for us to have a smooth system and redeem our image from the onset the professional bodies should be incorporated into the MoU. They are about to take the execution of the project, so that the entire professionals they need in the fitting aspect can be provided by our association”, he added.
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