Three Million Workers in Guinness, NBC, 7UP, Wampco Others To Be Sacked Due To FG Foreign Exchange Policy.

Labour Unions in the food, beverages and tobacco sector of the Nigeria economy has raised alarm that the sector  is about to shut down and over three million of their workers are going to be sacked due to inability of companies in the food and beverages sector to access foreign exchange for raw materials importation to enhance their operations.

Already leading companies in the sector, such as Nigerian Flour Mills, Nigerian Breweries Limited, Guinness Plc, Nigerian Bottling Company, 7 UP Bottling Company Plc, Friesland Campina Wamco Plc, among others, have written to labour for deliberations on retrenchment of workers. No fewer than 1,500 workers have been sacked in the last three months in the sector as companies  seek ways of coping with foreign exchange crisis and other factors affecting their production.

Speaking at a Press briefing in Lagos, leaders of Food, Beverage and Tobacco Senior Staff Association, FOBTOB, called on government to intervene to save the industry and over three million jobs of workers in the sector which are being threatened.

The associations President Quadri Olaleye, opined that employers in the sector had devised every opportunity to sack workers, decrying that in the last three years, over 3,000 workers were sacked on the ground of restructuring, right sizing, downsizing, redundancy and re-organisation. He lamented that over the years, the same excuse of difficult business terrain, loss in profit, epileptic  power supply, and so on had been given. He maintained that the current situation has reached a dangerous and pathetic level, because it seems all the employers in the  sector are in competition with each other on who can sack the most workers.

According to Olaleye the recent Foreign exchange policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria has really worsen the situation because most of the raw materials they use as a sector can't be sourced locally even when they could be found they are not available in commercial quantity so the sector basically need to import most of these raw materials and with fx it is not just going to be easy to cope. It is therefore imperative that the Federal Government and the CBN takes a second look at the policy on foreign exchange again to avoid shutting down the companies in our industry.