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Nigerians to strike over soaring fuel prices

09 January 2012 13:11 (UTC +04:00)

Baku - APA-Economics. Thousands of Nigerians took to the streets across Africa’s top oil producing nation on Monday, launching an indefinite nationwide strike to protest against the axing of fuel subsidies, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Shops, banks and petrol stations were shut and the highways into the main commercial city of Lagos, usually clogged with rush-hour traffic, were empty.

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.

Thousands of people gathered outside Labour house, in Yaba, the downtown market area of Lagos, waving union flags, from where they started marching and shouting "solidarity forever", closely watched by armed police in riot gear.

Some of them 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.

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 per day, fed corruption and siphoned off billions of dollars of public funds to a cartel of fuel importers.