Oil and gas senior workers, under the aegis of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria have urged the federal government to do more to expand the country’s revenue base.

PENGASSAN’s President, Festus Osifo, made the call at the union’s national executive council meeting held on Thursday in Lagos.

“However, that expansion of our revenue base must be how to harness our material resources and our mineral resources. Nigeria is a country that is blessed extremely with huge mineral resources. Is it the bitumen that you have in Ondo? Is it the tin that you have in Jos? Is it the gold that you have in Zamfara and many parts of Nigeria?

“We can go on and on, but these are lying fallow. The way we can generate jobs is for us to tap into these material resources and not export them as raw materials but to create value, to add value to them,” he said.

Mr Osifo earlier expressed dissatisfaction at Nigeria’s 2025 budget of N47.90 trillion, saying it was too low.

According to him, the country is blessed with human resources and endowed with mineral resources.

He said, “We should be talking about a budget size of $200 billion; we should be able, as a country, to harness the resources that we are blessed with so that our budget size will be much more compared to where it is today.’’

The union leader also called on the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and those saddled with the responsibility of fixing refineries to make the refineries functional.

According to him, beyond facilitating energy security, fixing the refineries will provide primary and secondary jobs.

“We will also have the opportunity of getting a lot of foreign exchange when these refineries are working, because the value chain is quite enormous. For us in PENGASSAN, we will continually push until the refineries are working,” Mr Osifo said.

(NAN)