AUATON decries exclusion from P-CNGI

The Amalgamated Union of App-based Transporters of Nigeria (AUATON) has expressed its disappointment over the discriminatory practices within the Presidential Compressed Natural Gas Initiative (P-CNGI), under the leadership of its Programme Director, Michael Oluwagbemi. 
  
AUATON, a registered trade union that represents hundreds of thousands of app-based transport workers across Nigeria, found it unimaginable that the P-CNGI could exclude a technology-driven union in such a national programme aimed at providing palliative to commercial transporters freely to ease the high cost of transportation across the country.
   
As a result of this exclusion, the union is calling on the P-CNGI  Committee Chairman, Zacch Adedeji, and the Director of Programme, to immediately include AUATON to enable members to benefit nationally.
   
The union has also noticed unwarranted favoritism in the choice of app companies like Uber and Bolt, rather than the union, which is directly responsible for members’ interests.
   
In a statement signed by the National President of AUATON, Damola Adeniran, the union said that it is important to understand that app-based transport workers are the backbone of urban digital mobility in Nigeria, commuting over 1.5 million trips across Nigeria daily. 
 
He said: “Yet our members have been systematically marginalised in the government initiative, supporting transport workers with the free CNG conversion kits.
“AUATON members have been unfairly excluded, despite their critical contributions to the nation’s economy in the transportation sector.”