The Federal Government has allayed fears of an impending petrol scarcity, assuring that the country has enough petrol in stock. Despite the Federal Government insistence queues are visible in some fuel stations in Abuja
The Group Chief Executive Officer, GCEO, of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, Alhaji Mele Kyari, gave the assurance in Abuja while speaking with State House correspondents after he briefed President Tinubu on the status of the availability of petrol in the country.
He explained that the queues being seen in some parts of the country was as a result of logistics gap in movement of products from the south to the north, adding that the issues has largely been solved.
While explaining that Nigeria has 1.4 billion liters of the product, he further explained that the price difference among fuel stations was one of the reasons for the formation of queues around filling stations selling the product cheaper.
He also noted that the scarcity of foreign currency had played a major role in the situation, but that the government is working hard to stabilise the problem.
“We have seen, in very few states, pockets of very low queues. Not unconnected with the road situation that we’re seeing the number of blockades on our roads, crossing products from the southern depots into the northern part of the country and it takes them a much longer time than they do now, they have to reroute the trucks around many, many locations for them to be able to reach and that created delays and some supply gaps. But that has been filled and we do not see any of such problems again.
“Secondly, because of the full deregulation that we have in this sector, marketers are now competing amongst themselves. So you must have noticed some fuel stations with reduced price by N2 or N3, so customers will naturally run to the places where you have that reduction in prices and that creates panic, because for those who don’t know why they are doing it, they will think that there’s something wrong happening, or there’s an ominous sign of scarcity or people start queuing up in the fuel stations. Otherwise, there is no challenge. Supply is robust.
“”We have over 1.4 billion litres of product in our hands, both marine and land. Also there are no issues around delivery of those products into the land. So there is no fear, nothing to bother about”, Alhaji Kyari explained.
He also debunked claims that the government had secretly restored fuel subsidy.
“I told you there’s no subsidy whatsoever, we are recovering our full cost from the products that we import. We sell to the market, we understand why the marketers are unable to import. We hope that they do this very quick and these are some of the interventions government is doing. There is no subsidy”, he said.