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Nigerians spent N334.34billion on petrol in first quarter of 2013 — Report

By on April 24, 2013

Nigerians may have spent about N344.34bn on petrol in the first quarter of this year going by consumption figures supplied by the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency.

The Executive Secretary, PPPRA, Mr. Reginald Stanley, had during an interactive session with journalists in Lagos on Monday said Nigerians consumed 38.298 million of litres per day between January and March, 2013.

“In terms of quantity, the average daily provisional PMS supply of 38.298 million litres was recorded as at March 2013,” Stanley had said.

Going by this, 3.446 billion litres of petrol on the average must have been consumed in the country in the first three months of the year, which had 90 days.

At the official pump price of N97 a litre, the sum of N334.34bn must have exchanged hands between consumers and oil marketers within the period.

While N115.16bn must have been spent in January, investigation revealed that the February and March figures must have been N104bn and N115.16bn, respectively.

According to the PPPRA boss, the 38.298 million litres daily petrol consumption is 36.41 per cent lower than the PMS daily supply of 60.259 million litres per day for 2011.

Analysts said the 60.259 million litres per day of PMS figure in 2011 was a clear reflection of the pervasive malpractices prevalent in the downstream sector before the bubble burst in November of the same year.

Stanley said the current fuel consumption in the country was a great deviation from what obtained as of November 2011.

“Some of the challenges of the government as of November 2011 were continuous crude oil price volatility and its effect on products cost; and high and rising government exposure to subsidy under the Petroleum Support Fund Scheme,” he said.

PPPRA records had shown that daily fuel consumption was 25.924 million litres per day in 2006; 26.385 million in 2007; 33.527 million in 2008; 36.812 million in 2009; and 46.906 million in 2010.

But the consumption pattern recorded a sharp increase to 60.259 million daily in 2011, an import and consumption volume, which Stanley said, was unparalleled in the nation’s history.

The 36.41 per cent drop in daily fuel consumption in the first quarter of 2013, according to the PPPRA boss, reflects that the downstream oil sub-sector has undergone massive sanitisation.

As part of the sanitisation, Stanley said the PPPRA had restricted downstream participation to only owners of coastal discharge/depot facilities.

This strategy, he explained, had helped the agency to bar 99 briefcase oil marketers from the industry.

He said, “The petroleum subsidy scheme management system has now been so drastically reformed that there is now greater transparency in the scheme.

“There has been improvement in compliance levels by marketers to PPPRA’s guidelines, instructions and policies, especially by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.”

 

 

 

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