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Petrol scarcity to end in days

By on November 21, 2015

If the words of some marketers of refined petroleum products, especially petrol, are anything to go by, the current fuel scarcity in different parts of the country will ease off in a few days.

The Executive Secretary, Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria, Mr. Thomas Olawore, said this in a telephone interview with one of our correspondents on Thursday.

“We have been busy trying to clear the queues and now, we believe the queues will last not for weeks, but days,” he said.

Olawore said the ssending of the N465.64bn supplementary budget proposal to the National Assembly to largely cover the N413bn owed to fuel importers under the subsidy regime was a step in the right direction.

President Muhammadu Buhari had sought the approval of the National Assembly for the supplementary budget on Wednesday.

The President asked the Senate and House of Representatives to approve N465.64bn to cover fuel subsidies, funding for military operations against Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast, prisoner rations and pay for outgoing and incoming legislative aides.

Olawore would not comment if MOMAN members had resumed full loading of products at the depots.

But findings by our correspondent showed that activities at the Apapa depots improved slightly on Thursday. More trucks were said to have loaded products, according to sources at the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers.

But queues at the few filling stations that had petrol to sell in Lagos and Ogun states grew longer on Thursday, with majority of the stations in both states shut for business.

The queues spilled over to major roads and resulted in traffic gridlock.

Meanwhile, the Operations Controller of the Department of Petroleum Resources in Kwara State, Mr. Stanley Phillip, has said low indigenous refining capacity is the major cause of the current fuel scarcity.

He gave this indication in Ilorin on Thursday when he appeared before the Kwara State House of Assembly’s Committee on Commerce, Cooperatives and Women Affairs, to explain the factors responsible for the current fuel scarcity in the state.

Phillip explained that if the nation’s four refineries were operating optimally, the nation would be able to get more than 18 million litres of petrol daily, stressing that corruption and vandalism of products’ pipelines had compounded the problem, thereby making the people experience product scarcity.
[Punch]

One Comment

  1. Julisu Emma

    November 21, 2015 at 4:16 pm

    i don’t like the situation whereby fuel is been sell like this in Calabar, as a prominent chief, you have to rise an do something about this now to serve people movement. Thank you