Adaobi Rhema Oguejiofor
After the meeting that was held recently between the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited and petroleum marketers alongside customs and security chiefs to find lasting solutions the lingering fuel crisis in the country, fuel queues have finally ended in Abuja.
This may not be unconnected with the claim by NNPCL that the company has consistently released a daily volume of 67 million liters of petrol to marketers.
However, despite the product availability, Valuechain findings indicated that most independent petrol marketers were selling at N350 per litre as against the N195 per litre as approved recently for marketers.
Defending the position that NNPC Limited has been living up to its own billing, the Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO) of the Company, Mallam Mele Kyari, said “we are not dealing with a supply problem, as we speak we have 831 million litres in marine and in various depots we have 738 million litres that are documented in platforms of the industry regulators. We do not have AGO problem for truck movement.”
He also maintained that any time the evacuation figure goes beyond 60 million litres in the country, crisis sets in, as was the case in early 2022 due to the contaminated fuel that was brought into the country at the time.
The situation, he said, resulted in the evacuation volumes at depots coming down to 56 million and creating a crisis.
Kyari however explained that, in response to receding evacuation volume, NNPC Limited ramped up supply and achieved normalcy. The GCEO’s further pointed accusing fingers at “some customers” as being responsible for the chaos in the country’s energy space as has been witnessed recently.
His words: “We have evidence that some of our customers are actually smuggling the vessels to other countries but we will get to the root of this and appropriate agency will deal with it.”