Marketers have attributed the recent shortage of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), sometimes referred to as gasoline, to a problem with supply from Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, the nation’s largest oil supplier.
Billy Gillis-Harry, the National President of the Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria (PETROAN), said this on Monday on The Morning Brief breakfast show on Channels Television.
Nigerians are lining up at gas stations all over the country as a result of the recent gasoline shortage, which has halted several economic activity in states around the Federation.
After hours of sweat and competition, some drivers were fortunate enough to purchase petrol at select retail locations for between N700 and N,1200 per litre; however, others weren’t that fortunate because several retail locations were closed, citing supply as an explanation.
The shortage of the premium product saw the black marketers selling the petrol for as high as N2,000 per litre in states.
Snake-like queues at filling stations in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kano and other places have worsened the traffic situation in the states as the long queues spilt on major roads, hindering movement just as thousands of people were stranded at bus stops with transport fares as high as double the former amounts.
Though many outlets owned by independent oil marketers remained shut, checks by our correspondent in Lagos showed that NNPC retail outlets sell petrol at N568 per litre but not many motorists could survive the unending queues and jostling for sometimes six hours.
Last Thursday, NNPC spokesman, Olufemi Soneye, said the “tightness in the supply of Premium Motor Spirit currently being experienced in some areas across the country is as a result of logistics issues and that they have been resolved”.
The NNPC also said the prices of petroleum products won’t change and urged Nigerians to avoid panic buying as there is a sufficiency of products in the country.
However, PETROAN boss, Billy Gillis-Harry, said the supply challenge has not been resolved though he acknowledged efforts by NNPC to solve the problem.
Gillis-Harry said, “NNPC has its own outlets that they also serve. So if they have some logistics issues, that will possibly be what is internal to NNPC. But as for us, PETROAN members, we can tell Nigerians for real that if we have petroleum products delivered to us, supply to us upon payment for those same products, we will supply to Nigerians.
“I would like to correct Nigerians that we retail outlet owners or marketers as they generally call all of us is the reason for this. We do not have any reason not to serve the public and we are willing to serve the public. All that is required is for us to have petroleum products delivered to us from NNPC and we will make sure that our retail outlets are open, some of them are even open for 24 hours.
“The challenge of logistics is only relevant to the NNPC retail outlets.”
Last May, President Bola Tinubu removed the subsidy on petrol with the pump price of the product jumping from about N184 to about N600 per litre. The move aimed at the deregulation of the oil sector has inflicted untold hardship on Nigerians with the prices of basic commodities going through the roof.
On Sunday, the President defended his action again when he told world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that his administration’s decision to remove the petrol subsidy was very necessary to prevent the country from going bankrupt.
