- Says imports cost $1.8bn per quarter
From Juliana Taiwo- Obalonye, Abuja
THE Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has assured that fuel queues will disappear in the next few days with the arrival of more stocks, enough to soak the nation’s demand.
NNPC Chief Executive Officer (Upstream), Bello Rabiu, gave the Corporation’s assurance while briefing State House correspondents at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, yesterday.
Flanked by the Chief Operating Officer (Downstream), Henry Nkem-Obi; Chief Operating Officer (Refineries), Anibo Kragha and Group General Manager (Public Affairs), Garbadeen Mohammed, Rabiu, who gave the update on the supply and distribution of the product, pledged that the Corporation will saturate the market with more petrol than the nation can consume.
He disclosed that five vessels were discharging products in various parts of the country, beside the more than 120 million litres of products the private importers were also discharging to complement NNPC imports.
The NNPC boss, explained that there was delay in circulation of the products across the country because they had to be trucked since the pipelines were still not in good condition.
According to him, “The plan going forward from today, is that we want to make sure that we give more than what is required in the whole country. The total requirement of the country is just about 1,300 trucks but our plan is to make at least 1,500 available everyday until this thing clears up.
“So, we want to make sure that we saturate the market in a very short time and I think you can see clearly now that Lagos is almost cleared and Abuja is getting better. Other places will follow.”
He said the Corporation knows what each state needs and the demand would be met, adding, “we just want to ensure this thing happen and quickly too.”
While apologising for the fuel scarcity on behalf of the Minister of State Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu and the NNPC, Rabiu assured that it would never repeat itself.
He noted that part of the ways to guard against reoccurrence was to have in-country storage capacity so that it would take minimum time to move products to depots in any part of the country, adding that the NNPC was therefore concentrating on that.
He added that efforts were also underway to ensure that the refineries and the pipelines were put back to order to achieve stability and make fuel queues a thing of the past.
He appealed to Nigerians to refrain from panic buying as the products would now be available on a regular basis in all the filling stations across the country.