•It’ll be over soon …NNPCL
From Uche Usim, Abuja
Abuja residents are facing a fresh round of biting petrol scarcity as many filling stations remained shut at the weekend for lack of products to sell.
The few that sold petrol had vehicular queues snaking several meters around them.
From Kubwa, central business district, Garki to Lugbe, the queues were frightening.
The development provided a predatory opportunity for black marketers to sell petrol at N450/litre to hapless motorists who could not go through the horror of queueing to buy petrol.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) in a statement attributed the scarcity and vehicular queues “to restrictions in businesses and movement, to allow for the conduct of the Presidential and National Assembly elections and enable Nigerians to exercise their civic right.
“However, operations have now resumed at the depots and trucks are being dispatched to various parts of the country.
We expect normalcy to be restored in the next few days.
“NNPC Limited and all its partners and stakeholders will continue to work together to ensure seamless distribution of petroleum products around the Gubernatorial and State Assembly elections” the company said in a statement.
It also assured of having 47-day petrol sufficiency.
It quoted its own updates released on Saturday as showing a total of 2.1 billion litres of PMS stock, representing 0.9 billion litres in all the land depots nationwide and 1.2 billion litres on marine vessels, which is equivalent to 35 days sufficiency as of 4th March 2023.
“We plan to close the month of March 2023 with about 2.8 billion litres, which is equivalent to 47 days of sufficiency”, the statement added.