Nigerians are groaning as fresh fuel scarcity and attendant long queue have emerged across the country with oil marketers blaming the fresh scarcity of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) popularly known as petrol on the refusal of the major oil supplier in the country, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited to supply them.
This development was made known by the National President of the Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria (PETROAN), Billy Gillis-Harry, while appearing on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief breakfast programme on Monday.
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, supplied to us upon payment for those same products, we will supply them to Nigerians.
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“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 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.
High-cost-of-living protests subsequently broke out across the country, with labour unions demanding a new minimum wage for workers to cope with the inflationary pressure. The government has continued to placate citizens with the introduction of palliatives — as interim interventions — and encouraging them to endure the pain of the moment.
.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.
