The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) on Wednesday assured that the persistent fuel scarcity in the country will end in the next few days.
The latest assurance was given by the NNPC management team led by its Chief Executive Officer (Upstream), Bello Rabiu, while briefing State House correspondents at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on an update on the supply and distribution of the product.
Rabiu, who was flanked by the Chief Operating Officer (Downstream), Henry Nkem-Obi; Chief Operating Officer (Refineries), Anibo Kragha and Group General Manager (Public Affairs), Garbadeen Mohammed on Wednesday, said that the Corporation will soon saturate the market with more petrol than the nation can consume.
According to him, five vessels were already discharging products in various parts of the country. Apart from this, private importers are also discharging at least 120 million liters of the product to complement NNPC’s imports.
He said that the only delay now has to do with circulation of the products across the country using trucks as pipelines were still not in good condition.
“The plan going forward from today, 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,” Rabiu said.
He apologized for the fuel scarcity on behalf of the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu and the NNPC, assuring that it would never repeat itself. As part of measures to ensure this, Rabiu said NNPC was focusing on having in-country storage capacity so that it would take minimum time to move products to depots in any part of the country.
He also said efforts were 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 around the country.
