As part of the measures to ease the crippling fuel scarcity across the country, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has approved that the Sovereign Debt Notes (SDN) be payable on March 30 to the oil marketers.
This was disclosed yesterday by the Petroleum Product Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) Executive Secretary Farouk Ahmed.
Ahmed said Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala had approved Sovereign Debt Notes payable on March 30 to the oil marketers. He noted that the agency is expecting about 8000 metric tonnes which is about one billion litres this month while other marketers are bringing in products this weekend.
Also speaking, the Group Managing Director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Dr. Joseph Dawha, said the Pipeline Products Marketing Company (PPMC) promised that there would be normal supply of products in Abuja and its environs today.
With him were Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of the corporation’s subsidiaries during an inspection of petrol stations opposite the NNPC towers in Abuja.
Dawha said: “We are here to see how thing are going on, we know that there is enough supply to cover all the filling stations but I wanted to see things for myself with the NNPC and things are getting back to normal.
”The PPMC has told us that by tomorrow (today), there will be normal supply in Abuja environment.”
He added that more trucks are coming from the Suleija depot and more are coming from Lagos to clear the queues as quickly as possible. Tracing the root cause of the scarcity, Ahmed said that commercial banks’ reluctance to issue letters of credit to marketers for importation fuelled the petrol scarcity.He said the devaluation of the naira caused confusion in the banking sector that further worsened the scarcity.
His words: “The problem actually started with the banks who were reluctant to issue letters of credit to marketers for importation and this was compounded by the naira devaluation by the CBN and that brought some confusion into the banking sector.
PPMC Managing Director Haruna Momoh said: “If we had our pipelines fully in shape, within two days, we would have had this situation cleared because our supply is much more robust, as at today. We have quite a number of vessels that have arrived over the weekend and we are expecting much more to arrive before the weekend.Regretting that the pipelines are not working, he said that the quickest, safest and most environmentally friendly and easiest way to transport petroleum products in a country that is as large as Nigeria is through the pipelines.
Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) Director George Osahon said marketers were hoarding fuel in anticipation of price increase by the Federal Government. He said that: “The issue now is people hoarding fuel so that price will go up. Over the course of time, several things will come up to enable pinpoint who is hoarding, but now, we still use the dip stick system to determine the volume of product in tanks.”
