*Price hits N200 per litre
*N400 at black market
OpeOluwani Akintayo
23 December 2017, Sweetcrude, Lagos — Barely two days before Christmas and despite several reassurances of surplus supply of petroleum products by the Nigerian National Petroleum, NNPC, fuel crisis keeps worsening across the country.
SweetcrudeReports’ monitoring of the market revealed that pump price of petro (Premium Motor Spirit) has shot up from the official price of N145 per liter to N200 per litre at most petrol stations.
Some others sold at N250, while NNPC stations that maintained the official price of N145, witnessed longer vehicular queues.
Today, the price on the black market had skyrocketed to N400 per litre in some areas, while five litre-jerrycan was sold between N1000 to N1500 in other places.
Even as Nigerians groan under shortage of the product, the Alliance for Progressive Congress, APC yesterday, said the product is available in abundance.
“There’s no ‘actual scarcity’,” the APC said in a statement on Twitter Friday afternoon.
The party’s statement came on the heels of NNPC’s several reassurances that the situation is under control.
APC had blamed marketers and panic buying during the holidays for lingering scarcity.
Just a few days into the scarcity, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, and the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Maikanti Baru, had also promised a return of normalcy in a matter of days.
To this end, SweetcrudeReports gathered that NNPC’s marketing and distribution arm, the Petroleum Products Marketing Company, PPMC and Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria, MOMAN, were in a closed-door meeting yesterday on product distribution, however, no update as to their next line of action has been made public.
The fuel crisis has lingered for more than three weeks now.
A four-day ultimatum issued to the Minister of State for Petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu to resolve the crisis had elapsed two weekends ago.
Governor Ayodele Fayose said the scarcity was a deliberate plan by the Buhari administration to increase fuel prices to as much as N200 per litre.
On Friday, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, asked President, Muhammadu Buhari, who also doubles as the petroleum minister, to take responsibility for the fuel scarcity.
But the APC denied government involvement, blaming the worrisome situation on petroleum marketers
“Just some stakeholders hoarding allocated products in order to cause artificial scarcity, plus panic buying, for their own selfish interests,” the APC said.
The party, nonetheless, said the government was working on resolving the crisis and “regretted” any inconveniences.