By Ezrel Tabiowo
Abuja
In his capacity as the Petroleum Minister, the Senate yesterday tasked President Muhammadu Buhari to end the scarcity within the next two weeks, just as it directed the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum and other agencies in the petroleum sector to do everything within their jurisdiction, to ensure the availability of products.
Accordingly, the upper chamber further directed that, in addition to ending the scarcity, relevant agencies should ensure that fuel, when distributed, was sold at uniform price all over the country.
The Senate Committee on Petroleum Downstream, gave the directives when officials of the ministry; Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Pipeline Products and Marketing Company (PPMC), Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), all appeared before the panel to explain the lingering fuel scarcity in the country.
Last Tuesday, the Senate mandated the committee to urgently examine all the issues associated with the current scarcity of petroleum products in the country.
The upper chamber also charged the committee to determine how the legislature could collaborate with the executive arm of government to bring lasting solutions that would forestall future fuel scarcity in the country, and report back in two weeks.
The directive followed a motion; “the current fuel scarcity all around the country
and the need to urgently resolve the crisis,” brought up by Senator Barau Jibrin (APC, Kano North) and co-sponsored by 23 other Senators.
Issuing the directive yesterday to the stakeholders, chairman of the committee, Senator Uche Ekwunife, noted that what Nigerians needed at this point in time was to see an end to the menace, and not to listen to stories from stakeholders.
“Nigerians want to see the immediate end of this fuel scarcity and also the uniformity of the price of the product across the country. As a committee, our target is that scarcity and discrepancies in price must stop and it must be done.
“Therefore, we are mandating the Minister, the Permanent Secretary and other relevant agencies in the sector, that fuel scarcity must stop in the next two weeks, and must be sold at the uniform price of N87 per liter everywhere in the country”, she ordered.
Meanwhile, the Managing Director of the PPMC, Mrs Esther Nnamdi-Ogbue, told the committee that the major problem disrupting fuel distribution in the country was vandalization of the oil pipelines by criminals.
She noted that Nigeria lost about 531 million liters of petrol, valued at N50 billion to the activities of vandals, between January and September 2015.
The MD also fingered sharp practices at the petroleum depots, including illegal charges and diversion of fuel by marketers, as some of the factors that provoked the scarcity and discrepancies in the price of the product being witnessed in the country today.
Lamenting that these sharp practices amounted to economic sabotage, Nnamdi-Ogbue hinted that the PPMC had gone into collaboration with the Department of State Security (DSS) and the Police to tackle the sabotage in the sector.
In his own submission, Executive Secretary, PPPRA, Mr. Ahmed Farouk, said the budget of N413
billion, requested for Senate approval by President Muhammadu Buhari was underestimated by about N2 billion.
According to Farouk, the outstanding arrears of 2014 subsidy is N120.5 billion while the outstanding for 2015 is N294.4 billion, totalling N414.9 billion.
He noted that the government was bringing in the fuel at the landing cost of N100 per liter, while selling at the retail cost of N87 per liter, thereby subsidizing the product with N13 per liter, adding that subsidy elements were driven by the price of gasoline.
Members of the Committee frowned at the lingering fuel scarcity in the country in spite of efforts by the present administration to implement its change agenda and deliver good governance to the people.
Senator Jibrin (APC, Kano North), who was disappointed by the situation in the oil sector, observed that the All Progressives Congress (APC) was elected on the mantra of change, and must do
everything to deliver the change to the people.
Concluding the session, the Chairman of the Committee, Senator Ekwunife, mandated the Permanent Secretary to submit within 24 hours, all documents needed by the Committee to do its report on the 2015 supplementary budget, for possible approval by the Senate in plenary next week.
