The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has said that the long queues experienced in petrol stations in Lagos, representing scarcity of fuel, is artificially induced.
Speaking during a television chat yesterday, the spokesman of the NNPC, Omar Farouk Ibrahim, said that there were absolutely no reasons for filling stations not to sell fuel to the people.
He recalled that a similar situation had occurred in Abuja the previous week, a situation that compelled the special task force comprising NNPC, PPPRA, and the DPR to go out to ensure that all the lines in Abuja were decimated.
He then stated that the NNPC did not believe that there was fuel scarcity in Lagos, but rather they believed that people were hoarding because some think that Government was going to raise the price of petrol, an assumption he said “there is no truth in”.
“Government is not, as far as we know, going to raise any price, and retailers who have fuel in their tanks should please release it for people to buy.”
Responding to the assertion by the major oil marketers that the federal government had just released the 1st quarter allocation of fuel importation to petroleum marketers who will now commence importation of the product, Farouk said the said release was done in February, but stressed that there had been vessels on the West African waters waiting to come into Nigeria, and he did not feel the marketers would delay in getting the products into the country.
He insisted that the fuel scarcity in Lagos had nothing to do with the importation of the products but rather the deliberate act of the filling stations to hoard the product, providing instances as experienced by the special task force to validate the view.
He promised that as the task force has successfully cleared the queues in Abuja, it would do same in Lagos and other places starting from Monday, March 3.
