The managing director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Engineer Andrew Yakubu, has confessed that the state oil agency cannot prevent fuel scarcity in Nigeria, except through collaborative efforts involving other relevant stakeholders.
Engineer Yakubu made the confession in Abuja while declaring open, the on-going 3-day, oil and gas, seminar/exhibition at the International Conference Center.
“There should not be blame game on this. It was a collaborative effort. If you work into a filling station today you can hardly count 30-50 vehicles on queue. So we are making progress.
On what should be done to avert future scarcity, he maintained that it is a collaboration of so many stakeholders.
‘’We did our bit and what we did as far as NNPC is concern was to support the entire country from own quota. If we didn’t do what we did, we would have been in more crises. We are more than happy to collaborate with the Major and Independent Marketers, PPPRA and DPR. You can see clearly that the result we got was as a result of our collaborative efforts of all the agencies’’.
The NNPC boss further expressed satisfaction on the on-going exhibition which he said will stimulate, Local contents development, and enhance increased participation in oil and gas in the value chain.
‘’As you can see the result is quite impressive and l am sure the President would be very happy to note the tremendous growth in local participation in oil and gas value chain. You can see clearly the investment that this has attracted, the huge foreign direct investment in this regard. We have fabrication yards, they have been building new ones, we have old ones that have been expanded, there modules before now couldn’t have been built in Nigeria’’.
The exhibition event which is expected to attract over 7000 visitors, has 200 participants from within and outside Nigeria, and over 1300 delegates. The conference is expected to end on Thursday march, 20th.
