The Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, has apologised to Nigerians for the biting petrol crisis and assured them that it would ease off by Monday.
The Minister on Saturday took a monitoring tour of some fuel service stations in Abuja to assess their level of products for sale to the public.
He said that more volumes of petrol have been deployed across Nigeria to ensure that fuel service stations had enough products to serve their customers.
He appealed to Nigerians to desist from hoarding the product, saying all efforts were being made to ensure there was no further instigating crisis in the sector to save Nigerians any further hardship.
There have been nation-wide scarcity of petrol and the scarcity has triggered hike in the prices of the commodity to as high as N200 in some parts of the oil-rich nation. The government approved price of petrol is N86.50.
The scarcity is coming at a period of huge reliance on petrol by households to generate electricity, since power from the national grid has dropped drastically.
At the moment, the nation with a population of over 160 million is managing less than 3,000 megawatts.
The government blamed the scarcity on sabotage and pipeline vandalism, which he said had affected the amount of electricity generated.
