By Ishaya Ibrahim Acting News Editor
Fuel shortage is still worsening after the April 7 assurances given by Minister of State for petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu, that queues would disappear in some major cities.
Queues still stretch for kilometres at the filing stations TheNiche visited in Lagos. Many others do not have petrol.
Feelers from other parts of the country, particularly Abuja and Port Harcourt, where Kachikwu said supply would be normalised by April 8, showed that the situation has not changed substantially.
Transport fare has increased on all routes in the metropolis.
Prices of foodstuff have gone up as part of the ripple effects. A bag of rice that sold for N14,000 last week now costsN15, 000.
Residents who spoke to TheNiche said the hardship is horrendous, in the worst fuel shortage Nigerians have experienced for years.
“The situation is so bad that even black marketers do not have the product,” lamented Chukwuemeka Anene, an optometrist based in Abuja.
Energy analyst, Adewale Sanyaolu, explained on Channels Television that the scarcity of foreign exchange (forex) and the huge import allocation to the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) are the reasons for the shortage.
“Before now, the NNPC had a quota of between 45 and 55 per cent and all of a sudden, it was jacked up to 78 per cent, leaving major marketers with 22 per cent.
“The NNPC does not have the capacity to flood the market with 78 per cent. The 22 per cent for the major marketers was stalled as a result of the foreign exchange challenges,” he said.
Obiorah Osokolo, an executive with a financial service firm, SIAO, told TheNiche in December 2015 that the government must think and act differently in order to end perennial fuel shortage.
His words: “You have the joint task force destroying private refineries (oil bunkering) in the South South. We don’t have fuel in this country, people are refining fuel creatively, and you spend so much money fighting them.
“That means you know this people and this people are jobless.
“If you bring them together and put them in a cooperative, and find the funding they need, you will have small refineries everywhere.
“Formalise them, let them invest in the proper equipment and you will have refineries everywhere. And they will finance everything. Once you give them a 15-year loan, that is all they need.
“This country will be awash with fuel. They will buy officially. You have created jobs for people that never had jobs.”
But Kachikwu thinks otherwise, arguing that the NNPC’s import rates have moved form 50 per cent to an all-time 100 per cent.
Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) Lagos Zonal Chairman, Tokunbo Korodo, countered that Kachikwu “is just using Nigerians as experiment and we don’t need that.”