As part efforts to arrest the growing queue of vehicles at filling stations in Abuja and other states, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) says it has concluded plans to begin 24 hour operations in most of its 513 retail outlets spread all over the country.
Pockets of queues of vehicles at petrol stations in Abuja have been noticeable in the last three days but the queues grew longer on Friday as the Total and Conoil filling stations opposite the NNPC towers gave a clearer picture of the situation at hand.
The same case was visible on Kubwa-Abuja expressway.
But addressing newsmen in Abuja on Friday on strategies the Corporation was adopting to end the queues, the Executive Director, Commercial of the Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC), a downstream subsidiary of the NNPC, Mr. Justin Ezeala said it has adopted extended hours of operations where for security reasons or locations it is not feasible to operate 24 hours.
He said: “We are going to start from about 5am and sell till about 9/10pm.”
Close to 50 trucks loaded with PMS were dispatched today to various filling stations in the FCT.
He advised Nigerian against panic buying or hoarding of product because there is enough Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) or petrol to last the country for the next 35 days.
“We currently have within our depot 66m litres of PMS, we have our partner depot which is the private depot 118m litres of PMS, marine stock 428m litres and then the major marketers have about 44m litres. These gives us a total of 657m litres and based on our daily consumption estimate of 40m litres we are looking at about 16-and-half days sufficiency”.