An average of $1.8 billion is spent – every 4 months – on the importation of Premium Motor Spirit, into the country.

This was revealed on Wednesday, April 13, by the Nigeria National Petroleum Cooperation while also apologising to Nigerians for the lingering scarcity of the product across the country.

Four officials of NNPC – Group General Managing, GGM, Public Affairs, Garba Deen Mohammed, and the Group Executive Directors, GED, Bello Rabiu, (Upstream) Henry Obih (Downstream) and Anibor Kragha (Refineries) – held a joint press briefing at the presidential villa, Abuja.

Speaking on behalf of the quartet of senior officials was Rabiu, who stated that: “The objective is to brief you on the current situation of the petroleum products scarcity and queues all over the country. Let us start by tendering our apology and telling the people that we are really doing the right thing.”

“We have been working very hard. It is supply issues that have been causing this problem but we are doing everything possible to end it. What we are doing now is to ensure that we get necessary supplies into the country through imports as well as through our refineries.”

“As we speak today, we have 5 vessels serving products all over the country. And not only in Lagos, but also Port Harcout, Warri and Calabar. Apart from these vessels discharging, we also have private sector people that imported over 120 million and are discharging currently. In moving the product out into the hinterlands, we have a little option because most of the pipelines are still not working.”

“Because pipelines are not working, we are relying on about 100 percent trucking to the hinterlands. The plan is that going forward, from today, we will ensure that we give what is more than required in this country. The total requirement for the whole country is about 1300 trucks. But our plan is to make at least 1500 trucks available everyday. We want to make sure that we sustain the market in a very short time. You can see that Lagos is almost cleared. Abuja is getting better. Other places will follow.”

“On behalf of the Minister, who is also NNPC GMD, we are very sorry for what has happened. And we are working very hard to ensure that this does not happen again. We are doing everything possible to have storage that will not allow us to experience this again. Once our depots are wet, it will not take anybody more than 4 hours to take the products from NNPC to any part of the country.”

“We are trying to ensure sustainable import, making sure that the refineries work and the pipelines also works. That will reduce all these incidences. Once we achieve that, queues will become things of the past in the country.”

Mallam Yero