New petrol price will create over 200,000 jobs – Lai Mohammed

Minister of information and culture, Lai Mohammed has said that the recent increase in the price of pump petrol will create 200,000 jobs and secure 400,000 more.

The minister stated this at the inauguration of the Advertisers Association of Nigeria (ADVAN) marketers’ conference in Lagos on Friday, in a statement read by his media aide Segun Adeyemi.

He said, “It (new petrol price regime) would end the recurrent fuel scarcity by ensuring product availability across the country, reduce hoarding, smuggling and diversion of products substantially, improves fuel supply situation through private sector participation, creates labour market stability, as this will potentially create additional 200,000 jobs through new investments in refineries and retails and prevents potential loss of 400,000 jobs in existing investments.”

“With the drastic fall in the price of crude oil, which is the nation’s main foreign exchange earner, there has also been a drastic reduction in the amount of foreign exchange available. The unavailability of forex and the inability to open letters of credit have forced marketers to stop product importation and imposed over 90 percent supply on the NNPC since October 2015, in contrast to the past where NNPC supplies 48 percent of the national requirement,” he said.

Mohammed added that, “the renewed insurgency and pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta region had drastically reduced national crude oil production to 1.65 million barrels per day, against 2.2 million barrels per day planned in the 2016 budget thereby reducing income to federation account and also affecting crude volumes for PMS conversion”.

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