NNPC: Lingering Fuel Scarcity Not Deliberate Attempt to Influence, Scuttle Elections

In a veiled response to the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) yesterday said it stands to benefit nothing by wanting to create artificial fuel scarcity to influence the oncoming general election.

Tinubu had in an outburst during his campaign trail, insinuated that the current problems besetting the country, including petrol scarcity and naira shortages were done to hobble his chances of winning the presidential poll.

But the Group Executive Officer of the NNPC, who spoke on the state-owned Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), argued that the nationwide petrol scarcity was not new and wasn’t targeted at anyone.

According to him, the shortage of the product began in 2022 and had continued intermittently despite efforts to curb it.

He reiterated there was no supply problem in the system, but said the market dynamics in terms of logistics and handling charges have changed, thereby affecting prices.

He explained that to deliver Nigeria’s daily 60 million litres consumption, there has to be at least 1,800 tankers on the road daily which may take up to seven days to get to their destinations. Kyari stated that there’s no scarcity of fuel, stressing that the situation has been further compounded by consumer behaviour and panic buying.

He highlighted the current attempts to end the fuel queues, stressing that prices would soon crash at the depots to ensure normalcy.

According to him, Nigeria’s current fuel consumption accounts for about 70 per cent of the entire West African sub-region.

The GCEO said while the West African region would have been a huge market, the arbitrage being created by differences in prices was making things difficult for the industry.

“There’s greed across the value chain,” he stated.

Kyari stated that the initial design of the petrol pipelines was such that no truck would move beyond 400km, but that the Jesse fire in Delta made it impossible to pump petrol from Warri to Benin and then Ore.

As for the atlas cove, he said the NNPC was losing 24 per cent of its products due to activities of vandals and had to be shut down, while Port Harcourt to Aba was also losing much before it was shut down.

He added that due to the age of the pipeline and the shallowness of the facilities, it was important to rebuild them under the Build, Operate and Transfer method.

“I do not think anybody sits down to orchestrate that there should be scarcity so that it will impact elections and so on. I don’t think it happens that way if it is so. But it is not true because the reality is that these glitches actually started early in 2022.

“It has nothing to do with this election period. Once you have a challenge of this nature, it is a cyclical thing. Once you have this challenge, they continue to come up, and then once you have arbitrage issues, you have this glitch.

“Today, our redundancy in terms of petroleum products supply is just three days in this country. Once you have a glitch that extends longer than three days, you need another three weeks to stabilise it. So irrespective of who does what, whatever causes the three-day glitch, it is a nightmare waiting to happen.

“Once we see this glitch, that is why we do everything possible to avoid the glitches from happening. I do not think anyone will sit down and say let us create this so that there will be an impact on the elections and so on.

“There is no benefit in it. No one would do this and I can tell you this very clearly that there is no one issue that bothers the president like this. There is no briefing that I do to the president that he does not mention this,” Kyari stated.

He explained said it was impossible to link petrol shortage to the elections, noting that NNPC was doing everything in its power to control the situation.

“Yes, there are a lot of glitches. There are a lot of logistics and nightmares. Greed has come into play. There are cross-border issues that we have to deal with. There are international market situations that you have to deal with,” he said.

Kyari maintained that Nigeria has enough stock in-country, but added that distribution was a major challenge.

“We do not have a supply problem because as we speak now, we have over 28 days of supply even if we evacuate up to 60 million litres of PMS every day. We have a distribution problem that comes up as a result of the shift in the cost of logistics in our business taking fuel from the mother vessels to the terminals into trucks to the fuel stations.

“Several things have changed and we do not have an automatic adjustment system that will resolve this as a result of the fuel subsidy regime we are currently operating in the country. However, fuel subsidy payments are understandable to protect consumers from the vagaries of market forces,” he noted.

In his remarks, the Chief Executive of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), Farouk Ahmed, stated that there’s about 28 days offshore capacity while there’s 12 days onshore, stressing that there has been an increase in charges to move vessels from offshore to onshore from about $19,000 to $60,000 per day in some locations.

He stated that there have been glitches on the road, including accidents which created huge gaps and by extension, arbitrage. He noted that tens of filling stations that flouted the rules had been shut down.