The GMD of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the Minister of State for Petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu has said that the fuel queues in the country will linger for at least another two months.
Speaking with State House Correspondents, Kachikwu said he was not a magician that could end the scarcity overnight.
He said, “One of the training I did not receive is that of a magician, but I am working very hard to ensure some of these issues go away.
“And let us be honest, for the five or six months we have been here, NNPC has moved from a 50 per cent importer of products to basically a 100 per cent importer and the 445,000 barrels per day that were allocated were to cover between 50 and 55 per cent importation.
“So it is quite frankly by sheer magic that we even have the amount of products at the stations. We are looking to see how to get foreign exchange input; the President and I discussed extensively on how to get more crude directed at importation.
“His Excellency (Buhari) will rather have less crude but have individuals in the society suffer less with inconveniences than have more crude and have them continue to suffer.
“So we are going to put a new model to enable us to increase the pace and actually get majors as part of the crew of those to bring in more products so that the NNPC will sort of go back on the capacity of what it used to do and the majors will take over the balance of importation.
“I think if we do that, although I don’t want to put a time frame, but I will expect that over the next two months, we should see quite frankly a complete elimination of this (fuel queues).’’