The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu has true to his earlier promise that the Fuel scarcity will abate on April 7 said today that the country will begin to experience reduced scarcity as from tomorrow, Wednesday.
The Petroleum Minister re-affirmed his promise today while speaking at a town hall meeting which he had with workers of the Petroleum Products Products Pricing and Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) in Abuja.
Kachikwu noted that Lagos and Abuja will be the first locations to feel the ease and end of the fuel scarcity which has lasted for weeks. He added that other cities like Port Harcourt, Warri, Sokoto and Kano would begin to feel the ease in the current fuel crisis by the weekend.
He said: “Today we have the whole fuel queues and it is a complete nightmare for me. It is being a lot of work but the reality is that I hurt more like every Nigerian who is at the filling station, I am very emotional about my job and the things that I do.
“There isn’t sufficient reason why Nigerians should suffer this much, we just need to take the right policies as difficult as it comes, we need to take the right policies to ensure that we do not have this recurrence of fuel scarcity, it’s been with us historically, but I don’t want that to define my legacy in the petroleum industry,”
Kachikwu further added: “Hopefully by tomorrow through Thursday the fuel queues in Abuja should be over, hopefully the same thing will happen to Lagos and thereafter, by the weekend, we should see Kano, Katsina, Sokoto and Port Harcourt and Warri get off this state.”
The Petroleum Minister also promised that the Federal Government will do all within its capacity to keep the downstream sector working efficiently to avoid recurrent scarcity of products.
Speaking on privatisation of the sector, Kachikwu said: “What concerns me more is not just getting the present queues out, that will definitely wear out, what concerns me more is how do you avoid having to have that ever again in this country and to do that there are certain things we need to do.
“First is that strategic reserves have not been in this country for over 20 years, we need to bring back strategic reserve that should serve 60 to 90 day type of product hold so that we can respond within a matter of hours when there is shortage in any part of the country.
“Two is that we need to find how to handle allocation of resources, for the first time I have been able to convince the major oil producers to allocate scarce foreign exchange to the downstream players to enable them bring in product.
“But that is not a futuristic long term solution, so we need to find a way of being able to fund this sector to do its work and there is no better way than to steer it to the path of privatisation, let them go do their thing, we are going to have to look at that and it is not necessarily synonymous with an increase in price. Hopefully the price modulation that we have put in place will enable us do that,”
Defending the rationale behind the idea which is expected to provide a long term solution to fuel crisis in the country, he explained: “But really, in the states, we do not have queues as such, people are paying double the price to get product, and there is no place for that practice, not right but what it says to you is that obviously, there are some statistical philosophy we need to watch in terms of whether we are pricing our products rightly for people to be able to participate in this chain.”
The petroleum Minister however unveiled plans to reposition the PPPRA, explaining that: “We need to enhance PPPRA and we need to ensure that as you advance your careers, they are in the right direction and one of those things we are going to do is to ensure that promotions that are long outstanding are all done and we are going to be looking at that within the next two weeks.”