With the country just coming out of one fuel crisis, there’s no eagerness to get into another, but that might just be the case if the oil marketers are to be believed.
The marketers, under the umbrella of the Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association of Nigeria (DPPMAN) have said except the CBN provides foreign exchange to import fuel, the recent subsidy payment they received from the government will remain in their naira accounts.
They made this clear on Friday, May 20, when they had a meeting with the Minister of Finance Kemi Adeosun. They lamented that they are unable to import fuel due to the unavailability of foreign exchange.
The marketers are requesting assess to Forex by the Federal Government.
During the meeting, the Chairman of DAPPMAN, Dapo Abiodun, told the minister that members of the association finding it difficult to convert some of the naira payments made by the government to dollars.
He said this conundrum was making it difficult to fulfill their promises to their foreign partners.
While he promised that the oil marketers would continue to do their best to provide petroleum products for the country, he stated that the lack of Forex would make fulfilling that obligation quite difficult indeed.
The Federal Government had announced that it has paid the oil marketers N48.2 billion minus value added tax as the arrears of outstanding 2015 subsidy claims earlier in the week.
Adeosun confirming this said the payment was to enable the marketers import petroleum products and meet up their other financial needs.
Countering this, Abiodun noted that except the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) provides Forex to them, the payment will remain in their naira accounts.
He said: “We want to thank you for the recent payment of about N42 billion but we want to emphasise the fact that this naira payment will continue to sit in our banks.
“We look forward to dialoguing with you as to how you can help us expedite the sourcing of foreign exchange to liquidate our exposures to our foreign bankers that we have line of credit with.
“We are very worried about going into a new dynamics in which marketers are now going to be sourcing forex at the rate that they can find, which we have approximated to around N285 to a dollar.
“We believe that it is a quick fix solution to all the epileptic supply of petroleum products in the country.
“However, we still have this naira sitting in our account from previous transactions and we are worried that if anything happens to the rate of exchange officially, we are going to be caught in between.
“We do not want to come back to you to ask for foreign exchange differentials which issue we still have pending from previous transactions.”