In a meeting with members of IPMAN, yesterday, the minister charged them to work with relevant government agencies such as the NNPC, Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) and other stakeholders to ensure that the prevailing fuel scarcity “becomes a thing of the past as quickly as possible.”
The minister had assured the Senate Committee that the lingering fuel crisis would be over within the next two weeks.
IPMAN, on its part, has assured Nigerians that the pains they are going through now as a result of fuel scarcity, would end soon as it has promised to flood the petrol stations with products.
National Secretary of IPMAN, Danladi Pasali stated: “In the spirit of reconciliation and patriotism, we have resolved to forget our differences and work together towards providing products to our various stations across the country in order to ease the hardship on Nigerians.”
The association which has been locked up in leadership tussle over the past three years, gave the assurance after the meeting.
While blaming a lack of long-term planning for the inability of Nigeria to build new refineries after years of experiencing fuel shortage, former President of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers Senior Staff Association (PENGASSAN), Peter Esele explained that the penchant of successive governments for basing planning on ad hoc arrangement had not done the country any good.
His explained: “Have we sat down to find out what would be our energy need in the next 10 or 20 years to come? Does Nigeria have a roadmap on how to achieve self-reliance in petrol need in another 20 years? What is our future plan on how to move the petroleum industry forward, apart from the omnibus Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) that has not been passed in the last eight years? There is no national goal on nearly everything Nigeria is doing.”
Therefore, Esele called on President Buhari to develop a policy on the development direction of the country in critical sectors of the economy.
He submitted that no businessman or International Oil Company (IOC) would build refineries in the country as long as government failed to remove incentives offered by an importation regime.
“Why would anybody be interested in building refineries when he knows he will make more money through importation of petrol? It is time for government to adopt a stick-an- carrot approach in dealing with marketers,” Esele stated.