Fuel scarcity handiwork of saboteurs –State Petroleum Minister Kachikwu

MINISTER of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, has attrib­uted the continuous fuel queues across the country to the handiwork of “sab­oteurs, who want to make quick returns.”
Kachikwu, who joined his colleagues at the Fed­eral Executive Council meeting (FEC), presided by President Muham­madu Buhari, to brief on the fuel situation, said the Department of Petro­leum Resources (DPR) has been given marching orders to fish out culprits and deal with them.
He said NNPC, already being over-burdened, as at Wednesday, delivered 1,200 trucks of petroleum products nationwide, to end the fuel crisis in the country.
“The queues are as a result of sabotage. Some people, rather than sell products, send them into hinterlands, where they sell at ridiculous prices and, so, you are hav­ing this price distortions whereby people are mak­ing a lot of money. Some are internal and some are external, but a lot of it is marketers trying to make quick returns on their in­vestments wrongly.
“We have asked DPR to deploy officials to en­sure products are sold at the right price because it is only through price stabilisation that these system queues will disap­pear.
“As at today, we are delivering about 1,200 trucks, by weekend, we should be delivering same number of trucks. It will take a bit of days to even out, but you can see improvement already. I hope by the end of next week, with the refiner­ies helping us to stay on course, every part of the country will get fuel.
“We thank the Presi­dent, NNPC staff and the ministry staff, who work night and day to enforce discipline.
“We thank Nigerians for their unbelievable level of patience; we are solving problem we met on ground and trying to find long term solution to it, and urge Nigerians to report sabotage, where people are selling product on higher price because we all need to work col­lectively to make this thing go for good”.
Kachikwu, who gave an overview of the fuel crisis and efforts to ad­dress the situation, said the long queues would disappear next week. The minister, who is also the Group Managing Direc­tor of NNPC said logis­tics were on to revamp the local refineries to boost the strategic reserves that have been depleted in the past few weeks.
He said the Port Har­court refinery has began operating skeletal pro­duction while crude oil was being supplied to Warri refinery at the mo­ment.
“Our intervention to­day was basically to give a brief update in terms of the petroleum distri­bution position and the whole fuel queue crisis that bedevilled this coun­try for few weeks.
“The position, rightly, is due to three or four causative factors. The first, obviously, is fiscal; fiscal in the sense that, at the time we came in last year, there were over N600 billion in subsidy that hadn’t been paid through 2014 and 2015 and marketers got to a point where their liquid­ity had become very chal­lenged and most of them had got out of the busi­ness, so they were not importing. Through the intervention of Mr. Presi­dent and the National As­sembly, including other stakeholders, we got that money paid at about No­vember 2015…”