February 08, (THEWILL) – The Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited has assured that there will be a major improvement in the supply of petroleum products across the country next week.
NNPC Group Chief Executive Officer, Mele Kyari, who disclosed this while speaking during an interview on Channels Television Tuesday evening, said the short supply of fuel will be resolved soon.
“I apologise for the situation. On behalf of all of us, the stakeholders in the oil and gas industry. Definitely, not surely exclusive. Having said this, it is unfortunate. It’s a glitch.
“We are responsible for resolving this glitch. We will resolve this.
“Now, within the next one week, I’m not saying that you’re going to have zero queues within the next week, no, I can’t guarantee that because a number of things are out of our control, and of course, the market forces will determine some of these issues.
“But, I believe that we’re going to see substantial and relative ease compared to today in the next one week.
“We have no benefit in doing this. We are families. We are members and part of this community. We are very proud of this country. We would like this country to prosper. We don’t want Nigerians to suffer and of course, as a matter of condition, we don’t think that anyone should go through this thing,” he said.
The NNPC boss said the company has been on top of the situation to bring the crisis under control by increasing the supply of petroleum into the market.
“We know that the solution is excess supply. Once we are able to do excess supply across the country and locations, you are going to resolve this issue, which is exactly what we’re doing now.
“We’re ramping up evacuation today. On a daily basis, we are doing more than 70 million litres into the market against the regular evacuation of up to 63-64 million litres.
“This will work and we believe the ease that we’re seeing in many locations today. I don’t want to cite specific locations but I know that we’re seeing ease across the country. This is easing up,” he said.
Speaking further, Kyari argued that the fuel queue is not peculiar to any country.
“It happens everywhere whenever you have breaches of pipes, pipeline issues, and so on.
“We don’t hope that this happens to our country but you must have a guarantee of supply in your country, which is why we are focused on delivering our refineries rehabilitation projects so that ultimately this product becomes close to us.
“Now, this hasn’t happened. The refineries’ rehabilitation is not completed. The Dangote refinery hasn’t taken off. Both of them will happen and once that happens, you have the safety and security of supply near you.
“And the guarantee I have now is that NNPC has locked supply into this country, irrespective of the financing challenges that we’re facing,” he said.
