We have enough fuel, says NNPC

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has put in place measures to prevent fuel scarcity in the last quarter of the year, its Group General Manager, Public Affairs, Ndu Ughamadu,  has said.

He said the Corporation was being proactive to avoid a recurrence.

Some of the measures, he said, include fuel import and provision of a good distribution mechanism to ensure that the product gets to the nooks and crannies of the country.

In an interview with The Nation, Ughamadu said the NNPC’s Group Managing Director, Dr. Maikanti Baru, was championing these measures to make the end of year celebrations merry.

The Corporation’s boss, he said, had  met stakeholders in the industry to achieve the goal.

He said the NNPC’s chief had intervened in the crisis involving members of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) and ExxonMobil and other issues to ensure that fuel distribution was not disrupted.

Ughamadu said: “PENGASSAN has given ultimatum to ExxonMobil to reinstate some of the workers sacked by the multinational oil company in line with the Supreme Court judgment. To prevent the issue from snowballing into major crisis, which would affect distribution and supply of petroleum products in the country, among other industry wide problems as 2018 is winding to a close, Dr Baru-led NNPC decided to engage stakeholders in the matter. NNPC has been able to deal with the threats by oil workers unions, especially PENGASSAN on the issue.’’

He said by taking these measures,  NNPC would avert a re-occurrence of the incidents that happened in the last quarter of last year, when the country was plagued by fuel crises, which paralysed economic activities  across the country.

He advised consumers, especially motorists not to entertain any fear of petroleum products shortages.

It would be recalled that the last quarter of every year is plagued with fuel scarcity with NNPC and marketers finding it difficult to address the problem.

Depots owned by NNPC and private operators also experience  the problem. While many of the depots owned by NNPC complain of problems of infrastructure decay and poor state of the pipelines, the privately-owned depots complain about lack of fuel supply.

Worse still, fuel marketers complain that NNPC has monopolise fuel import.