Fuel price soars to N1,300/litre amid scarcity as depots run dry
Fuel shortages have hit several states across the country, including Kano, Lagos, Kaduna, Rivers, and parts of Abuja and Niger, as many depots for Premium Motor Spirit (commonly known as petrol) are currently empty.
This alarming situation has led to long queues at petrol stations, prompting black marketers to exploit the crisis by charging exorbitant prices, with rates reaching as high as N1,300 and N1,500 per litre in certain areas of Lagos and Ogun states.
The surge in demand began to escalate over the weekend, with significant lines forming at fuel stations in Kano, Abuja, and Lagos on Saturday.
In response to the ongoing scarcity and the resultant long wait times at stations, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited attributed the supply chain disruptions to delays in the discharge operations of several vessels.
“The NNPC Ltd wishes to state that the tightness in fuel supply and distribution witnessed in some parts of Lagos and the FCT is as a result of a hitch in the discharge operations of a couple of vessels,” the NNPC Chief Corporate Communications Officer, Olufemi Soneye, said.
The company added that it was “working round the clock with all stakeholders to resolve the situation and restore normalcy in the operations.”
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However, despite the assurance by the NNPC, the situation worsened nationwide on Sunday showed that there were long queues at several filling stations across major cities.
There was no loading of trucks in the Apapa depots as of Sunday.
A depot operator, who did not want his name in print, told newsmen that there was no fuel in almost all the depots on Sunday after the little available was supplied on Saturday.
The source confirmed that the depots are dry, saying “supply gets late thereby affecting product load out.”
It was observed on Sunday in Abuja, the capital city that while the few filling stations that dispensed the product sold it at between N660/litre and N800/litre, black marketers took advantage of the scarcity to hike the price to about N1,200/litre, depending on the area of purchase.
A bus driver, Bashir Ibrahim, who spoke to newsmen at the Bank Road in Kaduna, lamented the struggle to get PMS.
“We have been finding it hard to get fuel for the past couple of days and it’s expensive, so, we had to increase the rates,” he said.
In Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, motorists queued for long hours to purchase fuel at the NNPC station on Trans Amadi.
The long queues at the NNPC station are a common occurrence as the product is sold for N591 per litre, the cheapest in the state.
In other stations in Benin, a litre of PMS was sold for between N750 and N800.
In Gombe, fuel sold between N850 and N1,000 across major stations, while black marketers made brisk business, selling for N1,250 per litre as frustrated motorists resorted to buying the product from them following the scarcity.
“You may think that the amount sold by the roadside people (black marketers) is expensive until you are in a fix and you can’t access a filling station with petrol, then you will be left with no option but to patronise them despite the ridiculous amount,” a motorcyclist, Usman Abubakar, told The PUNCH.
Motorists in Jos, the Plateau State capital, expressed concern over the persistent scarcity and high cost of the commodity, saying that the situation had worsened the economic hardship.
Proofreading and editing by Fa’izatu Aliyu Doma, Journalist at Neptune Prime.
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