The situation is that there is no product. Once there is lack of supply or inadequate supply, what you will see is scarcity and queues will emerge at filling stations.
By Deborah Hassan
365Daily – The Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), Chief Chinedu Ukadike, has explained that long queues in fueling stations across the country is due to unavailability of the product in the country, saying it will take about two weeks to be fully restore supply.
He said this while speaking to Vanguard Newspaper on Sunday, April 28, 2024.
Chief Ukadike blamed the acute shortage in supply of importation bottlenecks and the slow pace of renewal of marketers’ licences by the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA).
According to him, only 1,050 out of 15,000 licences have been renewed by the NMDPRA.
He said, “The situation is that there is no product. Once there is lack of supply or inadequate supply, what you will see is scarcity and queues will emerge at filling stations. On the part of NNPCL, which is the sole supplier of petroleum products in Nigeria, they have attributed the challenge to logistics and vessel problems.
“Once there is breech in the international supply chain, it will have an impact of domestic supply because we depend on import. I also have it good authority that most of the refineries in Europe are undergoing turn around maintenance. So sourcing of petroleum products has become a bit difficult.
“NNPC Group CEO has assured us that there will be improvement in the supply chain because their vessels are arriving. Once that is done, normalcy will return. This is because once the 30 days supply sufficiency distrusted, it takes two to three months to restore it. We expect that by next week or so, NNPC should be able to restore supply and with another one week, normalcy should return.”
He continued, “NNPC has said the marketers who have not been able to renew their licences will not be allowed to remain on their portal which has been shut for sometime now. Because of this we have not been able to request for new products.
“At this nascent period of deregulation, you will discover that this leads to scarcity even when the product arrives. As it is now, even by their own data, out of 15,000 marketers that are on the portal with licences, only 1,050 renewed their licences. And the requirement for renewal by NMDPRA is so much. Marketers are facing hostile environment. NNPC placed a deadline of April 15, 2024, for marketers to renew their licences.
“We are therefore appealing to NNPC to extend this deadline and also to NMDPRA to hasten the release of marketers licences who have completed their processes, and also reduce the bottlenecks around licence renewals.”