As acute petrol supply challenges enter its second week, independent marketers have explained that issues that led to the scarcity of the product would take another two weeks to be fully resolved.
Checks around Abuja on Sunday showed that most stations were out of stock with very few major marketers dispensing the product in Abuja city centre. At the suburbs, the few stations opened to motorists jacked up their pump price from N680 per litre to N870 per litre.
Speaking to Vanguard on the situation, the Public Relations Officer, Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria, IPMAN, Chief Chinedu Ukadike said the product was not available in-country.
Chief Ukadike blamed the acute shortage in supply of importation bottlenecks and the slow pace of marketers licence renewal by the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, NMDPRA.
He disclosed that only 1,050 marketers out of 15,000 have had their licences 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”.
The challenges faced by marketers in renewing their licences, he said: “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 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”.