KACHIKWU:WHY THERE IS STILL FUEL SCARCITY

In his remarks, Kachikwu disclosed that 30 per cent of Premium Motor Spirit, PMS, supplied in the country was often diverted to neighbouring countries, noting that the practice was responsible for the substantial absence of the commodity in the country. He said: “Understandably, most times people define what we have done in the context of fuel supply. But what is the problem with fuel supply? It is simple: by the time we started last year, the government owed marketers N600 billion in unpaid subsidy arrears. The effect of that was that many of them went out of business as they didn’t have the liquidity and stopped importation. “Now the traditional model that always worked for this country is that NNPC will bring you 50 per cent of the supply and the balance 50 percent is always provided by the marketers. So if you, therefore, have zero percent supply from the marketers, you have 50 percent deficiency in the supply. And NNPC had to struggle to fill that gap. “But this was a capacity that we did not have and the funding that we did not have. The second was that after we struggled and did that payment in November, there was no sufficient forex line to open up letters of credit.”