By Dipo Olowookere
Nigerians may witness another round of fuel scarcity less than a month after the price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), commonly known as petrol, was increased to about N1,000 per litre in Lagos and other cities across the country.
On Thursday, Business Post observed that a few petrol stations dispensing the product to motorists are beginning to experience queues.
At one of the petrol stations in Alimosho Local Government Area of Lagos State, fuel was sold to customers at N1,020 per litre, while an AP petrol station around the Okunola area of Egbeda had several vehicles jostling to purchase fuel.
It was a similar experience on Wednesday at the NNPC Retail Station in the Cele area of Egbeda, with queues extending outside the facility.
It was gathered that independent marketers are unable to access an online portal of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) designed for the purchase of petrol.
In a report on Thursday by Punch, it was stated that this platform had been shut, with marketers still awaiting over 90 million litres of petrol from the NNPC.
But the NNPC, through its spokesman, Mr Olufemi Soneye, claimed that the portal was shut down because “we have a significant backlog to address. The closure is intended to prevent us from holding marketers’ funds for an extended period,” promising that it will be “reopened once the backlog has been sufficiently reduced. We are working to address it as soon as possible.”
This development is coming at a time when Nigerians expect the country to say goodbye to the scarcity of products because of the commencement of the petrol supply from the Dangote Refinery in Lagos.
Recall that on September 15, 2024, the facility, which can refine 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day in Lagos, began to supply the NNPC with petrol amid issues concerning the currency to be used to sell crude oil to the refinery.
It was later agreed that Dangote Refinery would begin to buy the commodity from the NNPC in Naira and not in United States Dollars from Monday, October 1, 2024, to enable it to sell petrol at a cheaper rate.
However, the state of this is not known.