The Minister of State for Petroleum, Timipre Sylva, on Wednesday, absolved the Federal Government of any blame for the fuel queues in the nation’s capital, saying that marketers are responsible.
Sylva, who addressed State House correspondents after the weekly Federal Executive Council meeting, said the NNPC is in very good supply of the product.
“Frankly, it is not a supply issue, as you can also confirm. So it’s not from us. But you know When you have an arbitrage opportunity, people will tend to take advantage of it. These are some of the fallouts of the subsidy regime,” Sylva said.
“If you look at it, there are no queues when you leave Abuja, in most places, only in the Abuja, metropolis, you continue to have these queues. So is it that there is less applied to Abuja, than to the rest of the country? It is not so. It is because if you go out of Abuja, they can afford to probably sell at higher prices.
“And I’m sure a lot of you must be buying at higher prices, but within Abuja, because of the watchful eye of the federal government, they cannot sell at those prices. So it’s not a very attractive market for them. I think these are all things that we might have to be dealing with for a while until we’re able to fully deregulate.
“But that actually is a problem it’s not a supply problem, the country is well supplied as it is. NNPC has a very good supply. So it is not a problem for us, but it is the marketers. But we are engaging the marketers and will continue to engage them. In fact, before now NATO said, Oh, because diesel prices were now going up. And of course, you know that diesel is deregulated already.”
Although he promised continued talks with them, the minister does not guarantee that the fuel queues will dissipate any time soon.