The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, and its downstream subsidiary, Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, PPMC, have said that normalcy is being restored to the supply and distribution of premium motor spirit otherwise called petrol across the country.
The Managing Director of PPMC, Haruna Momoh, who made this submission Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Petroleum Downstream in Abuja, said that with respect to “fuel situation in the country today, the NNPC/PPMC and other marketers are jointly supplying fuel to the market, stressing that the long queues are beginning to disappear from most of the filling stations across the states.
“I will like to put on record that based on the 40 million litres national daily consumption, the NNPC/PPMC is responsible for 50 per cent of the allocation from the Petroleum Products and Pricing Regulatory Agency, PPPRA, and other marketers are responsible for the other 50 percent.
“The NNPC/PPMC as the supplier of last resort ensured that when marketers withdrew from supplying, the country was sustained with the fifty percent supplied from the inland and marine strategic reserves,” the MD PPMC asserted.
He explained that the NNPC/PPMC had to dip into its strategic reserves to keep the country wet with the product revealing that as at today, the country has 14 days sufficiency and with the involvement of marketers in the importation of fuel, the strategic reserve would be restocked back to thirty days sufficiency by month end.
The PPMC MD informed that the NNPC/PPMC maintains inland and marine strategic reserves so as to ensure energy sufficiency in line with the Corporation’s mandate.
Responding to a question on the cause of the recent tightness in fuel supply, Momoh affirmed that based on the information made available to him by the Major Marketers Association of Nigeria, MOMAN, and the Independent Marketers Association of Nigeria, IPMAN, lack of subsidy payment was the reason why they suspended importation of petroleum products to the country adding that with the payment of subsidy claims for third and fourth quarters of 2013 to marketers running to the tune of N41bn recently, the marketers have stepped up supply to the market.
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