For the third time, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu, is assuring Nigerians that the ongoing fuel scarcity will be a thing of the past “next week”. However, he did not give specific date of the next week.
The first, according to him, was April 7 which he vehemently denied thereafter and in an interview with journalists after the Federal Executive Council Meeting, at the State House, Kachikwu again said the fuel scarcity and the continuous queues would fade out in the new week.
He attributed the development to saboteurs who are bent on truncating the wheel of progress and benefiting at the background. However, he thanked Nigerians for the patience with the process.
He said rather than some oil marketers selling the product, they package the fuel to the hinterland where they sell at exorbitant prices to the people.
He said, “So you have this price distortion where people are making a lot of money, some are external while others are internal but a lot of marketers are trying to make returns on their investment. This is wrong.”
He said the Department of Petroleum Resources has been mandated to ensure that petroleum is sold at the right price because it is only through selling at the right price that the system will stanilise.
He said that 1,200 trucks were delivered yesterday and by this weekend such number will still be delivered and in that manner there will be improvement, promising that by next weekend, the fuel challenge will come to normalcy.
He thanked President Muhammadu Buhari and Nigerians with staff of the NNPC for standing with the government over the period.
He, however, said that the measures being taken were aimed at solving the problem that administration met on ground and it is urging all Nigerians to report sabotage, where people are selling the product at higher prices.
