Nigerians woke up to a new month with dashed expectations as the long gruesome fuel lines was evident across major cities in Nigeria. Fuel price, which the government had cut to N87 just a month ago was now selling for over N100 in some parts of the country. To make matters worse, fuel was hard to come by as Nigerians spent hours hoping to fill their think. Whilst Nigerian wondered what the cause of the fuel scarcity was, tweets from the twitter handle of the Chairman of the PDP suggested the opposition party was to blame.
https://twitter.com/Muazuaa/status/572384341919186944
As expected, a lot of people took this tweet seriously frowning at the apparent blame game and politicization of issues as sentitive as fuel scarcity. Despite all this, there has to be a reason for the fuel scarcity and someone has to take a blame. NUPENG it seems has an opinion on why fuel is scarce and who is to blame. As the News Agency of Nigeria reports
NUPENG urged the intervention of finance minister, NNPC, others The Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas workers (NUPENG) has called on the minister of finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to intervene in the current fuel crisis in the country.
They made the call on Monday in Abuja. Mr Isaac Aberare, the NUPENG general secretary, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) the intervention of the minister will facilitate the resolution of the crisis.
Aberare also called for the intervention of the NNPC, Petroleum, Pricing, and Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) and major players in the sector to tackle the scarcity. “It is the intervention of the minister that can adequately solve the problem. “She is the one who promised the marketers in February that in March, their outstanding subsidy amounting to N264 billion will be paid.‘’
He said the marketers claimed that the government owed them a lot of money in subsidies and that this has made business difficult. He said,
“The marketers say their cash is trapped such that they cannot import the product unless they are paid. It is when the money is released that they can import petroleum products; for us as a union, we have little or nothing to address the situation. “Our tanker drivers are not on strike; they are available to load the trucks but the product is not there for them to carry, so that is the situation.”
Okonjo-Iweala met with members of the Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria on February 23 and agreed to remove all bottlenecks in fuel imports. According to him, this includes the settlement of N100 billion before the end of March to banks, in order to avert a fuel supply crisis. The minister also met with officials of the Debt Management Office and members of the major oil marketers to reassure them of the
