Engineer Matthew Alalade (President Merchant Navy)
Engineer Matthew Alalade (President Merchant Navy)
We have the DPR and PPPRA and I think the Nigerian public should point accusing fingers at the two agencies of government. They have failed to conduct and investigate why a country like ours should experience fuel scarcity. We expect the agencies to always be on their toes to monitor activities in the sector, but nothing of such is done to achieve positive result on their own part and that is the reason we find ourselves where we are today. I think if the regulatory agencies are up and doing, the issue of scarcity will never come up.
Mr Ben (Stakeholder)
The way out of this scarcity of fuel is for government to repair all the refineries we have in the country. If we repair the refineries, I believe scarcity will be a thing of the of past because if all the refineries are working, then we can also talk about exportation of the product too, in order to earn some foreign exchange, but if we continue to depend on fuel import, then I think we still have a long way to go in life. Even the marketers take advantages of the bottleneck to rip Nigerians, importation of fuel is not too good for us, I must confess.
Engineer Isunama (President, AMERO)
Corruption is always the problem we are facing in this country and the earlier we fight it the better for us. We are among the oil producing states in the world, yet we import and buy fuel. If the by tomorrow, Chevron, Shell, and others decides to leave the country, what do you think will happen to the oil and gas sector? It is time for the government to fix all the moribund refineries and create an enabling environment for the private sector to build refineries like what Dangote is aggressively driving at.
George Emmanuel (HSE Expert)
If a country with over 150 people has to depend squarely on importation of fuel; this is a shame and I don't know if the present condition is due to a local problem, but I want to believe locally we are not producing as much as expected. Therefore we have to depend on import. In my own opinion I still maintained that increasing local production is the only solution that can solve the problem of scarcity of fuel in this country and not really depending on importation.
Fidel Aisodioune (Petrol marketer)
For about four years now we have forgotten that issues like this can still come up again, this is because the federal government had put up various programmes to ensure that the product is available and well circulated. The government had fuel available through importation mainly, coupled with two refineries running at 30% capacity, but what we had in the last two weeks was as a result of the systemic breakdown overtime, what I think government can do is the revival of the refineries we have and creation of an enabling environment for those who want to establish refineries. I am aware that licenses for private refineries were issued four years ago, but if you visit those sites, little or nothing is being done, I strongly believe that it is because the coast is not clear yet and that is why the investors are not ready.
Clement Agbaso (Treasurer, Ibeto Unit, PTD)
For the past two weeks now, we have noticed the scarcity of PMS and we sincerely don't know the cause of the problem, what government should do is to continue doing what they were doing before to alleviate the suffering of the masses, we are not supposed to be experiencing all these scarcity issues. Since the beginning of this Goodluck Jonathan regime, we have not experienced anything called fuel scarcity, therefore government should put our refineries in order all over the country because, importation alone at this time cannot help Nigeria.
Chris Iyasere (Petroleum Marketer)
Personally, I don't like speculations, but some people say the scarcity was caused by the fact that the budget has not been passed and funds were not released and this is what has hindered importation. If this is true, then what do you do, if the budget is not passed, the banks cannot continue to release money for importation, there would be approval of licenses that are used for importation; if the budget is not there, they will not know the volume of product needed at a particular quarter of the year, when you bring in your license that you want to import, it is only then the banks can release money for importation.
Ugochukwu Nnadi (Freight forwarder)
The solution to fuel scarcity is the building of refineries, the military in 1978 built two refineries within two years, I don't know why this administration despite haven been in power, and even the democracy we have been experiencing since 1999 has not yielded any refinery, it is a failure on the part of the politicians because they don't have any justifiable reason as to why they cannot build a refinery, instead, they are maintaining 40 years old refineries, how do you expect such to work? It can only perform a little and then it breaks down.
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