Movement of vehicles along the ever-busy Apapa-Oshodi expressway was temporarily brought to a halt last week as a result of the inability of the tanker drivers operating at the Ibafon-Ibru jetty in Apapa, Lagos to load petroleum products following the death of one of them. The deceased reportedly died while attempting to load kerosene.
Movement of vehicles along the ever-busy Apapa-Oshodi expressway was temporarily brought to a halt last week as a result of the inability of the tanker drivers operating at the Ibafon-Ibru jetty in Apapa, Lagos to load petroleum products following the death of one of them. The deceased reportedly died while attempting to load kerosene.
Shipping Position Weekly correspondent who visited the Ibru Yard last weekend was told that the incident happened on Thursday night when two tanker drivers (identity undisclosed) engaged each other in a fierce fight on account of allegedly hitting a truck.
Eye witnesses explained that the fight has already been separated but the Yoruba man who obviously still felt cheated, took a screw driver and stabbed his fellow Hausa driver who died immediately.
According to another account, the two men were drunk at the time of the fight which made it to get out of hand easily.
The incidence caused the tank farm; IBACHEM Petroleum limited, from which all the tanker drivers where jostling to load their product to close down and suspended further loading of the product till further notice.
The situation consequently led to a traffic gridlock for commercial and private vehicles along the expressway because of the large number of petroleum tankers trying to gain entrance into the Ibru yard in order to load product.
The situation has however caused marketers operating at the numerous tank farms to fault the NNPC method of distributing the hitherto scarce DPK known as Kerosene and the AGO commonly called diesel.
One of the marketers told our correspondent on anonymity that “the NNPC recently told us that they have circulated 50 million liters of kerosene into the market, but yet we have not seen the kerosene or the effect at all”
“Of the whole tank farms in this Ibafon jetty, only one is kerosene loading kerosene as we speak and even them too have closed their gate because of the driver that was killed, such an incident is to be expected because most of these drivers have spent al ost two to three days on the queue because they want to buy this product, they have not slept well for days and as a result of this tempers are meant to flare” he said.
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