The Natural oil and gas Suppliers Association of Nigeria (NOGASA ) on Tuesday blamed scarcity of fuel on high cost of diesel for transporting fuel .
Mr Benneth Okorie ,National President ,NOGASA said this while fielding questions from newsmen in Abuja.
Okorie called for a little increase in fuel price to tackle the challenges of scarcity especially in Abuja
According to him ,the reason the nation is having scarcity of petroleum products in Abuja particularly is as a result of the high cost of diesel.
He explained that diesel as at today was N850 in the market adding that the money being paid to transporters was not enough.
“If you look at it at N850 ,and you are giving your driver N1200 litres from Abuja to Lagos,if you plus and minis it ,you will find out that it is about N40 naira per litre .
“So if you add it to PMS ,buying the deport price and seling here is too high, if you bring it at N40 and you buy at N155 plus N40 which is 195 , you now sell at N165,who will do that business ?it is at a loss .
“Even with the PEF,you will not get the product to Abuja ,so the answer to your questions is ,the diesel is the risen ,it is too high N850 as at today in the market.
“As far as I know nothing for now to address this situation , the only way out, if you want to know is that they should increase the fuel a little to reduce the money spent on PMS subsidy.”
Okorie said that the hike in deisel price wqs responsible for most of the callings because is used to transport desiel fuel to filling stations, it is used for businesses in Nigeria because of lack of light.
He said that if the fuel price could be increased a little although it would hurt Nigerians the challenge would be resolved because that was the only solution.
“Increase the fuel price a little so that the savings will be enough for CBN to have enough forex .
“You and I know that everything now is import, the diesel is import and it is a full deregulation business.
” So the importers are not getting dollars to import this deisel at the official rate of CBN.
“So everybody is going to black market to get dollars to import their diesel, so you expect the desiel to be high .”
According to Okorie, if the rate of the user on that foreign exchange ciuld be brought down, it would help other business men importing desiel to bring the diesel at a low price .
He said that other places like Lagos and Port Harcourt were not experiencing queues because i because of the presence of ports in those states.
This ,he said was because after importing the product, the transport to the station was not too much .
“You are talking about Lagos to Abuja and you are talking about Port Harcourt to Abuja and you are talking about Warri to Abuja so they cost of dleisel for transporting the product is high.
“Not just that ,the roads are bad ,the maintainance is too high ,So you can not make any profit ,if you go round now you see 75 per cent of filling stations in Nigeria are going out of business. “
Okorie said that thr government needed to do something fast otherwise diesel would be sold between N1000 to N1500 in the next two weeks.
He therefore said that another way forward was to make refineries work adding that ” I heard in the news that Dangote needs 1.1billion dollars to complete the refinery before the end of the year.
” I will advise that if all the banks can come together and assist him to get it done quickly ,this is the only remedy we have now for now.”
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