President Umaru Yar’Adua said Tuesday that the country’s fuel supply situation will “normalize” in the next two weeks.
Nigeria, one of the top eight leading crude oil producers in the world, has faced a severe shortage of gasoline and other petroleum products in the past three weeks. Yar’Adua said it was caused by marketers who “don’t want the deregulation of the oil sector,” adding that measures had been taken to address the situation.
In February, his administration announced that it would end subsidies on petroleum products sold to Nigerians, fully deregulate the downstream sector of the oil industry and privatize state-owned oil refineries.
Nigeria imports a large volume of the 30 million liters of gasoline it requires daily because its four state-run refineries break down frequently due to poor maintenance and corruption.
The marketers have stopped the importation of petroleum products because of the government’s plan to end subsidies. They argued that the landing cost of gasoline is NGN85 to NGN90 a liter while the government fixed the pump price at NGN65 a liter.
Yar’Adua said deregulation is not aimed at causing hardship to Nigerians adding “it will bring sanity to the key oil sector in this country and it will break a very important jinx that has almost institutionalized the greatest corruption this country has ever seen.”