A shortage of aviation fuel in Nigeria has caused airlines to cancel or delay hundreds of domestic flights over the past week while British Airways planes are stopping in neighbouring Benin to refuel.
Airports have been crammed with passengers desperate to get onto flights and some airlines have resorted to changing their routes at the last minute according to fuel availability.
A Reuters reporter who boarded a flight from Lagos to the capital Abuja instead ended up in Kano, 400km further north. Passengers were informed of the change of route while the plane was already taxiing towards the runway.
A conference on aviation in Abuja has also been affected. Delegates arrived late on the first day because of flight problems, while the chief executive of sponsor airline Virgin Nigeria was unable to make it because of “urgent operational matters”.
The causes of the fuel shortage are complex.
Nigeria is the world’s eighth biggest exporter of crude oil but because of a lack of refining capacity the state-run Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC) has to import huge amounts of refined products.
It normally imports dual-purpose kerosene (DPK) for use as cooking fuel by millions of Nigerians.
A PPMC source said the kerosene, which is cheaper than imported jet fuel but can also be used in airplanes, was being diverted towards the aviation industry by middlemen who were selling it to airlines at a huge profit.
“The major marketers who are supposed to import aviation kerosene have abandoned that responsibility. Instead, they are resorting to DPK which should go to ordinary Nigerians for their cooking,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
As a result, the PPMC has started being more stringent in ensuring that the cooking fuel goes to people, not planes, and that is why the marketers are no longer able to supply airlines with enough kerosene, the source said.
The managing director of a private petroleum products marketing company said part of the problem was corruption. He said many marketers were linked to influential figures in business and politics who could put pressure on PPMC officials to grant them allocations of lucrative kerosene.
Problems like these are common in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, and lead to chronic shortages of different kinds of fuel.
Filling stations sometimes run out of gasoline and motorists have to queue for hours, all night in some cases, to fill their tanks, while hundreds of black-market vendors suddenly appear by the side of the road with plastic bottles of pink gasoline.