The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd has denied that the allegation that the ongoing fuel scarcity witnessed in the country is a deliberate effort to sabotage the efforts of a targeted presidential candidate.
The group chief executive officer of the oil giant, Mele Kyari, said during an interview on NTA that nobody orchestrated the queues to frustrate the chances of any candidate.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress had accused the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration of orchestrating policies to frustrate his chances in the February 25, election.
Tinubu had said during a campaign at the MKO Abiola Stadium in Abeokuta in Ogun that the fuel queues and the naira redesign are a deliberate attack on him by a section of people in the presidency that are working against him.
“Let fuel be expensive, only they know where they keep it. Keep petrol, keep the naira, we will vote and be elected. You may change the ink of naira notes. What you expect will not happen. We will win,” the APC flag-bearer had said in Yoruba parlance.
But the NNPC boss denied any wrongdoing, saying the queues first surfaced in February 2022 following logistics, arbitrage and other issues.
Kyari explained, “There is a very cumbersome logistics nightmare everywhere in the world where you move 1,800 trucks every day on the road on a consistent basis. Today, we have based on the records on our system over 38,000 trucks on our roads just carrying petroleum products and this is the reality.
“By the way, I think it is very good also to say that no matter what you do, once there is an arbitrage environment, some people will take advantage of it.
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And it is very contrary, we all respect the comments, I don’t think anybody sat down and orchestrated that there should be scarcity so that it will impact the election. I don’t think anyone did this. If it is so, we will know.
“But it is not true because the reality is that these glitches started well early in 2022. It has nothing to do with this election period. Once you have a challenge of this nature, it is a cyclic thing. Once you have this challenge, they will continue to come up. And then once you have arbitrage issues, you will have a glitch.
“Today let me just put it clearly, today, our redundancy in terms of petroleum product supply is just three days in this country. When you have a glitch, that extends longer than three days, you will need another three weeks to stabilize it.
“So, irrespective of what you do, whatever causes a three days glitch is a nightmare to tackle. We will always prepare. That is why we put everything possible to avoid glitches from happening. I don’t think anyone will sit down and say, let’s create this so that there will be an impact on the election and so on. There is no benefit in it. No one will do this and I can say this very clearly, there is no one issue that bothers President Muhammadu Buhari like this. There is no briefing that I go to brief him that he does not mention this.”
