The Minister of State for Petroleum
Resources said: “Today we have the whole fuel queues and it is a
complete nightmare for me. It is being a lot of work but the reality is
that I hurt more like every Nigerian who is at the filling station, I am
very emotional about my job and the things that I do.
There isn’t sufficient reason why Nigerians should suffer this much, we just need to take the right policies as difficult as it comes, we need to take the right policies to ensure that we do not have this recurrence of fuel scarcity, it’s been with us historically, but I don’t want that to define my legacy in the petroleum industry.
Hopefully by tomorrow through Thursday the fuel queues in Abuja should be over, hopefully the same thing will happen to Lagos and thereafter, by the weekend, we should see Kano, Katsina, Sokoto and Port Harcourt and Warri get off this state.
What concerns me more is not just getting the present queues out, that will definitely wear out, what concerns me more is how do you avoid having to have that ever again in this country and to do that there are certain things we need to do.
First is that strategic reserve have not been in this country for over 20 years, we need to bring back strategic reserve that should serve 60 to 90 day type of product hold so that we can respond within a matter of hours when there is shortage in any part of the country.
Two is that we need to find how to handle allocation of resources, for the first time I have been able to convince the major oil producers to allocate scarce foreign exchange to the downstream players to enable them bring in product.”
He also said that in the long term, the FG’s choice to privatise the downstream petroleum sector would be the surest solution to the perennial challenges of fuel scarcity.
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