The Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited’s Group Managing Director, Mele Kyari, has refuted suggestions that the nation’s gasoline shortfall is an intentional effort to undermine the approaching general elections.
Recall that Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate for the All Progressives Congress (APC), said that the shortage of gasoline and the redesign of the currency were attempts to disrupt the impending elections.
On Thursday, Kyari said during an interview on NTA’s “Good Morning Nigeria” that the country’s ongoing fuel shortage has nothing to do with the elections.
The NNPC CEO claims that the petrol shortage problem started in 2022 and is a cyclical problem, with arbitrage having a substantial impact on the product’s scarcity.
Kyari asked individuals making such claims to stop, saying it was impossible and out of context to link the gasoline shortage to the elections.
He did, however, assure Nigerians that the corporation is working tirelessly to address the petrol shortage before the presidential election on February 25.
Kyari said:
I do not think anybody sits down to orchestrate that there should be scarcity so that it will impact elections and so on. I don’t think it happens that way if it is so. But it is not true because the reality is that these glitches actually started early in 2022.
It has nothing to do with this election period. Once you have a challenge of this nature, it is a cyclical thing. Once you have this challenge, they continue to come up, and then once you have arbitrage issues, you have this glitch.
Today, our redundancy in terms of petroleum products supply is just three days in this country. Once you have a glitch that extends longer than three days, you need another three weeks to stabilise it. So irrespective of who does what, whatever causes the three-day glitch, it is a nightmare waiting to happen.
Once we see this glitch, that is why we do everything possible to avoid the glitches from happening. I do not think anyone will sit down and say let us create this so that there will be an impact on the elections and so on.
There is no benefit in it. No one would do this and I can tell you this very clearly that there is no one issue, being the direct report to Mr. President, there is no one issue that bothers him like this. There is no briefing that I do to the president that he does not mention this.
Yes, there are a lot of glitches. There are a lot of logistics and nightmares. Greed has come into play. There are cross-border issues that we have to deal with. There are international market situations that you have to deal with.