THE Federal Government on Wednesday blamed oil workers unions for the present petroleum products scarcity being experienced in the country, but has assured that the situation would be resolved in time before Christmas rush.
Speaking to State House correspondents in Abuja, Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs Deziani Allison-Madueke, said that government had some issues with the unions which led to the upsurge of queues at filling stations in parts of the country.
“Well, we had a slight union issue over the last few days which we are also trying to handle, that created the upsurge again in the fuel queues but that is well on it’s way to being sorted out and so, it will go down again,” she said.
The Minister remarked that the issue of subsidy payment had also contributed to fuel scarcity situation in the country, but that government had no choice except to do a stringent verification of claims before payments were made to genuine importers.
The Federal Government has also recently announced that it was withholding N29 billion claims by some oil marketers on subsidy payment, pending the outcome of the investigation by the economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
According to Mrs. Allison-Madueke, “We are doing everything possible to ensure that it does not happen. Initially, the queues came out of the whole fuel subsidy issue and the fact of course that verification of certain amounts and certain marketers claims were being made very stringently and this has toned down.
“We cannot eat our cake and have it. We cannot keep calling out for transparency and accountability and pointing at corruption if we are not prepared to bear some of the hardship that will obviously come when you are trying to clean up a sector.
“The verification were being done, payments could not be made by finance and I think they have said that several times, but the verification have been done, payments are now being made and like I said, the queues are actually beginning to go down.
“We too on the NNPC side, we had pushed out a lot of our strategic reserve in a bid to ensure that people were not overtly put out in terms of fuel scarcity. And if not for this recent union issue, I think it could have been completely alienated, but I am sure over the next few days it will die down completely.”
Meanwhile, the President of Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), Comrade Babatunde Ogun, has said the statement credited to Mrs Alison-Madueke is not true, stressing that everybody can see and understand what is happening in the downstream sector. According to him, “That sounds absurd because labour is not the cause of the scarcity, the Federal Government should be sincere with Nigerians and give tenable excuse or good reason for their inefficiencies.”
The Chairman of Independent Petroleum Marketers of Nigeria (IPMAN), Lagos Branch, Mr. Olumide Ogunmade stated that he cannot comment on the issue because he is yet to hear of it or read it on the pages of newspapers.
A marketer who pleaded anonymity because he was not authorised to speak on the matter, blamed the Federal Government for creating what he termed ‘artificial’ scarcity in order to raise the pump price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) from N97 per litre to N140 per litre.
“It is an open secret that this government is determined to remove subsidy. We first observed this in the 2013 budget provision for subsidy which is grossly inadequate. This claim was also seen in their reluctance to repair the damaged Arepo pipeline in Ogun State. The Minister should be fair to us all and address the issue of non-settlement of subsidy claims to genuine marketers who have their claims unpaid as I speak,” he stated.
Tribune
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