…as per liter price of PMS rises to N256
The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Mele Kyari, has said that the open price of premium motor spirit, petrol, has risen to N256 per litre.
With the present pump price of petrol pegged at N162 per litre, it means the government is subsidizing the product by N94 per litre.
Kyari said petrol daily truck out has risen significantly to 103 million per litre. Going by this rate, it means the federal government would be spending about N9,682,000,000 to subsidize Nigerians daily consumption.
He said: “If we are to sell at the market today at current exchange rate, we will be selling the product at about N256 to a litre. What we sell today is N162, so the difference is at a cost to the nation”.
He noted that with the high volume of daily consumption, the country cannot sustain subsidy payment adding “as long as we don’t regulate volume, until we are able to exit this current level, which I know so much work is going on, then we have to manage the volume that we are exposed to between this price of N162 and N256.
“The difference comes back to as much as N140 billion to N150 billion cost to the country monthly.
“As long as the volume goes up, that money continues to increase and we have two sets of stress to face, stress of supply and stress of foreign exchange for the NNPC. We may not see foreign exchange cheque taking place for importation”.
Kyari stressed at the meeting which had the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Department of State Services, Nigeria Police Force, Nigeria Customs Service, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and other relevant downstream and upstream stakeholders in attendance, harped on the need to find urgent solution to petrol smuggling challenge in the country.
He explained: “In very recent data, we see what we really want in the beginning of May and June, there was a day we load out about 103 million litres of PMS within one day across the depots. We know it is not required, we know it is inappropriate and we also know that something wrong is happening that somebody is chasing something.
“But we in NNPC, we are not in control of that, we are not in every depot, we don’t keep products in all the depot but when the volume goes down, it comes down to us, when there is tight in supply, it comes back to the NNPC and we solve the problem”.
The NNPC boss said that President Muhammadu Buhari had directed that smuggling must stop adding that it was the reason for inviting all stakeholders to chart the way forward.
Meanwhile, stakeholders in the downstream sector of the petroleum industry have blamed the distribution system and low pump price for the increasing rate of smuggling of premium motor spirit, petrol, out of Nigeria.
The stakeholders who include marketers, depot owners and transporters called for synergy to check the activities of smugglers.