At filling stations in Lagos, Ogun, and a few other South-Western states, long lines for Premium Motor Spirit, more commonly known as gasoline, are starting to reappear.
There were no lines, according to reports, in Abuja and other northern states, and it was discovered that Lagos’ fuel stores were rapidly running out of fuel.
Queues were seen at numerous stations, especially those on the Lagos-Ibadan Motorway and some sections of the Oshodi-Ojodu Berger Motorway, as vehicles waiting to buy petrol stretched into the motorway and slowed down traffic on the service lane.
The longest queue was at the North-West filling station since it sold petrol for N568 per litre. There were shorter lines at Eterna, NNPCL, TotalEnergies, and Mobil, which charged N568/litre, N570/litre, and N570/litre, respectively.
There was nothing for Conoil, Enyo, or Oando to sell at Berger in Lagos.
A branch of the station on the Berger axis was locked, while several TotalEnergies stations were seen dispensing.
A few others, like Worldoil, Fatgbems, and Quest in Ogun State, closed their locations.
Akin Akinrinade, the chairman of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria Satellite Depot, informed the media that the depot hadn’t loaded any goods in the previous three weeks.
Even the NNPCL Retail facility, according to him, is only currently running at a skeleton dispatching of goods.
According to Akinrinade, “From our end, the issue has been with the pipeline vandalism which we raised an alarm over since July. Satellite depot has not loaded any product in the last three weeks, and whenever there is a problem here, it is going to affect Lagos and the whole of South-West.
“Although I don’t know what has been happening in other depots, from what we gathered yesterday, even NNPC Retail has been operating skeletal product dispatching. The NNPC Retail loaded just three to four trucks to Ikoyi on Monday. No product was dispatched to other places. I don’t know about other depots.”
Speaking further, he said: “This continuous vandalism is a setback to the effort of IPMAN and NNPCL to ensure uninterrupted supply of petrol to Lagos and the entire South-West region of Nigeria.”
Additionally, according to sources with direct knowledge of the situation, “Stations are now cutting down costs because most don’t have enough money to buy products to distribute to their outlets. That is why you see that those with more than one station had to close down some of them.”
