By Chika Amanze-Nwachuku and Ejiofor Alike
The Federal Government has confirmed November 1, 2010 as the take-off date of its policy of deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry.
By implication, fuel prices will be increased to reflect “market prices” as against the current subsidy regime.
Petrol currently sells for N65 per litre and Kerosene N50, but it is not yet clear what the new prices will be.
And in a related development, the Federal Government has withheld approval for fuel importation by major petroleum products marketers and other licensed importers in the fourth quarter of the year on the ground that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corpo-ration (NNPC) is now in a position to meet demand.
Group Executive Director, in Charge of Commercials of NNPC, Mr. Aminu Babakusa, who confirmed the take-off date for deregulation at the weekend during an inspection tour of oil facilities in Lagos, said to ensure a successful implemention of the deregulation, government has put various measures in place to ensure adequate products across the country.
Babakusa, who spoke to journalists after an inspection of Capital Oil facilities, said to ensure that products are evenly distributed to NNPC depots across the country, the corporation is partnering private depot owners in to lease their oil tanks and trucks for products distribution.
He explained that the Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC), a subsidiary of NNPC, will be a big player in the market when the deregulation eventually takes off and will continue to sell products to both oil majors and independent marketers and will also continue to supply products to NNPC stations.
He said: “We are very confident that our deregulation which is taking off on November 1 will be a success and we are ready for it. Deregulation will ensure there will be no more shortages of supply throughout the country and what we are seeing here in Capital Oil is a huge investment by a Nigerian in the Nigerian economy. There is nobody that will come and do it for us, so it is a huge investment and it is highly impressing.
“We will encourage any other individual who is ready to invest to come and once you do such investment, we will be ready to partner with such individual at any capacity. We can take their tank, we can use their trucks to move our products. The operation which we launched yesterday (Friday) was to ensure that we move products to all our depots throughout the country and by the end of this month, everywhere in the country will be very, very wet. As we are doing that, we are doing other areas, piping to ensure that all our pipelines are okay so that we can start pumping in between depots throughout the country. So by the time we will have the refineries back on stream, that is when we will have full dependence and the huge success we are having currently from the amnesty is helping the economy to move forward.”
htlp://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=156835
