The President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, Ayuba Wabba, has identified those behind the ongoing fuel scarcity across the nation.
Wabba said that fuel markets in the country were largely responsible for the scarcity of Premium Motor Spirit, otherwise known as fuel.
“The problem of incessant shortage of petroleum cannot be divorced from the altitude of marketers,” Wabba told Punch in an interview.
“Towards the end of the year or any time there is a change of guard, they (marketers) will advance one reason or the other for the product to be scarce. It has become a recurrent decimal. All these boil down to non-adherence to good governance”, he added.
According to him, attitude of the market and the failure to enforce rules and regulations were all factors in the scarcity of petrol.
On the way forward, Wabba said: “The number one thing is that government must ensure there are rules guiding this and marketers must adhere to the rules of the business.”
“They would usually come together and create artificial scarcity and when there is scarcity, they would advance their demand that either subsidy be removed or deregulation. But they have forgotten that the government has a responsibility by law to regulate the price of petroleum products, this is one of the successes we achieved as far back as 2003,” Wabba said.
Commenting on the NLC’s rejection of fuel susidy removal, he stressed that the union was not just opposing the move for the sake of it.
He said, “The primary purpose of governance is for the good and welfare of the people, government has removed the so-called subsidy on diesel. Has the price of diesel reduced since the price of crude oil has been falling in the international market?
“An example is in Ghana; anytime the price of oil falls in the international market, fuel price is adjusted there. But have they adjusted the price here in Nigeria? What of kerosene? They have taken Nigerians for granted and they have been ripping us off for a very long time.”
He added, “Nobody can just import and start to sell at whatever price pleases them. If they have deregulated diesel and kerosene, why is it that the licence to import is given to only a few people?
“Our expectation is that if you have truly deregulated kerosene and diesel, they should serve as good base examples. Just as you import electronics, once you are importing good quality electronics, everybody should have access to import,” he added.
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