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According to Obinna Ezeobi from Punch newspaper in Nigeria, getting
your motor vehicle refuelled can be sometimes a difficult experience.
He also indicates the need for more service stations. The article was
originally published on 16th October and we have made some minor
changes.
Anyone who has driven in Lagos or any other Nigerian city where heavy traffic and bad roads make driving a hellish adventure will consider Abuja as the dream town. But after cruising at speed, the car owner will have to pull up at the petrol station to refuel and that is when the experience will turn sour. Every often, a phantom fuel crisis plays out in the city. After the close of work, long queues normally build up at petrol stations across the city and one can spend between 10 minutes and an hour, or even more before buying petrol.
In Abuja , the driver will assume that there is a looming fuel shortage and in a bid to be on the safe side, he will join the queue even when he has enough petrol in his tank to last him two days. Whenever there is a slight drop in the supply of petroleum products from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, either though the Suleja Depot or via trucks, a major crisis will immediately hit Abuja. The mere declaration of an industrial dispute by any labour union connected with the supply of petroleum products leads to acute shortage of products in Abuja.
Once the crisis sets in, it takes at least one week of uninterrupted supply before normalcy can return to the market.
In July 2008, members of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers embarked on strike over the high cost of diesel and bad state of federal roads, but were convinced to call it off after the first day. Ordinarily, the action should have had little or no effect on the FCT, if the claim by NNPC that it has 35 days products sufficiency is anything to go by, but shortage of petroleum products was experienced for nearly one week thereafter. The scarcity forced NNPC management to cause its Group General Manager, Public Affairs, Dr. Levi Ajuonuma, to issue a statement stating, “The Corporation has supplied over 138 trucks to Abuja and environs today, Monday, July 28, 2008 and the trend will continue.”
According to Obinna Ezeobi, the shortage of petroleum products in Abuja is traceable to the limited number of petrol retail outlets in the city. In September, the Managing Director, Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, a subsidiary of NNPC, Mr. Reginald Stanley, confirmed that Abuja was seriously underserved. Speaking at the inauguration of a new petroleum retail complex by Eterna Plc in Wuse, Abuja, Stanley, stated that there were only 65 retail outlets in Abuja, whereas the city needed 100 stations to serve the populace optimally.
Although the city had struggled with the shortage of stations over time, it was exacerbated after the FCT administration under the former Minister, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai bulldozed four major petrol stations in the city between 2005 and 2007 as part of the massive demolition of illegal structures in the city.
According to el-Rufai, the stations were wrongly sited. To compound the situation, three other petrol stations belonging to Texaco, Mobil and another independent marketer were pulled down at the popular Aya Junction to make way for major construction works going on around the place. Another private station along the same Nyanya-Keffi Road also closed shop in 2007.
The shortage of retail stations in relation to the increased number of cars in the city would not have had serious implications if the population of FCT residents had remained constant or if el Rufai had succeeded in his drive to get those who had little or no contribution to the running of Federal Government’s business in Abuja to relocate to other parts of the country. Besides, Abuja plays host to innumerable conferences every week, with thousands of people coming into town and putting pressure on the few retail facilities.
After a major shortage in the supply of petroleum products across the country in 2006, which particularly hit Abuja, former President Olusegun Obasanjo charged chief executive officers of major oil marketers to build retail stations in the city centre. He also directed the former Group Managing Director of NNPC, Mr. Funsho Kupolokun and el-Rufai to meet and have prime lands in the city allocated to major and big independent marketers to quickly construct petrol stations.
In May 2008, after another round of fuel shortage in Abuja, our correspondent drew the attention of the Minister of State for Energy, in-charge of Petroleum, Mr. Odien Ajumogobia to the shortage of retail outlets in Abuja and the directive by Obasanjo to Kupolokun. But Stanley has renewed the call on the FCT administration to allocate prime locations to operators in the downstream who wanted to build stations, a pointer that the original plan must have come to naught. He added that building new stations was the only way to ensure regular products availability in the city. Attempts by our correspondent to get reactions from the FCT administrators failed. Until 25 new petrol stations sprout in Abuja, driving in the city will continue to be with tears.
PetorlWorld 201008
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