The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Emmanuel
Kachikwu has been heavily criticized and asked to resign in the face of
the lingering fuel crisis. This came after he announced on Wednesday
that despite the efforts being put in place by the Federal Government,
fuel queues might not be completely eliminated until about two months.
Kachikwu who said he can’t do magic said he and members of his team
were working hard to resolve the fuel crisis. The scarcity of Premium
Motor Spirit, popularly known as petrol, has lingered since January as
hundreds of motorists crowd at filling stations daily without seeing
fuel to buy.
“One of the training I did not receive is that of a magician, but I am working very hard to ensure some of these issues go away.
“And let us be honest, for the five or six months we have been
here, NNPC has moved from a 50 per cent importer of products to
basically a 100 per cent importer and the 445,000 barrels per day that
were allocated were to cover between 50 and 55 per cent importation.
“So it is quite frankly by sheer magic that we even have the
amount of products at the stations. We are looking to see how to get
foreign exchange input; the President and I discussed extensively on how
to get more crude directed at importation.
“His Excellency (Buhari) will rather have less crude but have
individuals in the society suffer less with inconveniences than have
more crude and have them continue to suffer.
“So we are going to put a new model to enable us to increase
the pace and actually get majors as part of the crew of those to bring
in more products so that the NNPC will sort of go back on the capacity
of what it used to do and the majors will take over the balance of
importation.
“I think if we do that, although I don’t want to put a time
frame, but I will expect that over the next two months, we should see
quite frankly a complete elimination of this (fuel queues).’’ Kachikwu said.
Kachikwu has come under heavy criticism from various stakeholders,
including the organised labour, petroleum marketers, oil industry
workers, manufacturers and experts in the oil sector because of the
comment as he has been asked to resign due to his incompetence to tackle
the issues at hand and save many Nigerians from this suffering.
According to Punch, the Trade Union Congress specifically asked the
minister to resign instead of giving Nigerians excuses on why it would
be impossible to get fuel easily in the country before June.
The TUC, through its President, Mr. Bala Kaigama, called on
Kachikwu to resign to give room for a better person to be appointed if
he lacked the capacity to solve the current problem.
Kaigama said the positions occupied by the minister were too
demanding for him and urged Buhari to appoint a group managing director
for the NNPC.
Kaigama stated, “If he is not a magician, he should resign now. What we are saying is that Nigerians are getting impatient with him.
“So, if he has no quick fix to it, he should just quit. We are
getting impatient. He is moving from one unpopular policy to another,
yet we cannot see any quick fix.’’
The Chairman, NUPENG, Lagos Zone, Alhaji Tokunbo Korodo, said,
“For the first time in the history of Nigeria, we have an official of
the government accepting government’s failure. I have said it several
times that they have been rationing, and it is going to linger.
“But they shouldn’t allow it to get worse beyond this current
situation,” he said, adding that tanker drivers were being subjected to
unnecessary workload.
“They will say, ‘Discharge one compartment at Apapa; second
compartment at Agege, and the third at Abeokuta. So, the job the truck
driver is supposed to do within an hour, he may end up doing it for two
days.”
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