Oil marketers have faulted claim by the federal government that oil subsidy is totally gone.
Report has been rife that oil subsidy is back. It stemmed from PMS pump price maintaining status quo of being in the region of N600 per litre despite its N700 per litre landing cost.
On Monday, the Group Chief Executive Officer, NNPCL, Mele Kyari, pushed back at the claim, saying, “No subsidy whatsoever. We are recovering our full cost from the products that we import. We sell to the market, and we understand why the marketers are unable to import. We hope that they do it very quickly and these are some of the interventions the government is doing. There is no subsidy.”
Reacting via an interview with Punchng, the National Secretary, Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria, Chief John Kekeocha, stated that the government was peddling lies.
Kekeocha told the publication: “I don’t know why the government keeps peddling lies. When they removed the PMS subsidy, a dollar was about N700 and they made us believe that the removal of subsidy would make the supply of products play according to the dictates of demand and supply, looking at forex as the benchmark.
“Now, this is just simple arithmetic, if you removed the subsidy when a dollar was about N700 and today the dollar is more than N1,000, and you are still supplying and giving products at almost the same rate, what is the magic? They are subsidising products as we speak.
“They are spending billions of naira to subsidise products, and because they know that this country may go on fire if Nigerians buy products at about N1, 000/litre, they keep twisting facts. Why can’t they come out and tell the world the truth?”
