We have 1.5bn litres of petrol to last 30 days —Reps

The House of Representatives Committee on Petroleum Resources, Downstream and Midstream, has said the country currently has in its storage facilities, over 1.5 billion litres of petrol that can last for 30 days.

It called on Nigerians to remain calm and eschew panic buying.

The committee further disclosed that it was making moves to clampdown on hoarders and saboteurs.

According to the committee, from their findings, there is availability of petrol products, which have since arrived the country but the supply and distribution to marketers was disrupted by challenges of transport vessels that were supposed to take the products from offshore to onshore.

It added that the logistics challenges have since been addressed and product distribution has commenced and the queues would disappear in matter of days, hence the need to avoid panic buying as the product was available.

The downstream and midstream committees led by Ikenga Ugochinyere and Odianosen Okojie, while addressing newsmen in Abuja, yesterday, said: ” The purpose of this press briefing is to give an update on the scarcity of petrol products and what the committees are doing to ensuring that the right things are done as the representatives of the people.

“It is so painful that Nigerians have been subjected to serious hardship and pains as a result of the scarcity of petroleum products in the past few days.

“This development has led us as representatives of the people, to engage with the regulators of the relevant sectors with a view to finding out the cause(s) of this scarcity and providing solutions to same.

“We have, in the last few days, reached out to the stakeholders in the distribution value chain, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, NMDPRA, the Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria, PETROAN, and the Nigerian Association of Road Transport Owners, NARTO, and engaged extensively with them, with a view to ascertaining the cause of the resurgence of the fuel queues across the country.”