The Executive Secretary, Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria, MOMAN, Clement Isong, has alluded that the dealers were not importing petrol despite the fact that the government recently issued licences to about six marketers to bring in products.
Asked to speak on the import of fuel by other marketers and whether they were sourcing forex from the I&E window or the parallel market, Isong replied, “The I&E window is illiquid. There’s no money there.
“To buy products, it costs you between $25m to $30m. You can’t find it in the I&E window. So it doesn’t work and that is why people are not importing.
“We can’t find dollar again, you can’t find it right now. Nigeria has to sort out the security issues in the Niger Delta so that we can increase our daily crude oil output. If we increase it to 1.8 or two million barrels per day, then there’ll be dollar in the market. So we need to stop oil theft.”
FG should intervene
On the apprehension of a possible hike in petrol price, Isong stated that this was inevitable if the dollar continued to rise against the naira, but noted that the government might have to intervene.
“Well, the President himself said in his speech that if they find petrol prices moving too high, they would intervene. We don’t want prices to move too high, nobody wants that.
“So if the dollar continues to climb, we are expecting some sort of intervention from the government based on what the President said,” the MOMAN official stated.
He further explained that PMS was different from diesel in terms of pricing because petrol was newly deregulated.
“The dealer that has bulk of the stock is the NNPC. So it influences the price in the market. Diesel, on the other hand, is different, because it has been deregulated for a very long time. So people will sell petrol depending on their cost structure, loans they took from the banks, forex, etc.
“Many things are put into consideration by dealers before coming up with their selling prices. There’s no one person who sets or controls the price. Nobody is controlling the price of PMS. Right now, NNPC, however, will continue to control the flow of the price. But after a while, that will stop,” Isong explained.
Earlier, the President, PETROAN, Billy Gillis-Harry, while speaking on the matter, had said, “So long as the naira is losing against the dollar, the price of petrol in our retail outlets will continue to increase. To address this, he called on Tinubu to make sure that Nigeria’s refineries were put back to use.
“We have requested that the President should declare a state of emergency on our refineries in order to speed up their repairs.
“That is the one sure way to go, in order to be able to predict the price of petroleum products, because for now, every PMS you buy in any retail outlet is dollarised,” Gillis-Harry stated.
Meanwhile, the CBN last week attributed the continued fall of the naira against the dollar to the diversion of Diaspora remittances to the parallel market.
The CBN Acting Governor, Folashodun Shonubi, spoke while delivering a lecture titled ‘Diaspora Remittances and Nigeria Economic Development’ at the National Institute for Security Studies in Abuja.
Shonubi said a lot of Diaspora remittances arrived in Nigeria in dollars and end up in the parallel market without being officially documented.
It is still unclear at what point the President Bola Tinubu administration plan to intervene in the market to arrest the unfolding crisis.
