The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation on Sunday announced that it currently spends N774m daily as subsidy on the 50 million litres of Premium Motor Spirit consumed across the country every day.
Although it described the amount as “under-recovery,” the oil firm stated that the huge fund was due to the proliferation of filling stations in communities with international land and coastal borders across the country.
The Group Managing Director, NNPC, Maikanti Baru, said the multiplication of filling stations had energised unprecedented cross-border smuggling of petrol to neighbouring countries, making it difficult to sanitise the fuel supply and distribution matrix in Nigeria.
Baru disclosed this when he led a management team of the corporation on a visit to the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Col. Hameed Ali (Retd), according to a statement issued on Sunday by the firm’s Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division, Ndu Ughamadu.
Baru revealed that detailed study conducted by NNPC indicated a strong correlation between the presence of the frontier stations and the activities of fuel smuggling syndicates.
He said the activities of the smugglers led to the recent abnormal surge in the evacuation of petrol from less than 35 million litres per day to more than 60 million litres per day, which was in sharp contrast with established national consumption pattern.
