Why we can’t sell petrol at 125/litre – Marketers

Private fuel marketers have yet to reduce the pump price of Premium Motor Spirit (petrol), while retail stations belonging to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation have started selling at N125 per litre.

The PUNCH correspondent, who visited several filling stations including Oando, Mobil and Capital Oil and Gas on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway as well as Total at Ikosi-Ketu, on Thursday morning, observed that the private marketers were selling at N145 per litre of petrol.

“What we are asking the government is that: who is going to pay us between the old price and the new price on our old stock? And without them verifying our old stock and telling us what they will pay us and when they will pay us, we will not load,” a top official of one of the fuel marketers’ associations told our correspondent on condition of anonymity.

He said marketers would continue to sell the product at the old rate pending when the issues would be resolved.

“Marketers are holding their strategy session. We will have a common front. The GMD (of NNPC) has invited us for a stakeholders’ meeting, which should have been done before the announcement of the new price. By the end of today, we will have a clearer picture of how they are going to involve us,” he added.

The Federal Government had noted on Wednesday that the drop in crude oil prices had lowered the expected open market price of imported petrol below the official pump price of N145 per litre.

“Therefore, Mr President has approved that Nigerians should benefit from the reduction in the price of PMS which is a direct effect of the crash in global crude oil prices,” the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva, said in a statement.

He said the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency would subsequently issue a monthly guide to the NNPC and marketers on the appropriate pricing regime.

The NNPC, on Wednesday, directed all its retail station to change the retail pump price to N125 per litre from N145.