Petroleum minister apologies to Nigerians for another long queues for petrol

The Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu with five other ministers gave account of what had been done in terms of government policies since President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration during the second Federal Government Town Hall Meeting in Kaduna State.

According to him, the three refineries in Nigeria were back, working together for the first time in almost a decade.

He pointed out that, though the refineries were not working to the capacity he would love to see them, a lot more work still needed to be done to get into the level of performance that he wanted.

And for the first time, Nigeria has pipelines delivering crude oil to the refineries both from Brass to Port Harcourt and from Escravos to Warri.

“For the first time in 20 years, we took the bold audacity to go ahead and try and restructure Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Unless we do that, the issues of transparency, staff morale and direction of policies will never work. We have successfully done that and that took massive amounts of work,” he said.

Kachikwu also said that, he was doing his best to deal with this worst of fuel scarcity the country had experienced in the last decade.

“The reality is that as long as the refineries do not work in absolutely top capacity, as long as we do not have the foreign exchange to bring in the product and the price of crude continues to slide, we will have problems with fuel. You have to apply brain work to it,” he told the gathering.

Kachukwu however, apologised to Nigerians for the prevailing long queues for petrol. And urged them to be patient, as the government puts strategies in place to make fuel available.

The Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, named efforts that were being made by the present administration to plug leakages and ensure accountability in the use of funds.

Zainab also said that the government has a very robust implementation plan that ensures effective interaction with Ministry Departments Agencies to find out capital projects which resources would be released for, with assurance that the projects would be undertaken.