Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), on Wednesday, apologised for the lingering fuel scarcity in the country. Apapa road blocked by Tankers The agency however, assured that the problem had been resolved with adequate supply of Premium Motor Spirit through import and the local refineries. Spokesman for NNPC, Garba Deen Mohammed, and the Group Executive Directors, Upstream, Mr Bello Rabiu, Downstream, Henry Obih and Refineries, Anibor Kragha, told state House Correspondents that five vessels had berthed in the ports discharging products all over the country. According to Bello, the ships are in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Warri ports to complement importation from private dealers all together discharging at least 120 million litres of products.

Bello said that in moving the products up to the hinterlands, the NNPC had the only option of trucking as most of the pipelines were not working. He said NNPC was in a position to take PMS from the Atlas cove jetty up to Ibadan while the rest of the distribution was being done through the depots in the Lagos area. "We are almost on 100 per cent on trucking to the hinterland; that is the only way we can get it to the whole market but the plan is that going forward from today we want to ensure that we give more than we require in the whole country.

"The actual requirement of the country is just 1,300 trucks but our plan is to make at least 1,500 trucks available every day until all the problems are solved. ""We want to make sure that we saturate the market in a very short time and presently, Lagos is cleared, Abuja is getting better and other places will follow", he said.

Bello added that NNPC pushed 160 trucks into the cities across the country on Tuesday. "We are now in a position to say that each state's demand has been captured; we know the need and we are trying to ensure that all the states are supplied", he added.

He said that henceforth, the organisation was ready to announce the daily supply of PMS to the states and that the governors had expressed readiness to put task forces in place to ensure that the products were delivered to the consumers. He said NNPC was ready to ensure there was no repeat of the scarcity. "On behalf of the management of the NNPC, we are sorry for what has happened and we are working very hard to ensure that this thing will not happen again.

"Going forward, we are ensuring that we don't have this again and we are doing everything possible to have in-country storage, strategic storage that will not allow us to go into this situation. "our depots inside the country are actually wet, it will not take anybody more than four hours to take the products from our depots to his station." Bello said that once the pipelines were revived, products would move further into other parts of the country. "We are doing three things at the same time: ensuring sustainable imports, making sure that refineries work and the pipelines also work.

"That will reduce all these incidences and once we achieve that stability, queues in Nigeria will be a thing of the past", he said. He also urged Nigerians to reduce the tension in the country by not wasting time in the filling stations, adding that all the stations in FCT as at Wednesday had been supplied with fuel.

"Not a single station in Abuja is dry and we will sustain this to ensure that no station is left unattended not only in Abuja but also the states around Abuja", Bello added. He said the corporation was making sure that trucking was efficient having solved the supply problems.