Africa's largest oil producer faces severe fuel shortage

Long queues have been forming at petrol stations across Nigeria for days with motorists sometimes waiting up to 24 hours to fill up their tanks, as Africa's number one oil producer faces a crippling fuel shortage.

"I have been on the queue since 7am and I just bought now, you can see it has taken over close to five hours and we have other things to do and I think buying fuel should never be a problem in this country especially," said Charles Nwachukwu, a motorist.

While Nigeria is one the major crude oil producers, it does not have enough refineries and depends on imports for refined products such as petrol and diesel.  

The state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) is responsible for half of these subsidised petroleum imports. Private distributors help import the rest. 

However, since the drop in oil prices in 2014, the country has struggled to settle the payments it owes to the distributors who have slowly cut down on imports. 

Now the distributors are pointing the finger at the NNPC, which does not have sufficient resources to meet the demands of the country, with its population of 190 million people.

But the NNPC's chief Maitanki Baru blamed black market vendors for purposely paralysing petrol stations so as to push up parallel selling prices to $1.11 per liter, more than twice the official selling rate.

At the same time, consumers suspect the government of creating a chaotic situation in order to justify an increase in diesel and petrol prices at the pump next year.

TRT World’s Philip Owira reports.

National plan

Under orders from the government in Abuja, NNPC's chief Baru unveiled a national plan on Monday to deliver an additional 300 million litres of petrol to "support the current consumption of 45 million litres per day" – much higher than the normal demand of 27-28 million litres per day due to the holiday period.

Baru also pointed out that the national refineries in Port Harcourt and Kaduna were producing 3.8 million litres of refined petrol per day.

The crisis is particularly serious in a country where the public electricity supply is weak and where businesses and private individuals rely on their diesel generator for lighting.