NIGERIA’S cost of petrol importation has continued to rise despite an almost 50 per cent drop in the nation’s consumption rate, reports by the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics have shown.
The PUNCH reports that N2.63tn was spent on the importation of Premium Motor Spirit in the first quarter of 2024, which was 31.4 per cent higher than the cost incurred for the same purpose in the last quarter of 2023.
In the last three months of 2023, our correspondent estimated that N1.81tn was expended in importing petrol.
The country imported 6,372,422,896 litres of petrol at the rate of N1.49t in the first quarter of 2023, according to reports from the NBS, putting a litre of petrol at N234 during the subsidy regime.
N1.51t was spent in the first quarter of 2022 to bring in 5,782,767,749 litres of PMS, putting a litre around N260.
With the payment of fuel subsidies at that time, the pump price of petrol ranged between N165 and N200 per litre.
On May 29, 2023, when he was sworn in, President Bola Tinubu, announced an end to the fuel subsidy era, saying, “The fuel subsidy is gone.”
After the pronouncement, the price of petrol skyrocketed to around N550 per litre.
The price was later impacted by the government’s decision to float the naira.
The pump price of petrol is currently between N600 and N700, depending on the marketer and the location.
After the removal of fuel subsidies, the Federal Government said the nation’s oil consumption had reduced by 50 per cent.
“Petrol importation has been reduced by 50 per cent since the withdrawal of the fuel subsidy,” the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, said during ministerial press briefing in February.
On February 18, 2023, about three months before Tinubu ended the PMS subsidy regime, the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, Mele Kyari, revealed that Nigeria was consuming about 66 million litres of PMS daily.
•Continued on www.punchng.com•