Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited, Mele Kyari, has stated that petrol scarcity witnessed across the country is not a deliberate action to scuttle the forthcoming election.

On the NTA Good Morning Nigeria program on Thursday, February 2, Kyari disclosed that the petrol shortage began in 2022.

He said, "I do not think anybody sits down to orchestrate that there should be scarcity so that it will impact elections and so on. It doesn't happen that way if it is so. But it is not true because the reality is that these glitches started early in 2022.

It has nothing to do with this election period. Once you have a challenge of this nature, it is a cyclical thing. Once you have this challenge, they continue to come up, and then once you have arbitrage issues, you have this glitch.

This country has just three days of redundancy in petroleum products supply. Once you have a glitch that extends longer than three days, you need another three weeks to stabilize it. So irrespective of who does what, whatever causes the three-day glitch, it is a nightmare waiting to happen.

Once we see this glitch, we do everything possible to avoid the glitches from happening. No one will sit down and say let us create this so that there will be an impact on the elections.

There is no benefit to it. No one would do this, and I can tell you clearly that there is no one issue. Being the direct report to Mr. president, no one problem bothers him like this. There is no briefing that I do to the president that he does not mention this."

Kyari added that while linking petrol scarcity to the forthcoming election is unfair, the NNPC is doing everything possible to control the situation.

https://gist.am/q/petrol-scarcity-is-not-a-deliberate-action-to-impact-forthcoming-elections--nnp