Long queues re-appeared on Tuesday in certain areas of Lagos State as drivers waited for hours at filling stations to buy fuel.
In Lagos State, the situation was terrible in Ikosi-Ketu, the Arepo neighborhood of New Lagos, Obalende, Maryland, and Iju-shaga.
On Monday and Tuesday, commuters bemoaned the increase in the cost of transportation in the state, as fuel was priced between N195 and N200 per litre.
In addition, queues were seen along the Alausa Secretariat road since the NNPC was off-limits to cars. At Total gas stations in Ojota and PalmGrove, the identical circumstance was also noted.
Despite selling fuel, the Heyden filling station in Ilupeju had a long line of cars waiting to purchase the petrol.
The Nigerian organisation Independent Petroleum Marketers Association attributed the problem on the depots and the growing accessibility issues with petroleum goods.
In an interview, Mike Osatuyi, the national controller for operations at IPMAN, claimed that the association’s members had trouble finding enough supplies at the depots.
“No fuel. Even when we were able to get small quantity, DAPPMAN sold it to us at N200/N202 per litre. By the time we transport it to our stations, the cost would be around N210/litre,” he said.
Getting gasoline from the depots to the members’ filling stations now costs as much as N200 per litre, he noted.
The chairman of DAPPMAN, Dame Williams Akpani, had previously explained to the newsmen that the logistics issues were to blame for the ongoing gasoline shortages.
She claimed that poor roads were also to blame, making it take gasoline trucks from Lagos one week rather than three days to reach Abuja.
Meanwhile, oil marketers are lamenting what they call the imposition of a 0.5 per cent tax on the gross turnover of the petroleum by the Finance Act.
The Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association’s Executive Secretary, Olufemi Adewole, on the sideline of the maiden edition of the Platforms Africa Continental Forum held on Monday in Lagos, said the tax could shut down businesses and also fuel scarcity crisis if the Federal Government went ahead to implement the new tax regime.
Adewole explained that petroleum marketing firms’ trading margins were too small, and that they would not afford to pay such an amount sustainably.
Adewole said, “Petroleum marketers operate a very low margin, but the turnover is very huge. Unfortunately, the margin does not correspond with the turnover.”
He disclosed that the margins marketers were getting when a litre of fuel sold for N40 was the same they were still getting when it rose to N160 and N200.
According to him, “The Finance Act 2020 says the marketers have to pay 0.5 per cent from their gross turnover by the end of this year.
“It is unimaginable that probably, half of the petroleum marketing firms existing now may go under if the new tax regime is implemented, except the regulator, which is the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, approves a new margin for the marketers,” he said.
It would be recalled that oil marketers had recently lamented scarcity of foreign exchange, which, according to them, threatened the importation and distribution of petroleum products across the country.