BY ADOGHOR BRIGHT OCHUKO
There are strong indications that the price of PMS, otherwise knowns as petrol, maybe up to N180 per litre going by the reality facing the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN).
This hint was dropped by the Lagos Zonal Chairman of IPMAN, Akin Akinrinade who told Channels TV that members of the association have found it difficult to break even amid lot of environmental challenges.
Lagos in the past few days have witnessed shortage of petrol at many filling stations resulting in long queue of vehicles at the stations, while major cities across the country have been hit by the short supply since two weeks.
Initially, it was thought that a strike action being planned by the IPMAN might be responsible for the scarcity only for Akinrinade to say that the short supply was not occasioned by any strike or removal of subsidy.
“Members of Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria IPMAN are not on strike as being speculated, but the business environment has been very hostile to us such that we can no longer do business under this condition. For you to load a litre of petrol, you pay in N162 per litre.”
“It’s no longer feasible to sell the product at the recommended price of N165 to a litre, adding that the landing cost of petrol was between N175 to N178 naira to the litre.
“You now have to add the cost of transportation which is between N6 to N8, depending on the distance within Lagos,” he explained. “If it is outside Lagos, it is much more than that.
“So, if you add N8 to N162, you already have N170 and the government which is the regulator wants us to sell at N165; we have not even added the charges at the depot and the running cost at our stations.”
“You know what diesel says now, and you know how epileptic power supply is; we run on generator, using diesel at N800 per litre. There is no station in Lagos that uses less than 50 litres (of diesel) per day.
“So, our members can no longer sell (petrol) at N165 per litre; in fact, there is no reasonable person in this business that can sell below N180 per litre, so it is not as if we are on strike,” he said.
