Fuel subsidy at N774m daily, NNPC boss

Few days after the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) turned down human rights lawyer, Femi Falana’s freedom of information request on how much the government was spending on subsidy, the corporation has revealed that it was subsidising the supply of petrol to the tune of N774 million every day.
According to the NNPC, the benefit of the subsidy is being enjoyed by only a few, as well as in neighbouring countries, on the account of the continued smuggling of the fuel across the borders.
Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Maikanti Baru, had earlier on made a passionate plea to the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Hameed Ali, to help check the proliferation of fuel stations in communities with international land and coastal borders across the country.
He said it had energised unprecedented cross-border smuggling of petrol to neighboring countries, making it difficult to sanitise the fuel supply and distribution matrix in the country.
Baru according to an NNPC statement said that the “NNPC is concerned that continued cross-border smuggling of petrol will deny Nigerians the benefit of the Federal Government’s benevolence of keeping a fix retail price of N145 per litre despite the increase in PMS open market price above N171 per litre,’’
“Based on the heightened petrol consumption rate of 50 million litre per day, the corporation was incurring an under-recovery of N774 million every day.”
Nigeria imports around one million metric tonnes per annum of petrol due to the poor performance of the four oil refineries managed by the NNPC.