Barely 2 weeks of the return of President Muhammadu Buhari from the United Kingdom for medical vacation, the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), also known as petrol, now sell for as low as N139.99 per litre in Lagos and at N141 per litre in Abuja and many states.
There is also a drop in price of cooking gas.
This is as the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) crashed the ex-depot price of petrol to N131 per litre.
Investigations by New Telegraph at the weekend showed that the decreased price trend, which started last week in Lagos was also buoyed by a renewed price war among stations owned by NNPC and marketers, who now scamper for buyers that have, earlier, drastically reduced patronage of the stations through rationing.
While the NNPC’s mega stations have now reduced their price to N143 per litre, the major and independent marketers, further checks by this newspaper showed, have also taken down their prices to N141 per litre.
An independent marketer adjacent to Sango Secondary School, Dairy Farm Housing Estate in Agege sold at N139.99 per litre when New Telegraph visited yesterday.
Some fuel marketers told this newspaper that the price war was caused by low patronage of their stations by motorists.
“People no longer buy full tank of petrol for their car. Even the big men now ration the fuel they buy. This has reduced our daily sale and made the business less interesting,” station manager at Total Filling station in Ikeja, Timothy Odedina, said.
“We had to reduce our pump to N141 per litre when we discovered that the NNPC around us here has reduced its price to N143 per litre from N145 per litre. But we only hope that this new price will help us to bring back the patronage.
“Most of our attendants sleep between 10:30a.m. and 4:30p.m. and we are tired of this,” he added.
The NNPC confirmed the low price in a statement yesterday, maintaining that its sustained strategic intervention in the efficient supply and distribution of petroleum products has led to significant fall in the prices of petrol and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), also known as cooking gas, nationwide.
The mega station and NNPC affiliate stations across the country are selling the product for N143 per litre, while the pump price range from between N142 and N145 per litre in some major and independent marketers in Lagos, Abuja, Sokoto, Enugu, Delta and other major cities.
The corporation said in a statement issued by the Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division, Ndu Ughamadu, at the weekend that a national survey by Oil and Gas Forum, its weekly TV programme, indicated that in the last few weeks, the price of petrol has fallen steadily from N145 per litre to between N142 and N143 per litre in some stations across the country.
One of the respondents in the survey and a manager at an independent fuel retail station in Abuja, Mohammed Abdullahi, said the station currently sells petrol at N142 per litre in line with the prevailing market situation in order to sustain the turnover of the business and to attract more motorists to the station.
Another independent marketer in Mosimi, Emeka Ikechukwu, said the going ex-depot prices of PMS had dropped from N138 per litre in most depots to N133.28 in NNPC depots and between N130 and N131 per litre in private depots.
However, the situation is slightly different in Aba and Umuahia in Abia State and Calabar in Cross River State where most independent fuel stations, as well as major marketers, sell the product at N145 per litre.
The survey also showed a similar trend of drop in price for cooking gas with the average price for refilling 5kg cylinder at N2,215.96 from the former price of N2,500.00.
The study further revealed that states with the lowest average price for the 5kg LPG refill were Kaduna and Niger at N2,000; Kogi at N2,005.00; and Oyo at N2,033.33.
At the NNPC Mega and retail stations nationwide, a 12.5kg of cooking gas that was sold for N4,500 a few months ago is now sold for N3,800 while other retail outlets sell the same quantity for N4,000.
NNPC has sustained its interventions through sustained improvement in the supply of the products and remodelling of distribution channels to address sufficiency issues across the country.
The corporation has also stepped up the resuscitation of some of its critical pipelines and depots such as the Atlas Cove–Mosimi Depot Pipeline, Port Harcourt Refinery–Aba Depot Pipeline, Kaduna–Kano Pipeline and the Kano Depot which have enhanced efficiency in products distribution.
Efforts are also ongoing by the NNPC to revamp and re-commission other critical pipelines and depots across the country to further push down the prices of petroleum products for the benefit of consumers.
Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, had in a recent broadcast, said that the government had succeeded in blocking fraud impacted volumes of PMS consumed daily from 50 million litres to 28 million litres.
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