Vice-President spends Christmas at fuel depots to monitor supply

The Presidency says Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo will be visiting fuel depots in Lagos on Monday to monitor the loading of trucks and to ensure steady supply of petrol to designated filling stations.

This information is contained on the twitter handle of the Presidency Nigeria, tagged; @NGRPresident, in Abuja.

The post read: “This morning the Vice-President is visiting fuel depots in Lagos to monitor the loading of trucks, and to ensure distribution is going on without a hitch.’’

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalled that the Vice-President had on Christmas Eve made an unexpected stopover to some filling stations at Lekki area and Lagos Island to see that things were moving on very well.

“It’s such a shame that Christmas has been, to some extent, with this sort of discomfort. This is deeply regretted.

“And l know that, despite the resilience and strength of people in Lagos and the Nigerian people, we would see ourselves through this and will enjoy our Christmas and have a great New Year,” Osinbajo said in a statement issued by his spokesman, Laolu Akande, on Monday.

According to the Vice President, the Buhari administration is doing everything possible to quickly resolve the fuel shortages experienced by Nigerians.

It would be recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari had on Sunday sympathized with Nigerians over their suffering occasioned by the scarcity of petrol across the country.

The President, who was reacting to the long queues of motorists at various filling stations across the country, in a statement personally signed by him and posted on his twitter handle, said the scarcity was regrettable.

He stated that he was being briefed regularly on the matter by the NNPC and assured that the situation would improve positively in the next few days.

President Buhari disclosed that he had already directed the regulators to step up their surveillance and bring an end to hoarding of the products and price inflation by marketers.

NAN reports that fuel scarcity during festive periods is a recurrent feature in Nigeria, although it disappeared in the last two years.

The scarcity is said to be caused by greedy marketers who tried to take undue advantage of the high inter-state movements during the season.

In some states a litre of fuel rose to between N200 and N300 or above per litre as against the official pump price of N145.