- Safiu Kehinde
The Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited’s Group Chief Executive Officer, Bayo Ojulari, has assured Nigerians of cooking gas price’s return to normalcy, describing the surge in price experienced over the weekend as artificial.
Ojulari gave the assurance while addressing newsmen on Sunday evening.
The NNPC boss attributed the surge in price of cooking gas and heavy queue experienced across several states in the country to last week’s strike action by the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association (PENGASSAN) in protest against Dangote Refinery.
“The increase you saw was relatively artificial because for the period of the strike, what that meant was that movement and loading were delayed for about two to three days.
“Because of that, you see that impact. Things will come back to normal. It takes some time for distribution to be fully restored.
“With that delay, as you know that Nigerian people take opportunity, some of the people that had existing resources and reserves had to put up the price.
“My expectation is that now that things are back to normal, prices will return back to what they were before the strike.” Olulari said.
NPO Reported that the labour union had embarked on strike over alleged anti-labour activities of Dangote following the refinery’s sacking of 800 workers due to their membership with the union.
PENGASSAN eventually called of the strike following the intervention of the Federal Government.
However, the few days demonstration had resulted to scarcity of cooking gas with the few available station with stock heavily flooded with customers and long row of gas cylinders.
In some areas in Lagos, the price of cooking gas was reported to have skyrocketed to between N1,700 and N2,300 per kilogramme.
Some netizens from Lakowe, Alimosho, and Oshodi-Isolo areas of the stated that gas is currently sold at N2,500, N1,600, and N1,500 at their respective areas.
As observed by NPO Reports at Alagboole-Akute area of Ogun state on Monday morning, NNPC sold at N1,500 per kilogramme as against the N1,000/kg before the strike.
Oando, on the other hand, sold at N1,400/kg.
In contrast to the queue witnessed at gas stations in Lagos, there were only few customers at both stations observed by NPO Reports in Alagboole-Akute.
