Owner of Lagos-based refinery Aliko Dangote says his $20bn facility will show the true daily petrol consumption in Nigeria.
At a conference in Lagos to roll out Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) also known as petrol at his refinery on Tuesday, the billionaire business tycoon said, “There is a lot of round-tripping where people now do documentation and the fuel does not come into Nigeria, and this is a fact.
“Right now, as we have this refinery working, it will show the true consumption of Nigeria.
“We can track every single loaded truck and we will try as much as possible to track the loaded ships. Trucks, we can tell you where they are just as now some of the products that we do, we can tell you exactly the consumption pattern.”
The refinery owner said as soon as his company finalises modalities with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), the product will hit the market.
For years, the exact volume of Nigeria’s daily consumption of petrol has been subject of controversy.
In 2022, then Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Hammed Ali, then Kaduna governor Nasir El-Rufai, ex-apex bank chief Muhammad Sanusi, and others faulted NNPCL’s official figure that Nigeria consumes 66 million litres of fuel daily.
Asked to speak on the pricing of petrol from his refinery, Dangote said, “It is an arrangement which is designed and approved by the Federal Executive Council led by His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
“As soon as it is finalised, which he (Tinubu) is pushing, once we finish with NNPC, it can be today, it can be tomorrow, we are ready to roll into the market.”
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He declared that “it’s a celebration day” for Nigerians and assured all citizens that they “are now going to have good petrol while the engines of your vehicles will last longer. You will not be having an engine issue, which a lot of us were having. It won’t happen at all”.
“The quality here will match that of anywhere in the world; US, America, we will make sure that nobody will beat us in terms of quality,” Dangote said.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, faces energy challenges, with all its state-owned refineries non-operational. The country is heavily reliant on imported refined petroleum products, with the state-run NNPCL being the major importer of the essential commodities.
Fuel queues are commonplace in the country. Prices of petrol tripled since the removal of subsidy in May 2023, from around ₦200/litre to about ₦800/litre, compounding the woes of the citizens who power their vehicles, and generating sets with petrol, no thanks to decades-long epileptic electricity supply.
