The National Youth Council of Nigeria, NYCN, has inaugurated a Task Force with a view to enforcing measures taken by the Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited, (NNPC) to mitigate the difficulties faced by motorists as a result of short supply of premium motor spirit otherwise called petrol.
Recall that the NNPC had on Tuesday directed a 24-hour operations at petrol deports and other outlets in order to hastily dissipate the long queues being experienced at filling stations.
To this end, the NYCN inaugurated a Task Force to monitor the 24-hour fuel distribution and sales across the 6 geopolitical zones of the Country. The Task Force is directly being supervised by the NYCN President nationally while the Zonal Vice Presidents are to monitor in their respective zones.
Speaking during the inauguration in Abuja, the NYCN President, Solomon Adodo, said it became imperative to support the efforts of the NNPC to ensure that Nigerians do not go through further hardship in buying fuel across the country.
According to Mr Adodo, the NYCN, while engaging with stakeholders in the petrol ecosystem understood that failsafe strategies had been emplaced to ensure normalcy is restored within the shortest possible time.
He said: “While we commend the steps taken so far by NNPC to recall the contaminated fuel, we are committed to teaming up with relevant agencies to ensure that normalcy returns in the country’s fuel supply chain.
“We are satisfied with the prompt action taken by the NNPC and its partners to ensure 24 hours supply and sale of the product which we can confirm are already yielding positive results.
“Though there are still queues at petrol stations, constant supply of the product as seen during our inspection of some fuel stations in the Federal Capital city is an indication that the queues will disappear within the shortest possible time.
“We have so far gotten confirmation from several filling station managers that they have on ground several trucks of petrol for discharge and are expecting more. We also elicited their commitment to ensuring that normalcy is restored in sale of petrol”, the statement added.
The NYCN, therefore, urged Nigerians to desist from panic buying, especially as the NNPC had confirmed that it was expecting the supply of at least 2.3billion litres of the product to in Nigeria between now and the end of February. While urging youth not to take advantage of the situation for nefarious activities, the NYCN President departed Abuja for inspection of the Zonal monitoring Teams.
