By Kehinde Oyinlade
Petrol also known as (PMS) has been scarce for over two months now and still counting. It has been having negative impact on the populance. The transport fares have doubled, commuters and drivers have been groaning under scarcity of PMS. Lot of people have been blaming the government but the truth is that it will be unfair to blame the government alone for this. We are always mentioning the Government, who are the Government? We are the Government and that is the fact. Are we playing our roles?
I was in a popular filling station last week and someone brought over 40 kegs to the filling station to purchase PMS.. If we are not here to deceive ourselves, we all know black market is now flourishing and this must be condemned by well meaning Nigerians.We do not pray for explosion at this time and period as this will have adverse and damaging effects on properties and lives considering the dry season we are presently.
Some of us are just intentionally wicked and heartless and that is the problem..How can you buy at a normal price in the filling station and be selling the PMS #600 per litre??As a matter of urgency, the Government should issue directive to all filling station not to sell PMS to people bring kegs to filling station.
I was on my way to work on Thursday lo and behold a driver of a popular PMS tanker parked and was selling the PMS to people with kegs. The PMS is meant for a filling station, he didn’t offload the product at the station but was selling kegs..This must be condemned and this is purely sabotage. NNPC has been issuing same statement since the beginning of this fuel scarcity that the product is readily available and the truth is that charity begins at home. NNPC stations needs to step up their game and also the major marketers so that the issue of this fuel scarcity will be a thing of the past.
Filling stations must be given control price as some of them has been exploiting the members of the public and this must be enforced by the Government…Once a filling stations sells above the control price such filling station should be sealed and their license should be withdrawn. This will make others to sit up and they will become more reasonable and responsible..The members of the public has a lot to do on this as they will be the one providing information to the task force monitoring team.
The taskforce monitoring team cannot be everywhere but we can provide them with genuine information for them to act on.
Please let’s desist from stockpiling fuel at home as the effects are damaging once there is explosion. Anyone stockpiling fuel should be arrested and be made to face the full wrath of the law as they are the ones responsible for this artificial scarcity of PMS. All hands must be on deck to tackle this fuel scarcity and we should all remember we are the Government.
Government alone cannot tackle this as we all have our role to play… Let’s educate people on the dangers of stockpiling fuel, we don’t need to show I don’t care attitude. We might be saving the lives of our loved ones. The future of this great country is in our hands, we need to show more commitment and we should be able to hold ourselves accountable instead of blaming the Government all the time.
Oyinlade writes from Akure
