Frontline Civil Rights Advocacy group, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has condemned the crass incompetence of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited which keeps creating unprecedented nightmares and miseries for motorists and Nigerians in the form of artificial scarcity of petrol.

The rights group alleged that there is a conspiratorial activity going on between NNPCL and petrol markets to maintain constant artificial scarcity of Petroleum products available to members of the public in other to smuggle the products meant for the local market to the neighbouring countries that have no crude oil deposits and whereby fuel is sold at cut throat price particularly since the Central Bank of Nigeria has continued to devalue the Naira as against other foreign denominations.

HURIWA lamented that, “Even when the government bragged that the now incorporated petroleum company which emerged from the corruption-ridden NNPC has become professionally competent and efficient, yet fuel queues have returned to Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, as residents rush to get the seemingly scarce product even at a higher price.”

HURIWA, citing media reports and eyewitness accounts, stated that in virtually all filling stations located in Abuja have become spectacles of sharp practices of fuel hoarding and reselling at the black market directly in front of such fuel dispensing stations just as the products procured in the dead of the night by agents of the fuel stations' operators now sell fuel for N800 per litre, except for the NNPC retail outlet whose price remained at N617.

HURIWA in a statement issued by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, condemned the Federal Government “for letting the NNPCL to routinely subject Nigerians to long ordeals of artificial fuel scarcity in their crooked attempts at profiteering alongside their fellow gang members masquerading as petrol marketers.” HURIWA lamented that Nigerians are too docile to stage protests against the mistreatment of Nigerians by the central and sub-national governments.

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