Addressing a press conference yesterday over the inability of members of the association to have access to fuel several months after depositing millions of naira for supply, the National Secretary of AMFSON, Kenneth Nwachukwu, said his members had in recent past resisted the urge to mention the saboteurs, particularly after the Minister challenged them to mention names.
Nwachukwu alleged that several trucks of fuel had been diverted into black markets by the said saboteurs at the detriment of mega stations owners and Nigerians in general.
He pointed out that it was in a bid to prevent fuel scarcity that the immediate past government established mega affiliate stations, urging the minister, who doubles as the Group Managing Director of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), to address plight of AMFSON members towards ending the fuel crisis.
He said: “The minister said we should mention names, but you know Nigerians, when you come out in public to mention the names of the saboteurs, they can go after you.
“So it is something we can do if it is possible to do it one on one with the Minister.
“We can tell him. There is nothing to be feared because we have evidence of how fuel is being diverted to the black market. We have evidence of everything we are saying about this fuel crisis.
“The Minister said we should mention names, that if we mention names the persons will not last 24 hours. But it is not proper to mention names in public.
“We are giving information. It is left for the Minister to work on the information and get to the root of what we are saying.
“We cannot come out to the market place and say this person is a thief. We don’t do things like that. But if we are pushed to the wall and mention names, heads will roll at NNPC Retail.”
Nwachukwu said one of the ways to end this fuel crisis is for the Minister to come down to the level of the marketers and discuss with them in order to get the whole truth.
He added: “If they supply fuel to our affiliate stations, there will be no scarcity again. This is what the immediate past government was doing with us in time like this.
“The NNPC Retail takes the fuel meant for us to the black market and still end up spoiling our names as if we are the ones diverting the fuel that was not delivered to us but distributed somewhere else in our names. This is corruption of the highest order.
“We are now crying out. We met twice with the Minister of State for Petroleum and we told him that the NNPC Retail staff has refused to bring us into the mainstream of fuel distribution. But they can’t be the accused and the Judge at the same time.”
He reminded the errant NNPC officials that petroleum products belong to the government and the people hence the NNPC staff should not keep it to themselves.
“We should know how it is being distributed. We should know the quantity that that is available, and we should know that this is the quantity you are giving to us as the marketers. You cannot wake up one morning and say you gave us five million trucks. Who did you give them to?”
“Sometimes it is our names they use in bringing out the product but it never got to us.
“When we met the Minister for the first time around October last year, we discovered that the NNPC Retail officials deceived him to embark on building new 800 filling stations. It does not make sense to build 800 stations when the old ones on ground have not been serviced.
“So when we met him, we told him about our own plight, that these officials believe that NNPC Retail belongs to them, and not to the Nigerian people.
“They believe that it is their birth right while they earn salaries. We told the Minister of our problem that these officials refused to work with us as an association; they prefer to work with us on individual basis, so that if you are dying as an individual, you can’t talk, and if you talk, they drive you out of the business. Since there is strength in unity, they don’t want to deal with us as an association.
“So the Minister told them in our presence that he saw nothing wrong for them to work with us as an association than as an individual. He said that they should go and work with us. So we left.
“May be they went back to poison the Minister’s mind, because since that time, our problem became worse. They just abandoned us completely. For more than six weeks now, some us have deposited N10 million but we cannot access fuel. So how can we keep quiet over these issues.
“Again we wrote to the Minister and we met, and he was seriously disturbed by what is happening. We reported back to him that NNPC Retail staff had refused to work with our association, and he was furious and asked them what is wrong with working with our association.
“The Minister therefore told them to go and set up a committee that would include our own members so that we would be able to monitor the product, even if it means offloading the product at a particular depot from where we can load our own supply.
“The minister handed our issue to a new Chief Operating Officer (COO) who now told us that he would call for dealers meeting and not association meeting. But we were surprised at this because we are a registered association, so nobody can stop us from being an association.
“This matter had dragged us and the NNPC Retail to the National Assembly where the Senators settled the matter that we have 600 mega stations and the Corporation has only 37 mega stations, and that we should be given supply too even if it is 50 to us and 50 to them.
“Sometimes you see 10 trucks of fuel packed at Mega 1 while none of our members has fuel. And by night, Mega 1 will sell off these 10 trucks to the black market.
“You cannot solve fuel scarcity in this way unless you allow the supply to go round.”
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