As the nationwide fuel scarcity bites harder, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd. Has been declared incompetent by the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA). The group said on Tuesday that “it is a shame that both in front of the corporate headquarters of the NNPCL in Abuja and in front of Transcorp Hilton whereby President Tinubu recently addressed a conference on counter terrorism, street hawkers of fuel made up of street urchins and hoodlums, loiter around those landmarks selling their procured fuel at highly exorbitant rates.”

HURIWA in a media statement by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, told NNPCL pointedly that it was “a wicked act of unprecedented dimensions that the nation’s sole importer of finished crude oil products being the NNPCL has watched without intervening to flood the country with petrol whereas street urchins, miscreants and thugs, were the only class of illegal black market traders who have continued to cash in on the scarcity of fuel in organised fuel dispensing stations to extort desperate motorists and other Nigerians searching frantically for fuel to be able to engage in their daily economic routines and to power their homes during the night times.”

“It is beyond being described as despicable, reprehensible, atrocious and an act of collective punishment to Nigerians by NNPCL that government through the publicly owned NNPCL has failed for close to two weeks to supply fuel to Nigerians but at the same time Nigerians are subjected to several hours of waiting at the filling stations to fill up their car fuel tanks or even purchase essential fuel into their generators for use in their business and housing premises given that the National Grid of the Transmission Company of Nigeria kept collapsing on daily basis and failing to supply sustainable electricity power to Nigerians,” HURIWA further said.

The rights group said that “the reason NNPCL treat Nigerians with absolute disrespect and crass disregard is because there is no effective oversight activities by the National Assembly with a leadership that is absolutely compromised and bought over by the President who ironically is the senior minister of Petroleum in Nigeria since this administration came on board.”

According to it, “The NNPCL’S monopoly in the Petroleum sector of the economy has remained a pathetic show of shame and it is sad that even when the erstwhile NNPC witnessed a corporate transmutation courtesy of the commercial baptism by the corporate affairs commission which now accredited it partly as a privately administered company, yet President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has on two occasions made appointments into the management of the so-called private company the NNPCL which has yet to overcome the bureaucratic inefficiencies of its old self which is why this current harsh fuel scarcity came and is still in existence without the NNPCL taking any concrete steps to check the impunity of some lawless Petroleum Marketers hoarding petrol products all across Nigeria with a view to forcing a price adjustment which is absolutely intolerable.

“It is pure wickedness that at a time of mass poverty with over 133 million multidimensionally poor households in Nigeria and with the active absence of the ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and poverty alleviation, the federal government still allowed hoodlums to to take over the selling of fuel to motorists. This is absolutely condemned.”

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