SUBSIDY: SENATE TELLS FG TO LIFT BAN ON SUPPLY OF FUEL TO BORDER COMMUNITIES
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The Senate has requested the Comptroller General of the Nigeria Customs Service, NCS, and the National Security Adviser, NSA, to lift the existing restriction order on the supply of petroleum products to border towns as soon as possible.
According to the Senate, the federal government’s withdrawal of fuel subsidies has significantly reduced product smuggling, and, as a result, items should be permitted to flow freely and without limits.
The Senate has also encouraged the NCS and NSA Comptroller General’s Offices to step up preventive and enforcement actions to combat all forms of smuggling in the country.
The Upper House has charged its Committees on Customs and Excise (when they are formed) and National Security and Intelligence with ensuring compliance and reporting back in four weeks for further legislative action.
Yesterday’s Senate resolutions followed a motion titled “Urgent Need to Lift the Restriction Order Placed on Supply of Fuel to Border Communities.”
Senator Olamilekan Adeola, APC, Ogun West, sponsored the motion.
Senator Adeola told his colleagues in his presentation that the federal government had directed on November 6, 2019 through the Comptroller General of Customs that “no petroleum products are permitted to be discharged in any filling station within a radius of 20 kilometers to the border” of Nigeria.
According to him, the directive was issued to halt the smuggling of Nigerian petroleum products, primarily premium motor spirit (PMS, to neighboring countries where there was a thriving market for petrol due to a subsidy that remained in place until May 29, 2023, when President Bola Tinubu announced its removal in his inaugural speech.
Adeola said, “This policy had brought untold hardship and major losses to businesses of the residents and indigenes of the affected border communities, which later made the Nigerian Customs relax the policy slightly by given license to two or three petrol stations in each of the local government areas that border these neighboring countries.
“But that remedy was just a drop of water in an ocean scarcity of petrol considering the mass population of the people affected in these border towns and communities.”
He stated that the suspension order has had a significant impact on the people living in border communities across Yewaland in Ogun State, particularly in the Idiroko axis, where only five licensed independent petroleum marketers are permitted to dispense the commodity to over 500,000 residents spread across 150 towns and villages.
Senator Adeola argued that “since there is no longer subsidy on our petroleum products as proclaimed by the President, there is no longer justification for the restriction order because the price of petrol across the international border has also gone up in line with the new price regime across Nigeria.”
All senators who voted in support of the measure cited the “untold hardships” endured by residents living in border villages as a result of fuel and fertilizer shortages, notably in the country’s north.
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