Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has raised questions over the deregulation of the oil sector by the federal government.
Atiku took to his twitter handle on Tuesday to bare his mind on the issue. A litre of fuel is now selling between N158 and N162 in Nigeria.
President Muhammadu Buhari had on Monday said that the era of subsidizing fuel is over as it was no longer sustainable.
“I am a businessman. I look at things from an economic perspective. Questions beg answers. The price of crude is down from where it was in 2019.
“In the US and Europe, fuel prices are far lower than they were in 2019. If we truly deregulated, shouldn’t fuel price have dropped?” Atiku asked.
The former VP, who was the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2019 election, had in May this year called on the federal government to liberalise the country’s downstream oil sector.
He argued that the situation whereby the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) uses scarce foreign exchange to import fuel at subsidised rates was not sustainable.
Atiku therefore said the focus of the federal government should be to aggressively drive the enhancement of the local capacity to process larger quantities of our crude oil for domestic consumption and not be fixated over price fixing.
On the propriety of fixing the pump price of petrol, Atiku noted that the price of petrol is not determined by only the price of crude oil.
“The price of crude oil and fuel can fall even further or go up without notice. Nigeria, as it stands today, does not even have the money to continue to be involved in backstopping fuel price at any level.
“And the way to go is to liberalise the downstream sub-sector and not fix prices as long as the marketers can import on their own and sell,” he had said.
