The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Mallam Mele Kyari, has said the price of petrol should be more than N280/litre at which Automotive Gas Oil, also known as diesel, is being sold.
Kyari said smuggling of petrol from Nigeria had impacted negatively on the Nigerian oil sector but added that this would not lead to another closure of the borders.
He said on Tuesday during a programme on Channels Television that efforts were rather being made to curb smuggling.
Kyari said, “Today we are paying N162/litre (for petrol). I am sure many people buy AGO (diesel) in the market and it is selling at N280/litre in the market today. So (there is) nowhere in the world diesel sells more expensive than PMS. That means that the price of petrol anywhere in the world, assuming you are going to sell it at the market, you are going to sell it above that price you have seen. Today, from what I can remember, I checked the number two days ago; what would we sell if we are at the filling station today and recover our cost fully is around N256/litre. We are borrowing on the back of the cash flow of this business. We know that this business is viable, it will work and it will return dividends. It has a cash flow that is sustainable because the refinery business, in the short term, will continue to be sustainable. That’s why banks have come forward to lend to us, so we can take equity in this. There is no resource-dependent country that will watch a business of this scale, which is bordering on energy security and has implications for fiscal security of the country, and you don’t have a say. And for us, as a strategy, we started this process long before Dangote started his refinery project. We are also working on our refineries, to ensure that we fix them. We have awarded the contract for Port Harcourt refinery rehabilitation. And ultimately we are going to close that of Warri and Kaduna very soon in July so that all of them will work contemporaneously. The net effect is that you are going to have an environment where Nigeria becomes the hub of petroleum products and supplies. It’s going to change the dynamics of petroleum supply globally in the sense that the flow is coming from Europe today and it is going to be reversed to some other direction. So the meaning of this is, there is an opportunity that has been thrown at us. And I’m not sure Mr Dangote wants to sell his equity in the refinery. I can confirm that it was at our instance that we started this engagement. He did not want to sell his shares in this refinery.”