Long queues of vehicles have started manifesting at petrol filling stations in Lagos and Ogun States.
Many filling stations had no fuel to dispense on Tuesday, August 29. Consequently, the filling stations with fuel to dispense had long queues of vehicles waiting in line to buy the commodity.
Long queues were particularly noticed at many stations on the Oshodi-Ojodu Berger Expressway and some sections of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.
As a result of the queues, there was traffic snarls caused by some vehicles queuing by the roadside and obstructing the free flow of traffic.
According to The Punch, North-West filling station had the longest queue, as it dispensed petrol at N568/litre. Others such as Eterna – N568/litre; NNPCL – N568/litre; TotalEnergies – N570/litre; and Mobil – N570/litre had shorter queues.
Conoil, Enyo and Oando at Berger in Lagos, had no product to dispense.
While some of TotalEnergies stations were seen dispensing, a branch of the station located on the Berger axis was locked.
A few others such as Worldoil, Fatgbems and Quest in Ogun State shut their outlets.
The Chairman, the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria, Satellite Depot, Akin Akinrinade, told The Punch that the depot had not loaded products in the last three weeks.
According to him, even the NNPCL Retail depot is currently operating skeletal dispatching of products.
The NNPCL Retail has 21 depots across the country, nine in the North, and 12 in the South. However, the company abandoned the depots due to pipeline vandalism and now relied on private depots to dispatch products.
Recently, NNPCL had been making efforts to put the pipelines in order. One of those efforts was the Satellite depots in Lagos which resumed operations last year, but was again vandalised in July.
