Kachikwu apologises for magician remark saying petrol queues will end next week

MINISTER of state for petroleum Dr Ibe Kachikwu has apologised for his insensitive remarks about the long petrol queues in the country saying his comments in which he said he was not a magician were made in error.

 

Over recent weeks, there have been long petrol queues across Nigeria as a scarcity has forced fuelling stations to ration supplies. Challenged over the development last week, Dr Kachikwu said he was not a magician and did not have wand to wave the problem away immediately, prompting a spate of attacks.

 

Yesterday, while appearing before the Senate Committee on Petroleum, Dr Kachikwu apologised for his remarks saying that he erroneously made the statement because he was not a politician. A former director-general of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Dr Kachikwu is an oil industry technocrat appointed minister by President Muhammadu Buhari.

 

After apologising to senators, he said that the nationwide fuel shortages would be addressed soon,  adding that enough measures have been put in place to end them by next week. Dr Kachikwu said even though a two-week target had been set to end the scarcity, he was working assiduously to ensure that between April 5 and 7, the lingering queues would have largely disappeared.

 

Dr Kachikwu added: “I do apologise for the comment that I made jocularly with my friends in the press about not being a magician and it offended Nigerians. I did go on to explain what needed to be done and I did not know that it would create the kind of hyperbole that it did.

“Let me first admit that I am not a typically experienced politician, I am a technocrat. I come to work and some of the phraseologies that I may use, while being acceptable in the arena in which I play obviously will not be acceptable in the public political arena."

 

He blamed the current scarcity on the non-availability of foreign exchange by oil marketers to sustain the importation of petrol, a situation he said now placed the entire business of fuel importation on the shoulders of the NNPC. Dr Kachikwu  also said that while the current government inherited a subsidy bill of N600bn (£2.09bn), about N500bn had been paid while the balance had been brought forward in the 2016 budget.

 

According to Dr Kachikwu, the government had saved N1trn since January 2016 because it has not paid subsidy on petrol, adding that the issue of pipeline vandalism had further complicated the problem. However, he said for the first time, the NNPC had recovered the Escravos pipeline to the Warri refinery, a development he said would aid the movement of crude oil to the refineries.