Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana, on Sunday expressed concerns over the ‘monumental fraud’ bedevilling fuel importation in Nigeria.
Falana, who made the observation when he was featured as a guest on Sunday’s Channels Television’s ‘Politics Today’, stated that it was irreconcilable that cars were getting lesser on Nigerian roads while the subsidy payment was increasing.
He said: “How many people have bought a car in the last one and a half years, even second-hand cars (in Nigeria)? The point I am making is that the number of vehicles on the road has been reduced. Yet, we were told that during the days of boom, the NNPC was subsidising 68 million litres of fuel per day.
“Now that there are problems, scarcity, and poverty everywhere, no new vehicles on the road, we are still paying for 68 million litres of fuel. Whereas before this regime came on board, the Comptroller General of Customs challenged the NNPC during a Senate public hearing to pay for the amount of fuel that is said to be smuggled out of the country.”
He further alleged that the NNPC was not telling Nigerians everything it claimed to know about the smuggling of crude in the country, maintaining that smugglers need 2,000 petrol tankers to steal the volume of fuel the company claims is being smuggled.
Emmanuel Addeh, Chuks Okocha and Peter Uzoho
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