The National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) on Friday appealed to the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) to suspend its seal off of erring filling stations pending the availability of petrol.
Its South-West Chairman, Alhaji Tokunbo Korodo, made the appeal in Lagos.
Korodo said that continuous seal off of filling stations in the country would compound the problem of petrol scarcity as it were.
The NUPENG’s regional chairman said that private depots in the country were loading the commodity to independent oil marketers above official depot’s price.
“ When you load your product at the official price in the depot, there are some underground settlements that you have to fulfil before they will allow your tankers to go.
“With all these payments in the depots, it will be hard for the independent marketers to sell the product at the official price of N87 per litre.
“Due to the seal off of filling stations by the DPR, most of the independent-oil marketers are not loading at depots now because they can’t sell what they are buying from the depots at the official price.
“Most of the filling stations that are selling the product presently belong to major marketers that are importing it from foreign countries.
“The appropriate time for the DPR to effect enforcement is when the product is available for motorists to buy; the seal off of filling stations at this period is adding unnecessary hardship on the masses.
“We are not saying the DPR should not perform its statutory functions; but they should also consider the plights of motorists that spent unending hours at filling stations queuing for the product,” he said.
