After the long stories about the possibility of dangote refinary being handed over to the federal government and the possibility of them abandoning and it like the other non functional refinaries, dangote refinary has officially presented the first sample of the PMS and The 650,000-capacity refinery has officially done a test run of the product.
It was quite amazing to see the fracas between Dangote and the federal government even though it was not entirely surprising because, on one hand I was looking at the construction of the refinery as an investment that was silently done by some of these big wigs in the system. Since I was aware that Dangote had to source for other investors from within and outside, namely the domestic investors and the foreign investors. My little thought was that those investors were populated by the, what they call "Oil Cabals" and I saw that as the reason why he was so confident to go into that route where many top business men are scared of.
NNPC is said to be the sole buyer of the PMS at this intial stage ans according to dangotes team, " if Nigerians refuses to petronize the product, they will be left with no option than taking thier market off the shores of the country.
What do you make of this? Will this cause a direction reduction in the price of petrol and help reduce the rate of inflation in the country?
I don't support this idea of NNPCL being the sole buyer of the PMS products from Dangote Refinery. I suppose it was meant to be an open market for the companies in the system but not this form of monolopy in the sector. Remember, NNPCL is no longer a full fledged government property but now a limited company, so I don't see why federal government will dictate who buys or not, their products.
Now, what this means is that NNPCL are now the new giants in the sector and to a large extent the determinants of the fuel pump price in the country. I try to equate the number of NNPC filling stations which is just around 1000 filling stations out of the 150,000 filling stations in Nigeria. How do you really quantify or justify this? Everything about this oil and gas sector is just confusing and unreasonable.