With the fuel supply/distribution challenges recently noticeable in some Nigerian cities especially Lagos and Abuja finally becoming a thing of the past, the 'War Room', a special task force set up by the management of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC to eradicate the persistent fuel queues, is leaving no stone unturned in its effort to banish the incidence of fuel shortage.

As part of the arrangement, the task force is coordinating the loading and dispatch of huge volumes of Premium Motor Spirit, pms to filling stations throughout the country in excess of the national daily consumption figures which dovetails between 30-33 million litres.   

Figures from the weekly loading plan for 17-22 February 2010 indicates that a total of over 8,788 truck load of pms the equivalent of over 290 million litres would be made available to filling stations across the country by the NNPC and the major oil marketers. The outline shows a daily average dispatch of over 1255 trucks the equivalent of over 41.4 million litres of fuel.

A breakdown indicate that while 1565 trucks or 51 million litres were made available for loading on Tuesday, the figures for Wednesday  stood at over 1433 trucks the equivalent of over 47 million litres. Thursday’s number was put at over 1210 trucks (over 39 million litres)  while Friday and Saturday loading schedules have 1240 trucks each which translates to over 40 million litres per day.

On Sunday over 710 trucks or over 23 million litres are billed for loading while over 1390 trucks the equivalent of over 45 million litres would make their ways to various filling stations spread across the country.

Mallam Farouk Ahmed, a member of the `War Room’ who is also the Executive Director Commercial, Pipelines and Products Marketing Company Limited, PPMC a subsidiary of the NNPC stated that the whole idea of exceeding the national consumption level is to ensure that Nigerians have more than what they can consume on a daily basis so as to eliminate any form of panic buying or hoarding.

 "We are adopting a common sense approach. When there is more than enough product in the filling stations nobody would want to fill his tank, go back home to empty the content and return to the queue because of fear of the unknown. We are making sure that stations are wet with products," Ahmed said.

Ahmed added that to ensure that what is loaded and dispatched gets to the desired destination, the `War Room’ has since constituted an effective monitoring team.