A consumer body, the Cooking Gas Consumers Association of Nigeria (CGCAN) has reacted to the lingering issue of high cost of the ex-depot price of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) popularly called cooking gas.
It said the role played by middle men in the gas industry was the major contributory factor to the exorbitant and skyrocketing price of the essential item in the country.
The National President of CGCAN, Dr Hakeem Olajide, was reacting particularly to reports credited to the Managing Director of Nigerian Independent Petroleum Company, NIPCO Plc, Mr. Suresh Kumar.
Recall that the Managing Director of NIPCO Plc, Mr. Suresh Kumar had claimed that the “local production of LPG was not at par with domestic demand, as the industry had expected that Nigeria should have grown to a two million metric tons per annum market.”
According to reports, the NIPCO boss explained that the local production of LPG from Nigeria and some other International Oil Companies (IOCs) was not enough to meet local demands, even though the country’s domestic LPG market recorded some progress between 2014 to 2020, growing consumption from 2, 000 metric tons per annum to 1.2 million metric tons in 2020.
‘‘But from 2020, we started witnessing a decline basically due to low local production and increased level of imports,’’ he had said.
He further explained that in order to meet up with the demand gap, the industry had to step up the volume of imports, with the cost of imported LPG far higher than locally produced ones.
But in a statement issued yesterday by its National President, the CGCAN picked holes in some of the positions of NIPCO boss, insisting that from his association’s investigations, “the marketers of LPG in the country, whom we have interacted with over these years concerning the hike in the price of cooking gas, have repeatedly told us that the hike, which we all bear the brunt, was as a result of middle men that play gods in the industry, who the regulatory agencies have continued to use in hijacking and manipulating the prices of cooking gas in the domestic gas market
