FUEL SHORTAGE HITS ACCRA

 Alex Mould, CHief Executive Officer, NPA

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Monday December 31, 2012. 

 

The perennial shortage of petroleum products particularly super and liquefied petroleum gas has reared its ugly head again.

The situation worsened during the Yuletide and there appear to be no end in sight.

Motorists have been struggling to fill their tanks. Long queues have been formed at few petrol stations where the products are available.

The National Petroleum Authority NPA earlier claimed that there is no such shortage in the system but later turned around to admit the product was in short supply and that they were working hard to restore normalcy.

Sources say dealers of the product are anticipating increment in the prices of the product and that has led to hoarding.

It is rumoured that a gallon of petrol is likely to go for GHC10 but this has not been established by the national regulator.

NPA Chief Executive Officer Alex Mould told Joy FM that there was enough supplies on the market to last for weeks. 

“We have enough stock to last us a few weeks and as you are aware there were a few days around Christmas that supplies were not made to the public from these depots and we are rectifying that by ensuring that they work over time to make up any short fall in the country,” he said.
However most filling stations in the capital are without petrol, with those having supplies besieged with long queues.

Mr Mould said the NPA had dispatched officers to the ground to assess the situation and denied rumours that fuel prices would be increased in the first week of January.

Later, Public Relations Officer (PRO) for NPA Yaro Kasambata attributed the problem of bringing in more products to the delay of vessels which were supposed to discharge refined products.

“Most of the vessels that were bringing us refined products have had to defer their estimated time of arrival because of bad weather conditions, this is one of the factors we can confirm as the reason for why the stock run low,” he told Citi FM.

“We don’t have to mistake the current situation with the strategic national stock since there is the regular stock and the strategic national stock.

“Those strategic national stocks you don’t tap into it just when you think your stocks are running low; those stocks are rarely for when you think you have crisis’’.

“What we are doing now is that we have had all those vessels arrive and they have been discharged so our depots now have products and you know most of these products are transported by road so we expect that in the next couple of hours or a day or two supply will normalize across the country,” he added.