By Francis Sadhere
As mixed reactions continue to trail the pump price hike by the Federal Government, the Center for Peace and Environmental Justice (CEPEJ) has said that the policy would bring more hardship to the Nigerian people.
The Center said the federal government should have used the on-going town hall meetings to gauge the minds of Nigerians before going ahead to jack up the price, describing the subsidy removal as a display of arbitrariness in policy implementation.
In a statement signed by the National Coordinator of CEPEJ, Comrade Sheriff Mulade, the NGO advised the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu , to be mindful of his utterances as dubious marketers were taking undue advantage of Nigerians.
It said it was absurd that Buhari’s government would ever think of imposing increase in fuel pump price on Nigerians who have been passing through months of fuel scarcity and hyper-inflation which have brought untold hardship to them.
The NGO, therefore, urged the federal government to provide palliative measures to cushion the effects of the price hike and also revive the moribund refineries and give more licenses to prospective investors to build more refineries especially in the oil producing communities in the country.
Besides, the Center called for proper monitoring of the petroleum sector and activities of the marketers to check unwholesome and unethical conducts, advising that recalcitrant marketers should be sanctioned and their licenses revoked to serve as deterrent to others.
It advocated for the merging of the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulating Agency (PPPRA) and Directorate of Petroleum Resources (DPR) for effective and efficient service delivery and control.
It equally called on the government to step up efforts at providing steady and uninterrupted power supply which would go a long way to help small and medium and even Large Scale industries to maximize their productions, reiterating that the cost of production in the country was really out of the roof because of epileptic power supply, among other variables.
