Government through its petroleums procurement entity, National Oil Infrastructure Company (NOIC) is struggling to balance fuel imports as diesel supplies have plummeted in the past two weeks.
Despite receiving adequate petrol supplies in the past five weeks, NOIC has been inconsistent in injecting enough diesel supplies in the market to cater for commuters and other heavy duty industries.
This development has given birth to prolonged fuel queues which have been the order of the day on service stations before the recent price hikes.
To curb fears on the looming crisis, government made an announcement late yesterday through the Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting saying efforts have been made to balance supply of all both petrol and diesel.
“Government apologizes for the logistical glitch which resulted in fuel retailers ordering more petrol than diesel giving rise to diesel shortages. The situation has been attended to and normalcy in the fuel retail sector is expected to have been attained within the next few hours,” read an official statement from the Ministry of Information’s Twitter account.
Despite fuel supplies improving soon after government decision to hike prices of both diesel and petrol to $3,11 and $3,31 respectively, the nation has not been receiving adequate Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) since forex shortages reached an all time high in late 2018.
However, optimistic economic commentators expressed confidence in the improvement of fuel supplies in recent weeks and predictions are high that the fuel supplies will normalize considering that the central bank has moved to float the foreign currency exchange rates in a bid to build forex reserves in the local banking sector.
