Presidency Scraps Subsidy, Reduce Petrol To N85 Per Litre From 1st January

The President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government would on January 1, 2016, reduce the pump price of the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) to N85 per litre.

The Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu broke the news to journalists in the Port Hacourt Refinery Company (PHRC), where he spent Christmas inspecting the plant.

Asked when the Federal Government would release the new price temperate of the Petroleum Product Pricing Regulation Agency (PPPRA), he said that he has already approved the new price for the agency on Thursday.

Pressed to reveal when the new price will become effective, Kachikwu, who is also the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said "like I said, we have done a modulation calculation and it is showing us below N87. I imagine that if PPPRA publishes it today, it will become effective immediately. But the 1st of January that is when we are looking at."

According to him, the new price is below the current N87 per litre and it would now convince Nigerians that the pricing modulation that the Federal Government promised to embark on a few days ago was not a trick.

His words: "It is out I signed off on it yesterday (Thursday). I imagined that in the next couple of days the marketers would get advice on that. The nice thing about the PPPRA, where I signed up on it yesterday is that the price will be far below N87.

"So for the first time people will understand that the pricing modulation I was talking about is not a gimmick. It is for real. We have gone to find out how we will be able fluctuate this market to reflect what the reality of crude market is. The objective is that one, we cannot afford to continue to subsidize.

"We can't even understand where those subsidies were going to. There is a lot of fraud elements in it so we need to cut that of."