The Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream) has advised Nigerians to stop panic buying of petrol as refineries would soon start functioning.
Senator Uche Ekwunife, who led a delegation of the committee to the Port Harcourt Refining Company on Monday, told newsmen that efforts had been made to ensure sufficient products in the system.
Ekwunife said what was needed was to fast-track the distribution so that in the next one week the market would be flooded with the product.
She said the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation had been doing its best to ensure the availability of the product.
She commended the management of the refinery for striving to get it back to business.
Ekwunife urged the Directorate of Petroleum Resources to live up its responsibility of ensuring that product was not hoarded or sold above the pump price of N87 a litre.
She called on the DPR to sit up to ensure that erring filling stations were sanctioned.
She said: “The essence of making a law is to ensure that people adhere to it.
“If you do not adhere to it, you face the consequences.
“So we have to begin to adhere to the laws we have made.
“So I think the DPR should sit up and right now, they are moving from one filling station to another to ensure that the distribution is not hard and the product is sold at the normal rate.”
Ekwunife said although people were clamouring for the deregulation of the sector, it required all stakeholders sitting together and understanding the modalities and the mechanisms to make it work.
She said: “It is not something we will just wake up and start because so many things are involved and all these things must be thrashed out before we get to that.”
Ekwunife said the essence of the effort was to ensure that the average Nigerian could get petroleum products at affordable price.
Earlier during a courtesy visit to the Managing Director of the refinery, Dr. Bafred Enjugu, the senator explained that the visit was a follow-up on a motion to find out the reasons for the scarcity of the product and the discrepancies in price.
She said that they were in Lagos and decided to come to Port Harcourt to know why Nigeria would not continue to have the flow of the product.
Also speaking, Enjugu said the refinery stopped producing due to the failure of the operational bleep.
He assured the team that in a few days, the refinery would resume production.
NAN.