The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said that the federal government spent N2.95 trillion on the importation of petrol in 2018.
NBS, in a new data released on Monday showed that that the country spent N1.97 trillion on the product in 2017, N1.63 trillion in 2016 and N1.14 trillion in 2015.
Petrol imports accounted for 22.4 per cent of the nation’s total imports in 2018, up from 20.6 per cent in 2017, 18.4 per cent in 2016 and 17 per cent in 2015.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has been the sole importer of petrol into the country for more than a year as private oil marketers stopped importation due to a shortage of foreign exchange and increase in crude oil prices, which was said to have made the landing cost of the product higher than the official pump price of N145 per litre.
Fuel import, which averaged 56.5 million litres per day in January, jumped to a high of 86.4 million litres in February, according to the data obtained from the Pipelines and Product Marketing Company, a subsidiary of the NNPC.
It stood at 66.8 million litres per day in March; 70.7 million in April; 36.7 million litres in May; and 34.5 million in June during the period in review.
It climbed to 36.5 million litres per day in July, 58.4 million in August, and 57.8 million in September.
Analysis of the data from the PPMC and the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) showed that petrol imports averaged 55.1 million litres per day in the first nine months of 2018 compared to 48.5 million in the same period in 2016.
Petrol imports averaged 49.2 million litres per day and 49.8 million in 2015 and 2016 respectively, DPR data showed.
It would be recalled that in October last year, the senate initiated a fresh investigation into an alleged illegal subsidy payment on petrol, but the NNPC denied that it had in its custody a $3.5 billion subsidy fund.
