Nigeria’s oil marketers, on Thursday, insisted on a possible increase in the pump price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), popularly called petrol, following a further plunge in the value of the naira against the United States dollar.
The local currency weakened against the greenback at the black market from 900 per dollar on Wednesday to 920 per dollar on Thursday, raising further concerns about whether the pump price of petrol could be sold at the current price.
Naira which had hit 945 per dollar at the parallel market about two weeks ago, rebounded last week.
The local currency, however, began a move southward this week, a situation that has unsettled economic managers and stakeholders in the oil and gas sector.
Oil dealers and marketers told Punch on Thursday that with the exchange rate at N920 to $1, the pump price of petrol could not remain at N617 per litre, particularly if the current exchange rate lingered.
They again projected a cost of between N680/litre to N700/litre for PMS, based on an exchange rate of N920/litre, stressing that the forex rate was about N750/$ to N800/$ at the time the cost of petrol was pegged at N590/litre to N617/litre.
However, the oil marketers pointed out that since the Federal Government had insisted that it would not increase the petrol price, it must then be “subsidising the commodity secretly, based on the prevalent exchange rate reality.”