The amount spent on Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) imported into Nigeria from January to September this year climbed by 55.56 percent to N2.52tn from the N1.62tn spent in the same period of 2020.
This development came amid the Federal Government’s plan to remove subsidy from petrol by February next year.
Oil marketers have already begun plans to resume importation of the PMS as soon as the government deregulates the downstream sector of the petroleum sector in the first quarter of 2022.
Data obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows that petrol’s N2.52tn import bill for the first nine months of this year is 47.37 per cent and 25.37 percent higher than what the country spent on PMS imports in the whole of 2019 and 2020 respectively.
Buoyed by the rally in global oil prices, the jump in the country’s petrol import bill comes amid growing concerns over the shortage of foreign exchange in the country.
Nigeria banks entirely on imports to meet its fuel needs as its refineries have remained in a state of ruin for many years despite several recorded repairs.
The country spent N2.01tn on petrol imports in 2020, compared to N1.71tn in the previous year.
Petrol imports gobbled up N1.05tn in the third quarter of this year, up from N782.46bn in Q2 and N687.74bn in Q1, according to the NBS data.
The data from NBS also showed that petrol topped the list of products imported into the country in Q3, accounting for 12.52 per cent of the total amount spent on imported products, up from 11.26 per cent in the previous quarter.
