“I don’t think there is any credible data on consumption, but there is credible data on evacuation from the depots. They are very distinct. So every truck that leaves the depots in this country is known – the truck number, the driver, and the destination of that product are known.
“We have numbers around this and those numbers are what we assume is our consumption. But we know that this may not be our consumption figure because we know that petroleum products are smuggled across the country,” he stated.
Kyari admitted that not all the petrol imported into Nigeria is consumed within the country, stressing that the arbitrage situation caused by the subsidy regime was to blame for the anomaly. “We’re actually subsidising everybody else in West Africa,” he added.
Explaining that even those who secure the Nigerian borders are “not angels,” Kyari argued that there was a huge incentive to smuggle the fuel because the gains are enormous.
