The lingering fuel scarcity hitting many parts of the country has turned into a crisis situation in Gombe even as the Gombe and Bauchi Operations office of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) express helplessness in managing the tensed situation.
It was revealed that there were many sharp practices allegedly perpetrated by the owners of some filling stations in connivance with officials of the DPR, especially within the state capital.
It was gathered that many of the filling stations across Gombe metropolis on Friday discovered disorganised and unruly crowds that characterised the fuel stations even as black marketers had a field day doing their brisk business in front of filling stations.
One motorists, Danlami Inusa Mohammed, alleged that there was no road side petrol vendor (black marketers) in Gombe town that did not have fuel.
According to him, it was an open secret that most of the filling stations, with the knowledge of DPR, sell fuel to illegal vendors in the middle of the night between 1:00 am and 4:00 am.
He blamed the DPR for worsening the scarcity saying the DPR allowed the filling stations to sell to the black marketers at above the official N87 per litre while the black marketers sell at N120 per litre and above.
However, after a hard search, chasing him from one filling station to the other, Mr. Bernard S Amos, the assistant to the controller in charge of Retail Outlet Monitoring who spoke on behalf of the DPR Controller said Gombe is “suffering sufficiency level of fuel”.
He explained that instead of the 594,000 litres that could be sufficient for Gombe, the state only got 561,000 litres from Friday all through Monday.
According to him, with very few staff to monitor stations in Gombe and Bauchi states, the DPR office was totally helpless, coupled with the fact that they were not security agents which left most of the filling stations in crisis situation.
