It is Christmas day, but Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is not at home to savour the special moment with his family.
Rather as duty calls, he is out on the streets of Lagos, particularly petrol depots, to monitor supply and distribution of the product which scarcity has brought an anti-climax to this year’s Christmas.
And specifically, the Presidency confirmed that Professor Osinbajo will be visiting fuel depots in Lagos on Monday to monitor the loading of trucks and to ensure steady supply of petrol to designated filling stations.
This information is contained on the twitter handle of the Presidency Nigeria, tagged; @NGRPresident, in Abuja.
The post read: “This morning the Vice-President is visiting fuel depots in Lagos to monitor the loading of trucks, and to ensure distribution is going on without a hitch.’’
The Vice-President had on Christmas Eve made an unexpected stop-over to some filling stations in the Lekki area and Lagos Island to see that things were moving on well.
“It’s such a shame that Christmas has been, to some extent, with this sort of discomfort. This is deeply regretted.
“And l know that, despite the resilience and strength of people in Lagos and the Nigerian people, we would see ourselves through this and will enjoy our Christmas and have a great New Year,” Osinbajo said in a statement issued on Monday by his spokesman, Mr. Laolu Akande.
According to the Vice President, the Buhari administration is doing everything possible to quickly resolve the fuel shortages experienced by Nigerians.
President Buhari had on Sunday sympathized with Nigerians over their suffering occasioned by the scarcity of petrol across the country.
The President, who was reacting to the long queues of motorists at various filling stations across the country, in a statement personally signed by him and posted on his twitter handle, said the scarcity was regrettable.
He stated that he was being briefed regularly on the matter by the NNPC and assured that the situation would improve positively in the next few days.
President Buhari disclosed that he had already directed the regulators to step up their surveillance and bring an end to hoarding of the products and price inflation by marketers.
Perhaps exasperated by what he witnessed in Lagos, Vice-President Osinbajo reportedly described it as a shame that Nigerians are celebrating Christmas amid a serious fuel scarcity.
Osinbajo’s spokesperson, Akande, quoted the vice-president as saying this, when he visited Oando and Heyden filling stations in Lagos.
“It’s such a shame that Christmas has been, to some extent, with this sort of discomfort,” Osinbajo said.
“This is deeply regretted, and I know that, despite the resilience and strength of people in Lagos and the Nigerian people, we would see ourselves through this and will enjoy our Christmas and have a great new year.
“We are trying to move as quickly as we can. Obviously, people have gone through a lot of pain and anguish in the past few days, and that is deeply regretted.
“We are trying to do what we can to move as quickly as possible and there is certainly enough products to be able to solve the problem.
“We will be able to solve the problem; the short period of scarcity is quite a bit of burden, but we know that so long as products are enough and the trucks coming out and feeding the stations, this will be over very soon.
“I am going around with the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources here in Lagos to ensure that first, the trucks are being loaded from all the depots, and also looking at the filling stations to see that things are moving on very well.
“The GMD of the NNPC is also working in Abuja to see that things are moving quickly and we are moving around the country. So we expect that it will be resolved very quickly.”