Filling stations still manipulating prices

A Toyota Camry was parked beside a petrol filling station at the entrance of Olabisi Olaitan Street, Igando, Lagos on Saturday afternoon. The motorist, a middle-aged man, approached one of the attendants,  a yellow keg in his hand.  After making a purchase, he returned to empty the fuel into his vehicle’s tank.

Asked why he did not buy directly into the car, Mr. Samuel Olanrewaju said the exploitation by filling stations in the area was becoming unbearable for him.

“I don’t trust these dubious attendants. Apart from the fact that they sell a litre to you for N110, much of what their nozzle blows into your tank is air. So I prefer to use the keg, though it really has not removed this exploitation,” he said.

Curiously, the station not only had the official N97 on its signpost, it also displayed the price on its pump machine so that a first-time motorist may have the impression that they sell at the normal price.

However, the situation is not peculiar to Igando as most filling stations on the Egbeda/Iyana-Iba road sell at prices ranging from N100 to N120.

Other  areas where such extortion was observed include Ojodu Berger, Abule-Egba, Agege and Iyana Ipaja. A common characteristic of these filling stations is that they bear names which show they are one-man establishments.

One of the attendants, who declined to give his name, blamed the situation on government.  He claimed, that government also exploited marketers at the point of purchase.

“It is a chain of corruption. If you say some filling stations are extorting money from motorists, the issue is that the stations have also been exploited. We cannot sell below what we buy. So everybody has to fix their own price and nobody is forced to patronise us. It is as simple as that,” he said.

The few exceptions to this case of extortion are filling stations owned by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, and other big multinational oil companies.

At such stations, however, the queue is usually very long, such that a motorist could spend as much as 30 minutes before being attended to.