The Federal Government has has taken down a link holding the new prices of petrol from the website of the Petroleum Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA).
Energy regulator PPPRA on Thursday night posted its new template that showed an increase in the pump price of petrol from N186 to N212 per litre.
The controversial template was previously accessible here: http://pppra.gov.ng/pms-guiding-price-for-march-2021/.
It was unclear why the link was deleted, but it came amidst nationwide uproar over the decision.
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Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), a State-owned oil firm, had also raced to microblogging platform, Twitter, to insist that fuel price would not be going up immediately this morning; a claim that drew widespread mockery as Nigerians said they remember that the government made similar false statements in the past.
Nigerians have also been enraged by President Muhammadu Buhari’s decision to implement another controversial increase in the price of petrol, saying it was bound to aggravate the suffering of the masses after hikes in electricity rates and biting inflation.
It was unclear whether pressure was mounted on PPPRA to delete the template to douse public outcry, a move that was not immediately clarified by officials.
While the Federal Government has insisted through the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) that there will be no petrol price hike in March, the expected ex-depot price is N206.42 while the landing cost is N189.61 for the month of March, 2021.
