By Festus Fifen

The Presidency on Wednesday said that President Bola Tinubu has expressed his desire to reshuffle his cabinet anytime soon.

The special adviser to the President on Information and Strategy Bayo Onanuga stated this on Wednesday while fielding questions from State House Corespondents at Briefing room of the Aso Rock Presidential Villa Abuja.

According to Onanuga, “The President has expressed his desire to reshuffle his cabinet and he will do it. I don’t know whether he wants to do it before October first but i know he will surely do it. That is what I will say, but he has not given us any timeline.”

Onanuga added, “The President has given an order to all his ministers at the last Federal Executive Council meeting to go out there and speak about the activities of his administration.

“Some of them have been media shy, television shy, radio shy, and he wants them to overcome all that and go out there and speak about what they have been doing.

“Because the feeling out there is that government is not doing enough and the government has been doing a lot. And it is up to them to go out there and blow their own trumpet. They should go out there and talk about what their ministries have been doing.”

Speaking on the possible price of Premium Motor Spirit PMS since the commencement of the Dangote Refinery, Onanuga said the market is already deregulated.

” The PMs regime, has been deregulated. Dangote is a private company. NNPC should not forget is a limited liability company.

” Whatever controversy both of them are having is their own problem. They are operating, even if you go by the terms of petroleum industry act. NNPC is on its own, even though it’s owned by the federal government, the state government and local councils and everything, but it’s operating as a limited liability company.

” You can see what the private marketers have said, that if they find the NNPC or DANGOTE price too much for them, they will resolve to importing fuel because it is a free market at the end of the day.
It It is the consumer who benefit if a price war starts, if NNPC fuel is too much, the public market can go to the market and bring in their own fuel and sell at the price that they think is very reasonable and profitable for them. So my answer is that, as far as it is concerned, the government is not dabbling in this controversy.

“The government has a program which somebody mentioned earlier about CNG, that the government wants to make sure that Nigerians have a choice. If you don’t want to use PMS, you can use CNG, and you can see what’s going on in many of our cities, Lagos, Ibadan, Benin and some other places where transporters are already embracing CNG.

” And the whole idea that CNG, the equivalent of gas to PMS is the gap is too, is very, very wide. If you want to buy a liter of petrol, if they sell it, let’s say 850 Naira, what they’re going to get by the equivalent of CNG is about 230 Naira, and you can see the gap.

” Some of the transporters are already converting their vehicles to CNG, and the government has a plan to make sure that about a million of those vehicles run on CNG. The whole idea is that if they run on CNG, the cost of transportation will go down.