President Bola Tinubu has been urged by young people in Ogun State to abolish the prohibition on the sale of petroleum products at filling stations in areas that border the Benin Republic.
Obasanjonews24 notes that in 2019, the late President Muhammadu Buhari issued an order prohibiting the sale of petroleum products at any filling stations that were within 20 kilometers of the nation’s land borders.
The Buhari administration said that the action was intended to stop bunkering and the smuggling of petroleum products into nearby nations.
However, young people in Ogun State’s bordering Ipokia Local Government Area are pleading with Tinubu to swiftly overturn the prohibition.
The young people made the appeal on Friday in a statement issued by the Ipokia Local Government Youth Forum (IPYF) through its Secretary, Adeyemi Sulaimon Olusegun.
The group demanded that the Federal Government withdraw the prohibition because there was no longer a fuel subsidy, claiming that this would lessen the hardship on the citizens of the border communities in Ogun.
The youngsters bemoaned the fact that many border settlements had been without power for the last 15 years, making it impossible for businesses to exist because customers couldn’t afford fuel.
You might be interested to hear that due to our persistent agitation and discussions with the required parties, just four filling stations were permitted to operate in the Ipokia Local Government. A LGA with more than 700,000 residents is this one.
“To obtain fuel for their separate enterprises, farm equipment, clinics/hospitals, and daily residential usage, the majority of the population must travel up to 20 kilometres. For nearly five years and counting, this had caused us excessive hardship, the organization claimed.
The locals bemoaned their lack of all social amenities, claiming that business operations had collapsed because most artisans and traders had left their towns to carry on their daily operations elsewhere because “there is no power supply and yet again, they couldn’t get fuel for their daily operations.”
In their request, they stated: “The good people of Ipokia Local Government do solemnly plead with you to lift this suspension since the subsidy had been relinquished.”
