Government to track fuel trucks to curb diversion

Plans are underway to plant tracking devices on fuel trucks in Nigeria following the discovery that nearly a third of the country’s fuel supply is being diverted and smuggled to neighboring countries, acording to Ibe Kachikwu, Nigeria’s state minister for petroleum resources.

Presently, he said none of the fuel trucks is being tracked and to ensure that the diversion is curtailed, he said to use manpower alone may require engaging the entire Nigerian Army but with tracking devices, it may be easier to follow the trucks from when they lift fuel at the depot to when and where they are offloaded.

Experts are however pessimistic on the project becoming successful without some forms of sanctions.

“They’ve done this before,” Dolapo Oni, the Lagos-based head of energy research at Ecobank Transnational Inc. said, referring to Project Aquila, which put trackers on gasoline trucks.“Drivers tampered with them. It sounds like an interesting idea, but it’s difficult to implement unless you have a sanction for all those operating without a tracker.”