From January to September 2021, the cost of Premium Motor Spirit, also known as petrol, imported into Nigeria increased by 55.56 percent.

This is a rise to N2.52tn from the N1.62tn spent in the same period of 2020.

This development is coming amid the plan to remove subsidies from petrol by February 2022. 

Data obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that the import bill for the first nine months of this year is 47.37 percent and 25.37 percent higher than what the country spent on PMS imports in the whole of 2019 and 2020 respectively.

Also, the country spent N2.01tn on petrol imports in 2020, compared to N1.71tn in the previous year.

Breakdown Analysis

According to the NBS data, petrol imports gobbled up N1.05tn in the third quarter of this year, up from N782.46bn in Q2 and N687.74bn in Q1.

The data also showed that petrol topped the list of products imported into the country in Q3, accounting for 12.52 per cent of the total amount spent on imported products, up from 11.26 per cent in the previous quarter.

Recall that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation put the amount spent on subsidizing petrol from January to October 2021 at N1.03tn.