“This should help every Nigerian save about two-thirds of their transport cost”
The Federal Government has announced that it will deploy 11,500 gas-powered buses across the country from next week.
Also, one million Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) vehicles will ply Nigerian roads by 2027, the government said.
Mr Toyin Subaru, the Special Assistant to the President on Special Duties and Domestic Affairs, said on Sunday that the rollout of CNG buses will reduce CNG price to N230 per kg. and also help to reduce the transport cost of Nigerians by more than half.
Subaru, who spoke at the stakeholders’ meeting held at the Bank of Industry headquarters in Abuja, said the gas needed to operate the vehicles would not be imported as it is available in abundance locally.
The partnership meeting was aimed at formalizing with the Nigerian Institute of Transport Technology, FEMADEC group, among others to facilitate sustainable transportation in Nigeria.
He said: “Now, with this CNG plan, we don’t even have to import what we need to operate our vehicles. It is called CNG and we have the gas here in Nigeria. So, the idea is just to take the gas to distribute it across Nigeria via different truck stations.
“Most gas is not CNG enabled yet and what we are doing is to help them convert their cars so you can use petrol and CNG at the same time.
“We are going to develop an app that will enable you locate where a CNG station is located. We should be able to buy gas for our cars at N230 per KG as against the cost of petrol which is N680 per litre. This should help every Nigerian save about two-thirds of their transport cost.”
The Programme Director of the Presidential CNG Initiative, Mr Micheal Oluwagbemi, said the initiative will cut down transport cost and save for the country about $20 billion in the next 10 years.
According to Oluwagbemi, the project will create at least 50,000 jobs and that the partnership meeting will address the shortage of workshops as 1000 functional workshop will be set up across the country.
“Our goal in the presidential CNG initiative, as stated by the President in his October 1st speech is to make 55,000 conversion kits immediately available to the Nigerian public so that we can begin to jumpstart the CNG revolution.
“The palliative programme as described by the president will last until March 31, 2024. So, technically speaking, we are expected to roll out 55,000 within that time frame.
“Given of course naturally, we are quite a bit constrained when it comes to the number of workshops and there’s a reason why we are here today. We only have seven functional workshops in the country. In our estimate, we need about 1000 to be able to achieve our goal.
“Today, we are rolling out our initial partnership because there will be more partners, and there wipll be more investors in the sub-sector with four, one of them being a national Nigerian Institute of Transport Technology to roll out an additional seven workshops in the next 14 days.
“We believe they can do more but what we will have to do is to double what they have in 14 days and from there we can start doubling after 14 days. In that way we can be able to get closer to our goal of having workshops everywhere there is CNG in Nigeria so that we can convert those 55, 000 vehicles.
“We have a goal, one million vehicles by the year 2027, and that allows Nigeria to save about $20bn in ten years and also allows us to manage transport inflation,”
the Programme Director said.
Oluwagbemi added: “You will have five people working there in two days. So, if we have 1,000 workshops, we are talking about 5,000 jobs for technicians, including the cost of the labour and manpower that will go into the increased supply of CNG, processing stations, model stations, and refueling stations that will not run on this ecosystem.
“So, the number of jobs that will be rolled out under this programme, even under the pilot phase in six months is about 50,000 jobs; 50,000 jobs that never existed before that will be supported by this programme.”
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