Surviving and thriving in the current and future Nigerian petroleum products market

Currently, the petroleum products market is totally regulated. The operations and pricing mechanism must be conducted under prevailing Government rules and regulations. Indeed, in Nigeria today, no industry is as regulated as the Oil Industry (downstream emphasised) - which constitute the totality of petroleum products market. This situation has arisen as a result of the seeming classification of the oil industry as being strategic. Due to the regulations of the market, it can no longer adapt to the changing economic trend of liberalization and interplay of market forces, even when under serious pressure to yield to the dynamics of free market enterprise. As a result of the resistance to change, the market becomes stressed and over-burdened by the shackles of regulation which leads to a breakdown of the system and the impact becomes noticeable almost immediately. Needless to emphasize that, for the petroleum products market to survive and thrive, a cursory look at what obtains currently would afford us the opportunity to access the strength and weaknesses of such system, with a view to ascertaining the survival strategy to be applied for sustainable growth. In addition, a serious examination of the roles being played by the key operators in the petroleum products market otherwise called down stream operators (refineries, pipelines and marketers) is imperative. Since it requires the co-operation of the operators to achieve synergy in the market, any bottleneck arising from any of the sub-sectors has the capacity to disrupt the system