Lilongwe, May 6: Minister of Information and Digitalisation, Moses Kunkuyu has assured Malawians that fuel situation, particularly petrol, will be normalised from next week.
Speaking during a Government Faces the Press briefing in Lilongwe on Friday, Kunkuyu said as of Friday 494,000 litres of fuel have been received and distributed to the filling stations.
“Volumes that have been loaded as of today and expected to arrive Saturday and Sunday from Beira amount to 1,300,000 litres . From Dar les Salam 5,500,000 litres are expected to arrive from Monday next week and this is under Petroleum Importers Limited (PIL).
“Under National Oil Company of Malawi (NOCMA) 760,000,000 litres have already made their way to the Songwe border. There is loading at Beira and 1,900,000 litres are expected to arrive on Monday next week. Loading from Dar-Salam expected to arrive in the country next week is a total of 21 million litres,”Kunkuyu said.
He said, the situation will be retaining to normal around Wednesday next week although shortage of forex remains the challenge.
“Lately the country has been operating on hand to mouth. The reserves for the past months were running on around 20 percent of the volume until we got to a point where we depleted all the reserves. And also issues of letters of credits were normally taking around 48 hours to process for the suppliers to give us the commodity. Then we saw a shift to where it will take about two weeks and in some cases it takes a month to process a letter of credit,” he added.
He further said, the government is trying all its best to make the situation normalise as the good numbers of litres have started coming and hopefully by next week the country will have close to 30 million litres which is almost half of the reserves the country have.
