By Deogratias Mmana:
The country does not have fuel in its strategic reserves, a development that has culminated in the country leading a hand-to-mouth life, Malawi News has established.
The capital Lilongwe has, for instance, been hit hard for the past few weeks, as pumps at most filling stations have been dry.
At times, a few stations would have petrol but without diesel and other times the opposite was true.
This has also been the case in Blantyre, although the situation stabilised Friday, as at least three filling stations had petrol and diesel in Blantyre Central Business District.
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When we visited some fuel reservoirs, workers told us that there has been no fuel for some time.
Malawi Energy Regulatory Authority (Mera) spokesperson Fitina Khonje confirmed Friday that the fuel reserves have no fuel.
She said if the strategic reserves had fuel, pump stations would have been supplied with the commodity.
“Forex access challenges have affected the flow of supplies. Stock levels are still not healthy. Authorities are working on addressing this,” Khonje said Friday.
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Recently, Mera Chief Executive Officer Henry Kachaje told Parliament that the reserves and the availability of petrol and diesel were disrupted several times and that the stocks were depleted.
“We would like to appraise the public that the availability of products, especially diesel and petrol, has been disrupted a number of times, not only this year but last year [as well]. It is good to give background. We are where we are because we depleted our strategic reserves in December of 2021 and it has become difficult for us to restock them,” Kachaje said.
He said the strategic reserves were depleted because international prices of petroleum products rocketed.
Kachaje said the country used to require an average of about $300 million worth of products but when prices on the international market rose, the country came to a level that needed almost $600 million despite that the country’s export base did not double.
“And this put a lot of strain on our major importers because they could not readily access dollars and, eventually, we relied on whatever we had in our strategic reserves,” Kachaje said.
He, however, said Mera had put measures that would enable Nocma to focus on restocking the strategic reserves while putting pressure on private importers to fill the gap of bringing enough products into the country.
National Oil Company of Malawi (Nocma) Director of Operations Micklas Reuben told the press that quantities of the commodity being brought into the country are not enough.
“There is a problem of forex shortage. There are also delays in payment of invoices for suppliers and in getting letters of credit confirmed. All these impact the flow of the product. As such, we are not importing to the expected levels,” Reuben is quoted as saying.
He added that monthly consumption of fuel is around 51 million litres but the country is importing around 40.8 million litres.
Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) Director of Public Relations Mark Lungu said the central bank is doing all it can to ensure that Nocma and Petroleum Importers Limited are assisted through commercial banks.
Lungu said the country does not have abundant supply of forex.
In February 2022, Nocma said it had plans to double its strategic fuel reserves storage capacity from 60 million litres to 90 million litres following increased appetite for fuel, from one million litres per day to 1.7 million per day.
Nocma said the storage expansion was in alignment with the Southern African Development Community protocol on fuel storage for landlocked countries.
According to Nocma, the country has 60 million litres of fuel reserves for both diesel and petrol in all the three reserves in the country.
Thus Blantyre depot has a storage capacity of 18 million litres of diesel and seven million litres of petrol, just like Lilongwe depot, while Mzuzu has a capacity of 10 million litres for both diesel and petrol.
