First, on resumption in August, we had a very major problem on our hands. Because subsidies, 500 billion, close to 600 billion, hadn’t been paid over a one year period, and so the majors, everybody who was importing… had began to very quietly reduce the levels of importation that they had and although I struggled very hard and got the Assembly approval and the President’s approval to eventually pay a good portion of that subsidy somewhere in November, by then it was too late.

Too late because although they got the money, they didn’t have access to foreign exchange so the critical reason, main critical reason why you have this supply gap today is that although NNPC has its own 445,000 barrels allocation of crude and is meeting its own, who is meant to meet 50% of your delivery and is more than meeting but is indeed exceeding that, the individuals who should provide the balance of the 40% component are not bringing in any product.

And so, we’ve had to be very creative over the last 4, 5 months, until we basically ran out of options and the sort of creativity that we put in the space was forward buying, forward purchase, forward crude allocations, and also, just to bring in more product, because we saw NNPC transit from a 45% provider to suddenly 80%, and about this month really to 100% provider of petroleum products in Nigeria.

That was not sustainable, we didn’t have the capacity, we didn’t have the funding, we didn’t have access to the products, we didn’t have the foreign exchange. So in very many ways, it’s surprising that we’ve even been able to survive this long.

So the key element has been, how do we find foreign exchange for those who eagerly want to participate in the stream, who have been doing this traditionally, to get into the space, buy their products, come in, distribute. That’s something we’ve had to work on.