The Federal Government says over 90 per cent of cooking gas cylinders in the country are expired or substandard. The disclosure was made on Tuesday by the Programme Manager, National LPG Expansion Implementation Plan (Office of the Vice-President), Dayo Adeshina, at the just concluded 7th Annual LPG conference and exhibition, held in Lagos.
According to him most cylinders are over 30 years old and are still being used by Nigerians for the purchase of cooking gas despite the attendant risk. He called on Nigerians to carryout regular integrity checks on their cylinders.
“Things need to change in the industry. Today, everybody wants a cylinder but in most developed countries where LPG plays active role, marketers are rightly the sellers of cylinders.
This is because from when it is manufactured, it passes through proliferation after five years, with Standard of Organization, SON, running its test and certification. All of these processes take 10years. After 15 years, the cylinders should be withdrawn from the market.
But today how many of us can attest for manufacturing date of the cylinders we have in our homes? There are cylinders that have been with us for 30 years and have not been tested or certified. Our investigation has shown that over 90 percent of Nigerians are using expired cylinders”
He also called for the establishment of Cylinder plants in Nigeria.
“We need to invest in cylinders and proudly one of the investors would have its cylinder operating plants opened in January. We also need to have cylinder re-proliferation plants.
We need to take care of the regulatory and fiscal policy. Enforcement needs to play a big role. There is going to be a shakeup of regulation because the government has seen that if we ever have a repeat of the incident we had in Nnewi, it is dead on arrival. Industry would not be able to come out of such incident.
We have a 5 year plan for cylinder where for the next three years you can still import and hoping that we are going to encourage investors to have manufacturing plants where it will be 50 percent importation and 50 percent local production, and by the fifth year, we are going to have 100 percent local production.
So the government is going to throw up a whole lot of incentives to help investors achieve the desired goal and growth. In doing all of these, we are going to look for alternatives in as much as cooking is the main drive; my mandate is to shift 4 million Nigerians to gas within the next two years. Personally I have set it high and that is why the investment aspect of raising funding is significant for this program.”
