The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Malam Mele Kyari has come out to say that the country will no longer pay subsidy on petrol with the ongoing worldwide oil price decline.

Malam Mele revealed this in a statement signed by NNPC spokesman, Dr. Kennie Obateru, in Abuja on Monday.

According to him, NNPC will focus on playing in the marketplace and will be there for Nigeria to sustain the security of supply at market price.

He added that he believes COVID-19 will eventually subside and nation will return to how things were in the past.

His words, “There is no subsidy and it is zero forever, going forward there will be no resort to either subsidy or under recovery of any nature.

“NNPC will play in the marketplace, it will just be another marketer in the space. But we will be there for the country to sustain security of supply at market price.”

“The key issue in crude oil business is market fundamentals of demand/supply. I believe COVID-19 will subside and countries will come back to life.

“I don’t see oil price going below the 20 dollars we saw last week. I’m certain, all things being equal, oil price will bounce back.”

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Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.