Cooking gas scarcity hits Maiduguri as outlets close

Residents of Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, are facing an acute shortage of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), commonly known as cooking gas. This comes as several retail stations across the metropolitan area unexpectedly shut down operations over an abrupt lack of product supply.

The widespread disruption has left dozens of major outlets locked for days, triggering panic buying and forcing families to traverse long distances across the city in desperate attempts to refill domestic gas cylinders.

The crisis became starkly visible on Sunday afternoon when local commercial transport operators, hired by households to replenish empty cylinders, reported returning empty-handed after visiting multiple dispensing stations. Major retail outlets serving large swaths of the city’s population, including A.A. Rano, Zenigid Gas Station, Hesan Gas Station, Machar Gas Station, and Maidoki Gas Station, remained out of stock, with their gates locked to the public.

With almost all primary distribution outlets forced offline, Matrix Energy Limited stood out as the single operating facility dispensing cooking gas in Maiduguri on Sunday. Attendants at shuttered competitor outlets were reportedly directing desperate customers toward the Matrix Energy plant, generating unusual congestion and heavy queues as consumers rushed to purchase domestic fuel before supplies ran dry.

The localised supply failure reflects broader national challenges facing Nigeria’s downstream energy sector. Energy analysts point out that despite the nation’s vast natural gas reserves, domestic LPG distribution remains vulnerable to severe logistical bottlenecks, supply chain mismatches between local processing facilities, depot clearance delays, and distribution imbalances where significant volumes are channelled toward export markets rather than meeting domestic demand.

The sudden outage has sparked deep anxiety among Maiduguri households that rely almost exclusively on cooking gas for daily meal preparation. Local residents express fear that if the scarcity persists over the coming days, families will be forced to turn to far costlier or less convenient domestic alternatives, such as kerosene, charcoal, or traditional firewood. Community leaders warn that shifting back to biomass fuels not only increases living costs for struggling families but also poses environmental risks and health hazards associated with indoor smoke.

With cooking gas shortages hitting Maiduguri, it is almost certain that the rest of Borno State will be suffering from similar shortages, thus compounding the living condition problems of a people already caught in a 15-year battle with the Boko Haram extremist group. For communities across the state, these intersecting infrastructure failures threaten to push already vulnerable populations deeper into economic and humanitarian strain.

As of Sunday evening, neither local petroleum marketing associations nor regulatory agencies had issued an official statement clarifying the exact cause of the supply outage or providing a timeline for when bulk deliveries will resume.

Residents are appealing to state authorities, regulatory bodies, and major gas distributors to intervene urgently to restore bulk supplies, clear distribution bottlenecks, and bring immediate relief to the state capital.

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