The introduction of OGAS 3 – kilogramme cooking stove for low income earners by Oando Marketing Plc. has the potential of making Nigeria save about N5billion annually.

This was the position of the firm’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Yomi Awobokun while presenting a lead paper during an OANDO/ACCESS Africa-Agriculture, Climate Change and Entrepreneurship Support Services Summit in Abuja, recently.

Awobukun remarked that the country spends about N5bn on its national afforestation programme targeted at desertification which could be avoided.

According to him, “If the government at all levels adopt the use of LPG as the preferred cooking fuel and avail the people, especially those in the rural Nigeria, an affordable cooking stove like the OGAS 3-kg stove, we will be making tremendous saving that can be committed to other important areas of our national life.”

Also Mr Jerome Okolo, the operations director of Access Africa who cited statistics from relevant national and global bodies said the nation lost 55.7 per cent of its primary forest between 2000-2005.

He said with the country also losing 351,000 hectares of land mass to desert encroaching going by statistics, the rationale behind the proposal for a switch from firewood to LPG was also to save the country from draught.

According to him the N760bn spent annually on kerosene by the federal government was equivalent to 16 per cent of the nation’s annual capital budget and added that Nigeria requires only an estimated 20million cylinders to switch from kerosene to LPG thereby saving the government over N760 billion annually.

Oando’s target is to switch 5 million homes from the use of dirty cooking fuels like kerosene and firewood to a more cleaner, safer, convenient environmentally friendly and affordable cooking fuel like LPG through its OGAS 3kg initiative which will address the menace of deforestation and other associated problems of dirty fuels.