After gulping $1.5bn, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited has now admitted that reopening the Port Harcourt Refinery is a waste of scarce resources. This belated admission validates my long-held position that Nigeria’s refineries should be privatised.
It is instructive that the Tinubu administration has finally come to terms with an inevitable truth: pouring public funds into moribund refineries is economically indefensible. Paying billions in salaries to facilities that produce not a single litre of petrol does not serve the national interest.
For years, I advanced this patriotic position and was vilified and accused of plotting to sell public assets to “friends.”
Today, the facts have caught up with the rhetoric. Decades of so-called turnaround maintenance have swallowed billions of dollars with nothing to show for it, exposing deep deficits in capacity, technical know-how, and financial discipline.
The latest push to “revive” these refineries was driven by political pressure, not economic sense. Politics must never substitute for sound, transformative policy.
Accordingly, any proposed refinery deal, including with foreign partners, should be discontinued, as it merely repeats failed models.
Nigeria would have been better served by selling the refineries pre-rehabilitation to avoid ballooning debt and the steady depreciation of what have effectively become liabilities. -AA
