Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has said the admission by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) that reopening the Port Harcourt Refinery is a waste of scarce resources validates his long-standing position that Nigeria’s refineries should be privatised.
Atiku made the assertion in a statement posted on his Facebook page on Sunday, reacting to reports that the refinery had gulped about $1.5 billion without producing petrol.
According to him, the Bola Tinubu administration’s acknowledgment marks a belated acceptance of an economic reality he had consistently highlighted over the years — that continued public funding of moribund refineries is economically indefensible.
“It is instructive that the administration has finally come to terms with an inevitable truth: pouring public funds into moribund refineries makes no economic sense,” Atiku said. “Paying billions of naira in salaries to facilities that do not produce a single litre of petrol does not serve the national interest,” he added.
The former vice president recalled that he had repeatedly advocated privatisation of the refineries but was vilified and accused of planning to sell public assets to cronies.
“Today, the facts have caught up with the rhetoric,” he said, adding that decades of so-called turnaround maintenance had consumed billions of dollars with little or nothing to show for it.
Atiku argued that the failure of the refineries exposed deep structural problems, including gaps in technical capacity, weak financial discipline and poor management. He further criticised recent efforts to revive the refineries, describing them as politically motivated rather than driven by sound economic reasoning.
“The latest push to ‘revive’ these refineries was propelled by political pressure, not economic sense. Politics must never substitute for sound, transformative policy,” he said.
Atiku also advised against pursuing any new refinery agreements, including partnerships with foreign firms, warning that such arrangements would merely replicate failed models of the past.
According to him, Nigeria would have been better served by selling the refineries before embarking on costly rehabilitation projects, thereby avoiding rising debt levels and the continued depreciation of assets he described as liabilities.
He concluded that decisive privatisation remains the most viable option for ending decades of waste and inefficiency in the country’s refining sector.
Chuks Okocha
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