With over $25 billion spent from past revamps that produced almost zero results, the Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA) has urged the Federal Government to privatise or concession the nation’s refineries over endless turnaround maintenance (TAM).

The call came following the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) and Chinese firms for the “restart, completion and expansion” of the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries.
Director-General/Chief Executive, NECA, Adewale-Smatt Oyerinde, in a statement yesterday, noted that while the nation desperately needed functional refineries, the body could not ignore the decade-long pattern of billion-dollar rehabilitation contracts that have delivered zero sustained refining output.

According to him, it will be unpatriotic to endorse another opaque deal while questions on past spending remain unanswered.

Giving instances, he said between 2010 and 2023, the country has expended over N11 trillion – approximately $25 billion – on refinery rehabilitation projects, maintenance, and turnaround programmes, yet the state-owned refineries remain significantly unreliable and non-functional.

Lamenting that the gamble of over $1.5 billion on the Port-Harcourt refinery in March 2021 was still fresh in the minds of Nigerians, he said, despite purported claims of 90 per cent readiness by 2026, the facility has not been recorded to produce sufficient barrels of refined product on a sustainable basis.

According to him, since the 1990s, Port Harcourt Refinery has endured multiple “rehabilitation cycles” – 2000-2010, 2012-2015, 2016-2021 – each involving billions expended with facilities that continued to deteriorate.

While he urged the NNPCL to provide Nigerians with sufficient informational explanation on the status of past spending and audits carried out on the refineries, he queried how the MoU would guarantee Nigerian man-hours, procurement, and technology transfer beyond press statements.

Oyerinde urged the urgent fixing of the “governance model” before fixing the pipes.

Noting that Nigeria cannot industrialise on imported fuel, he said it also cannot develop by burning approximately $25 billion on refineries that don’t work.

MEANWHILE, a civil society organisation has supported the MoU between the NNPCL and two Chinese firms, Sanjiang Chemical Company Limited and Xinganchen (Fuzhou) Industrial Park Operation and Management Co. Ltd, for the rehabilitation, restart, and expansion of the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries.

The CSO known as Nigeria Citizens Watch for Good Governance said if faithfully executed, the deal will fundamentally restructure Nigeria’s downstream petroleum sector, strengthen energy security, create mass employment, and stop the recurrent haemorrhage of scarce foreign exchange on fuel importation.

The group, in a statement issued by its chairman, Collins Eshiofeh, said the pact is arguably the most consequential refinery intervention since the country’s return to democratic governance.