Nassarawa State Governor, Abdullahi Sule has expressed his dissatisfaction with the amount of money spent by the past administration of President Muhammadu Buhari on reviving Nigeria’s refineries.
According to Sule, Buhar’s regime spent more than $19 billion on trying to fix local refinery projects, which was more than what Dangote spent on building the largest oil refinery in Africa.
Nigeria has refineries in Kaduna, Port Harcourt, and Warri, but none of them were operational.
The above led to the creation of the Dangote Refinery, which was seen by industry experts as the beginning of the privatization of the oil sector, reports held.
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The Dangote Refinery launched its building plans in 2017 and was commissioned in May 2023, a few days before the end of Buhari’s administration.
Nigeria’s refineries have been struggling to function properly due to the payments of subsidies, according to the Governor.
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He insisted that the government has not done a good job in maintaining the refineries, which have cost more than $19 billion in the past eight years.
In comparison, he stated that Dangote’s newly built refinery was one and a half times the size of Nigeria’s three refineries combined, with a production capacity of six hundred and fifty thousand barrels per day.
Governor Sule also highlighted the complex nature of maintaining refineries, which consist of five or six different components including water, crude, and diesel.
He said:
“Look at how much the President Buhari administration spent on fixing the refineries. In the eight years, he spent more money than the $19 billion that Dangote spent in building a refinery” Sule said to Channels Television on Thursday, June 8.
“That is one and a half times the size of our three refineries combined.”
The Governor believed that the payments of subsidy made Nigeria’s refineries non-functional.
He said:
“From the government side, I think we didn’t do a good job. When the (former) President (Buhari) came in in 2015, prices of crude oil dropped by less than 30 dollars. At that time, there was zero subsidy.
“Our three refineries in Nigeria today have a total of 450,000 barrels per day, Dangote is 650,000. He spent $19 billion on building it. We spent, not building a new one, but in maintaining these refineries; more than $19 billion in eight years, yet they have not been maintained.
“The moment the government says we are going to spend $2 billion this year on the refinery. The $2 billion is spent and as far as the President is concerned, they have given $2 billion.
“Now when it goes to the three refineries that we have in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna. Then they say, you now take $700 million, you now take $800 million – by the time they take that, it goes to fix maybe only one component out of the four components that are all bad.
“So, zero work is done. These are the true realities of what is happening, and that is why none of the refineries is working. These are truly the problem, we have not really managed this thing well.”
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The Governor said that the ideal thing the past administration would have been to allocate the funds to one of the refining states to fix it before allocating the remainder to the other states.
