Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has said recent admissions by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) over the Port Harcourt Refinery have vindicated his long-held stance 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 about $1.5 billion had been spent on rehabilitating the Port Harcourt Refinery without the facility producing petrol.
He said the Bola Tinubu administration’s acknowledgement that reopening the refinery was a waste of scarce resources amounted to 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 the privatisation of Nigeria’s refineries but was often vilified and accused of attempting to sell public assets to cronies.
“Today, the facts have caught up with the rhetoric,” he said, noting that decades of so-called turnaround maintenance had consumed billions of dollars with little or nothing to show for it.
Atiku argued that the persistent failure of the refineries exposed deep structural deficiencies, including gaps in technical capacity, weak financial discipline and poor management. He also criticised recent attempts to revive the facilities, describing them as politically driven rather than guided 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.
He further cautioned against pursuing new refinery agreements, including partnerships with foreign firms, warning that such arrangements could replicate the 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.
Atiku concluded that decisive privatisation remains the most viable option for ending decades of waste and inefficiency in the country’s refining sector.
