By Amayindi Yakubu
It is not my culture to be too direct when writing about burning issues. Yet I find it not flabbergasting, assuming I sound and appear overly direct with this thought. It is not news anymore that our refineries have consumed billions of naira without dispensing the requisite barrels of crude the nation has relied on for its national and economic development for decades now.
Let me not mince words and thoughts; it has become a perpetual tale of sadness and gloom over the years to see sensational headlines in national dailies portraying the wastage of a large sum of money invested with the intention to revamp our dilapidated refineries. Without withholding any sense of hesitation, if there is any moment we need to sit down and ask ourselves hard questions, it should be now.
Nigeria is blessed with vast oil reserves. Yet for decades, its state-owned refineries have lurched from one rehabilitation to another—each promising revival but stubbornly failing to meet expectations. Take the Port Harcourt refineries for example. The old facility began in 1965, and a second unit followed in 1989, giving a combined design capacity of some 210,000 barrels per day.
The Buhari-led government in 2021 earmarked $1.5 billion to restore the complex. The plan was bold—bring one unit back at 60,000 bpd by 2023, with full restoration by 2025. But months later became years, as the facility continued to go offline again. Late in May 2025, it was closed for maintenance—half a billion dollars injected, yet it remains idle. The saddening part of the story is that it has never operated at more than 40 per cent capacity.
Warri refinery, built in 1978 with a capacity of 125,000 bpd, was revived in December 2024 after an $897 million overhaul. At first, it trickled out diesel and kerosene but no petrol. Within weeks, a heater fault forced a shutdown. By January 2025, operations had halted completely without meaningful production.
The event with Kaduna refinery is not different from that of Port Harcourt and Warri. Kaduna refinery, dating from 1980, was supposed to benefit from a roughly $740 million revamp. By mid‑2025, it still lay dormant, with no clear accounting of disbursed funds and no product flowing through the large pipes.
Combined rehabilitation under all administrations over decades has neared $3 billion for these three refineries alone, yet nothing meaningful has changed. Beyond the fact that this is appalling, for fairness, we have not been true to ourselves for long.
It’s not just the refineries that falter—it’s the mysteries that surround them that are revelatory. Between 2020 and 2023, these facilities built up debts running into trillions of naira, as NNPCL kept sinking money into what remained idle. By the end of 2023, Port Harcourt owed nearly N2 trillion, Kaduna N1.36 trillion, and Warri N1.17 trillion—yet still produced nothing. In 2021 and 2022 alone, repairs and maintenance costs topped N214 billion while revival tarries.
Dangote alone built a 650,000-bpd modern refinery with about $20 billion—and it works. One will think that the billionaire was mocking when he recently asserted that our three combined state-run refineries might never work, even though $18 billion has been spent so far. The story here isn’t just about broken pipes or rusted boilers. It’s about a repeated pattern. The need for rethinking and strategising remains the only best alternative, or we allow our resources to continue slipping into ruins.
“Sale is not out of the question.” A thrill of joy runs through my mind when the current Group Chief Executive Officer of NNPCL, Bayo Ojulari, sees from a clearer lens when he answers the question regarding the probability of selling the refineries.
Maybe, had it not been for the President Musa Ya’adua-led government aborting Dangote’s acquisition of our state-owned refineries after they were sold by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, we might have averted the current dilemma we are in.
While many well-meaning Nigerian patriots advise that we turn to privatisation of our refinery plants, which is not a bad idea in essence, because of the trajectory. We must bow to the mindset that we cannot properly handle our business as a collective nation without resorting to the private sector. A thought pattern that reminds us that developing and managing government resources is a gain not for those in Aso Rock but for the nation at large will help us break from the stronghold of believing that government properties are not ours. Let me ask this humbly, in its true state, who is the government?
Bringing a nation like Singapore into illustration. The example that the set shows is that investment into public service is investing in nation-building. Contemplating why the various government functionaries have not been able to live up to the true creed of their existence points to one decisive factor called the ‘people’.
Now Nigeria stands at a crossroads: keep pouring money into failing assets or embrace accountability, transparency, and partnerships that might finally birth refineries that work. The dream in the first place was simple—turn crude into petrol at home, save foreign exchange, and tame fuel prices.
Successful systems do not use Excel on their own; there are usually people steering the affairs of those initiatives. When we look at the failure of our state-owned refineries, we have to fully take responsibility by accepting that we might have handed our nation’s wealth into the wrong hands all this while. It is a painful truth that we cannot deny but only shy away from.
