Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has urged the Nigerian government to privatise the country’s refineries, following the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited’s (NNPC) admission that reopening the Port Harcourt Refinery is a waste of scarce resources.
Atiku made the remarks in a statement posted on his Facebook page on Sunday, reacting to reports that the refinery had consumed about $1.5 billion without producing any petrol.
He said the Tinubu administration’s acknowledgment confirms a long-standing economic reality he has consistently highlighted: 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.
“Paying billions of naira in salaries to facilities that do not produce a single litre of petrol does not serve the national interest, ” he said.
He recalled advocating for privatisation over the years but being accused of seeking to sell public assets to cronies.
“Today, the facts have caught up with the rhetoric,” he added, noting that decades of so-called turnaround maintenance had consumed billions with little or no results.
Atiku further blamed the failures on structural issues such as technical gaps, weak financial discipline, and poor management.
He also warned against new refinery agreements, including partnerships with foreign firms, arguing that they would only replicate previous failures.
“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, stressing that decisive privatisation remains the most viable option to end decades of waste and inefficiency in Nigeria’s refining sector.
