The President of the Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has cast serious doubt on the possibility of Nigeria’s state-owned refineries—located in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna—ever functioning effectively again, despite consuming over $18 billion in public funds.....KINDLY READ THE FULL STORY HERE▶

Speaking on Thursday while hosting members of the Global CEO Africa group from the Lagos Business School at the Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Lekki, Lagos, Dangote said the government-owned refineries under the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) had failed to deliver results despite decades of investments.

He revealed that his 650,000-barrel-per-day Dangote Refinery has already dedicated more than 50% of its output to producing Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), a stark contrast to the meagre 22% once achieved by the NNPC-operated refineries.

Recalling past efforts to privatise the refineries, Dangote said he and his team purchased the facilities in January 2007 during President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, but were forced to relinquish ownership a few months later when President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua took office.

He explained, “We acquired the refineries in January 2007, but had to return them because a change of government occurred. The NNPC managing director at the time told President Yar’Adua that the refineries would work and claimed Obasanjo handed them over to us as a parting gift. Today, those same refineries have swallowed around $18 billion and are still non-functional. Honestly, I doubt very much if they will ever work.”

Dangote likened the federal government’s repeated attempts at turnaround maintenance (TAM) of the obsolete facilities to trying to modernise a 40-year-old car using today’s technology.

“You can change the engine, but the old body won’t handle the new system. That’s the situation with these refineries,” he noted.

His remarks echoed the long-standing criticisms of former President Obasanjo, who has consistently warned that the NNPC was incapable of managing the refineries. Obasanjo revealed that even international oil companies such as Shell declined his request to take over the assets, citing their lack of commercial viability.

According to Obasanjo, Aliko Dangote and other private investors had offered $750 million to acquire the refineries, but the deal was reversed under Yar’Adua. “I told my successor, ‘NNPC cannot do it.’ And I said if you wait too long, even scrap dealers won’t pay $200 million for them,” Obasanjo stated.

The former president accused the NNPC of knowingly mismanaging the refineries to sustain entrenched corruption, insisting, “In any civilised country, the people responsible would be in jail.”

Reinforcing his stance in January 2025, Obasanjo added, “I was told over $2 billion has been wasted on these refineries since we left office, and they still won’t work. If Shell refused to take them, and Dangote is now building from scratch, what does that tell you?”

Obasanjo capped his criticism with a Yoruba proverb: “When a man harvests 100 heaps of yam, but claims he planted 200, he must also harvest 100 lies.”

Public frustration has mounted following the recent re-shutdown of the 60,000 barrels-per-day Port Harcourt refinery—barely six months after the NNPC declared it operational in late 2024. The Warri refinery similarly ceased operations a month after the former Group Chief Executive Officer of NNPC, Mele Kyari, commissioned it.

In response, calls for the full privatisation of the refineries have intensified. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) labelled them economic liabilities and urged the federal government to sell them off. Independent refiners also advised that the ageing refineries be scrapped, with proceeds redirected toward building modular refineries.

Despite years of investments, the refineries remain unproductive. In 2021, the federal government approved $1.4 billion for the Port Harcourt refinery’s rehabilitation, while allocating $897 million and $586 million for the Warri and Kaduna refineries, respectively.

Records show that ₦100 billion was spent on refinery rehabilitation in 2021 alone, with ₦8.33 billion disbursed monthly. Between 2013 and 2017, a total of $396.33 million was spent on turnaround maintenance—yet there has been no meaningful output.

As of the time of filing this report, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited could not be reached for comment. The company has no acting spokesperson, and calls and messages to listed contacts on its official website went unanswered.