Let’s stop pretending: Nigeria behaves like a country allergic to seriousness. And nowhere is this unseriousness more boldly displayed than in its tragic, never-ending refinery circus.
When Bayo Ojulari was appointed Group Chief Executive (GCEO) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), many Nigerians—myself included—thought an outsider with real industry credentials might finally break the NNPC culture of waste and political capture.
Two years down the road, what do we have? The same old script, the same tired excuses, and the same dead refineries gulping billions and producing absolutely nothing.
Ojulari has blended so seamlessly into the old NNPC way of doing things that you would think he spent his entire career there. No radical ideas. No shift in culture. No operational aggression. Just recycled talking points, familiar bureaucratic lethargy, and a dangerous willingness to become yet another puppet of the Presidency’s petroleum politics.
Then came the bold claim in Abu Dhabi: Nigeria will soon hit 2 million barrels per day, and even 3 million by 2030. But this is precisely the kind of grandstanding that keeps Nigeria trapped. Our upstream sector has never been the problem.
If we had real investment capital, Nigeria could hit 3 million bpd in under two years. So let’s cut the noise. Production targets don’t fix refineries. All they do is distract from Nigeria’s real oil-sector funeral ground: the downstream.
And this is where Ojulari and his team will be judged—if not crucified.
Two years after Bayo Ojulari took over NNPCL, the refineries remain cold, silent monuments to Nigerian government’s legendary incompetence and elite fraud. With talk of selling them and no crude oil available to run them, Nigerians have every right to ask: Is the NNPCL truly sincere with feigned plans to bring them back to life?
Two years in office and not a single one of Nigeria’s refineries has blinked back to life. Not even a cough. Yet the government now wants Nigerians to believe that selling the plants will magically solve decades of incompetence, corruption, and sabotage. We’ve heard it all before.
Special Adviser on Energy, Olu Verheijen, floated the idea of selling the refineries or finding “technical equity partners.” Ojulari echoed the same line, talking about searching for firms that can “run the refineries to international standards.”
Here is the truth no one at NNPCL wants to say publicly: There is no crude oil to give these refineries. Zero. Not a drop.
Forget the technical issues. Forget the EPC contracting drama. Forget even the pipelines. Those challenges can be fixed. But when the refineries have no guaranteed crude feedstock because Nigeria’s entitlements were mortgaged under Buhari and Kyari in those reckless crude-for-cash arrangements, what exactly are we “rehabilitating”?
This is why the talk of selling refineries is laughable. What investor wants to buy a refinery that cannot be supplied crude? What operator wants to manage a plant that is technologically obsolete, structurally decayed, and strategically trapped in a market now dominated by Dangote, who is already preparing to expand his refinery to become the world’s largest?
Between 2021 and 2023, NNPCL reportedly poured nearly $3 billion into these facilities:
– $1.5B for Port Harcourt
– $897.6M for Warri
– $586M for Kaduna
Yet none is working!
Worse still, between 2013 and 2023, an estimated $25 billion was wasted on “repairs,” “rehabilitations,” and “turnaround maintenance.”
Former President Obasanjo has openly said the refineries may never work again. Dangote calls the entire turnaround-maintenance model a monumental scam—likening it to installing a new engine in a 40-year-old wreck that can’t handle modern technology.
He’s right. And he should know. Because while NNPCL was burning billions trying to resurrect dead refineries, Dangote quietly built a modern, globally competitive one from scratch—now on track to dominate Africa.
Even if the government finds a buyer, which investor will commit billions into plants that are outdated, uncompetitive, and will be fighting for survival against the Dangote Refinery—a facility already positioned to dominate Africa’s refined-products market and expanding towards becoming the world’s largest?
This is the dilemma NNPCL refuses to confront. No investor will touch a refinery that cannot source crude, is technologically obsolete, and is entering a market where a private giant is aggressively expanding capacity.
So let’s ask the painful question: Who exactly will buy a Nigerian refinery today? A plant with no crude, no efficiency, no technological relevance, and no competitive edge? This is not privatisation—it’s attempted disposal of national embarrassment.
Bayo Ojulari should understand something. History will not remember how many giant targets he announced at foreign conferences. He won’t be celebrated for talking Nigeria toward 3 million or even 5 million barrels per day. Nigerians judge results, not rhetoric.
He will be remembered for one thing alone: Did the refineries come back to life under his watch?
So far, the answer is a very loud, very expensive, very embarrassing “No.”
God bless Nigeria.
(IFEANYI IZEZE writes from Abuja. Contacts: iizeze@yahoo.com; 234-8033043009)
