Marketers Reject Obasanjo, Say Tinubu Will Make Refineries Work
Two of Nigeria’s biggest fuel marketing bodies have thrown their weight behind President Bola Tinubu’s pledge to revive the country’s state owned refineries, rejecting former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s verdict that the plants will never run profitably, in a dispute that turns on decades of heavy spending and repeated failure.
The Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria and the Petroleum Products Retail Outlet Owners Association of Nigeria said the current rehabilitation approach differs from earlier efforts and deserves support. Their intervention followed Tinubu’s declaration, made while receiving the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, that the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries would return to production and be made profitable. Tinubu stressed that mere operation would not count as success, insisting a plant is not truly working “until it’s profitable and yields the value for which it is built.”
Obasanjo has taken the opposite view. He argues that public ownership has failed and that public private partnership offers a better model, citing the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas venture in which private investors hold 51 per cent and government 49 per cent. He said about $16bn had been spent trying to fix the refineries, an amount he put at only $4bn below the cost of Aliko Dangote’s much larger refinery. He also recalled that Dangote offered $750m for a 51 per cent stake in two of the refineries during his administration, a deal later reversed under the late President Umaru Yar’Adua following pressure from the NNPC.
The marketers acknowledge that history but reject the conclusion. The PETROAN president, Billy Gillis-Harry, said the age of the plants was no reason to abandon them, pointing to older refineries elsewhere that still operate. The IPMAN vice president, Hammed Fashola, said the involvement of an engineering consortium expected to fund the work and take a controlling management stake gave marketers fresh confidence. Both conceded that the sums already lost justified Obasanjo’s scepticism.
Not every expert agrees with the marketers. The energy analyst Dan Kunle rejected further public spending, describing the plants as technically insolvent and urging Tinubu to privatise them so investors risk their own capital rather than the treasury’s.
The recent record supports the caution on all sides. The Port Harcourt refinery, with a nameplate capacity of 60,000 barrels per day, resumed in November 2024 but ran at about 37.87 per cent of installed capacity before being shut in May 2025. The Warri refinery was brought back on 30 December 2024 and closed within weeks, on 25 January 2025, over a safety fault in its crude distillation unit main heater. The NNPC group chief executive, Bashir Ojulari, has said the refineries operated at only 50 to 55 per cent utilisation while running at a monumental loss, with Port Harcourt alone reportedly losing between $300m and $500m each month, and described continued operation as value destruction.
Obasanjo’s $16bn estimate should be read with care. Documented spending on the two southern refineries under the Buhari administration was about $2.39bn, with Warri’s turnaround maintenance put at roughly $897.6m. The larger cumulative figure spans earlier decades and has not been independently verified.
The timing gives the argument its edge. In April 2026, the NNPC signed a memorandum of understanding with two Chinese firms, Sanjiang Chemical and Xinganchen Industrial Park Operation and Management, for a technical equity partnership to complete and operate the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries. The company has said the arrangement is still under evaluation.
What is confirmed is that the three state refineries are currently idle, that billions have been spent without sustained output, and that the government is pursuing a new partnership model. Whether this attempt will differ from the last remains unproven. The marketers’ optimism, like Obasanjo’s pessimism, rests for now on expectation rather than fuel actually leaving the gate.