President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has reaffirmed his administration’s determination to fix Nigeria’s ailing refineries, insisting that getting them running again is not enough, they must also become profitable.
The president gave the assurance on Thursday when he received the newly elected leadership of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) at the Presidential Villa in Abuja. The union’s delegation was led by its National President, Comrade Salimon Akanni Oladiti.
Responding to concerns raised by the union, Tinubu said the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries would undergo a structural overhaul to ensure long-term viability rather than a superficial restart.
“The refineries that you mentioned are going to come back to work,” Tinubu said. “We’re just building a very firm reset and structural reworking of the economics of it. Ordinary flame and smoke of a refinery doesn’t mean that it’s working, until it’s profitable and yields the value for which it is built.”
The president added that he had accepted responsibility for the state of the nation’s assets and liabilities inherited from previous administrations. “I’m not a man who will go there, come back and say everything is fine because I’ve accepted the assets and liabilities of my predecessors. No matter what has happened in the years past, it’s my responsibility now as the president to fix it, make it work for the largest common value of our population. I take responsibility for that, and I’m going to do it.”
In his remarks, Oladiti commended the administration’s recent partnership between the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited and Chinese firms aimed at fixing the Warri and Port Harcourt refineries. In May, NNPC signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Sanjiang Chemical Company Limited and Xingcheng (Fuzhou) Industrial Park Operation and Management Co. Ltd. to facilitate the rehabilitation, restart and expansion of the two facilities through a technical equity partnership model.
Oladiti also urged the government to extend similar attention to the country’s decaying Nigerian Pipelines and Storage Company (NPSC) depots, suggesting they be handed over to private investors under an equity arrangement. He further appealed to the president to press state governors to comply with the Supreme Court judgment affirming the financial autonomy of local governments.
The NUPENG leadership went on to confer on Tinubu the award of Grand Patron of the union, in recognition of what it described as his relationship and partnership with petroleum and natural gas workers.
Thursday’s pledge revives a long-running saga around Nigeria’s state-owned refineries. Tinubu had previously celebrated the reopening of the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries in 2024, but both were subsequently shut down again. In February this year, NNPC Group Chief Executive Officer Bayo Ojulari disclosed that the refineries had been operating at only 50 to 55 percent capacity, insufficient to be commercially viable while rising operating costs and low product quality compounded the losses.
“The first thing that became clear is that we were running at a monumental loss to Nigeria. We were just wasting money,” Ojulari said at the time, adding that political pressure had previously kept the facilities running despite the losses.
PENGASSAN President Festus Osifo has separately described the current rehabilitation drive as one of the most significant interventions in the refineries in years, though he contrasted it with a history of government announcements and approvals that were not matched by corresponding work on the ground. Nigeria’s four state-owned refineries, two in Port Harcourt and one each in Warri and Kaduna have collectively cost the country billions of dollars in past rehabilitation efforts without achieving sustained, profitable operation.
