- We need to know why Port Harcourt refinery packed up barely six months after recommissioning
If merely for the dark clouds that have trailed the Port Harcourt refinery since it was recommissioned in November, last year, the announcement that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) is considering selling the complex could not have been entirely surprising.
Last week, newspapers reported the Group Managing Director of the company, Bayo Ojulari, as telling Bloomberg at the 9th OPEC International Seminar in Vienna, Austria, that a strategic review of NNPC’s refinery operations is currently under way and expected to be concluded before the end of the year, and that the sale of the entity is no longer off the table.
“So refineries, we made quite a lot of investment over the last several years and brought in a lot of technologies. We’ve been challenged. Some of those technologies have not worked as we expected so far. But also, as you know, when you’re refining a very old refinery that has been abandoned for some time, what we’re finding is that it’s becoming a little bit more complicated,” he was quoted to have said.
He would also add: “But what we’re saying is that sale is not out of the question. All the options are on the table, to be frank, but that decision will be based on the outcome of the reviews we’re doing now”.
Could it be, finally, the moment of truth, coming from the new helmsman, after years of deception by the previous managers? We cannot but shudder at the implication of the twist. Of course, it is entirely the prerogative of the company’s management to undertake whatever restructuring it deems necessary, one of which is an outright sale.
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Only that in this particular instance, the so-called restructuring is being forced by the revelation that the refinery currently delivers far less than the citizens were promised (or is actually delivering nothing), – in effect, that citizens’ hope in its highly publicised revamp has been misplaced. Nigerians might wish to recall that the 60,000 barrels per day (bpd) facility only commenced production and trucking of products barely eight months ago – precisely on November 26, 2024. Barely six months after – in May, it had to be shut down supposedly to enable maintenance to be carried out. And now, two months after that rather ridiculous shutdown, the announcement coming from far away Vienna, Austria, is that things are not exactly what they seem.
Considering the billions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds spent to get things up to this point, it is tempting to imagine that the country may have been scammed again.
Surely, the development not only raises fresh but grave questions about the initial claims by the NNPCL that the facility had been successfully restreamed, but would appear an unquestionable vindication of those who had along insisted that the refurbishment was a sham. Having indulged the company with serial cover-ups in the past, Nigerians should not allow the latest one by the NNPCL to pass.
The Federal Government needs to get to the root of the matter. Both the NNPCL and the contractor, Maire Tecnimont SpA, have a lot of explaining to do on how things got to this point. Nigerians need to know whether or not the necessary guarantees were in place to protect the country’s interest. It comes basically to addressing the question of how a newly refurbished refinery could, so soon after the fanfare of its recommissioning, slip into dysfunction and the extent to which the contractors could be held liable.
Until these issues are resolved, we can only urge that NNPCL take things easy. In the meantime, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC) should be interested in who did what, and whether or not, any laws were broken. It should hold more than a watching brief on what is going on at the NNPCL.