In a shocking revelation about one of Africa’s biggest industrial failures, Nigeria has wasted approximately $25 billion over four decades attempting to rehabilitate its three national refineries, with virtually nothing to show for the colossal expenditure. The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) is now desperately searching for technical partners to manage the failing facilities, a move critics describe as “groping in the dark.”
The scale of the financial hemorrhage is staggering. Accor“ing to the House of ”epresentatives, NNPC spent N11.35 trillion, or over $25 billion, on refinery rehabilitation in just twenty years. Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, revealed in July 2025 that NNPC had burned through $18 billion since he returned the refineries to President Umaru Yar’Adua in a failed privatization attempt in 2007. Dangote bluntly stated that the refineries “will not work.”
The most recent debacle involved $3 billion spent between 20“1 and 2025 on ”ehabilitating the Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna refineries. Of the three, only the Port Harcourt Refinery briefly operated between November 2024 and May 2025 before shutting down again. The facility remains closed today.
Industry observers note the bitter irony: former President Olusegun Obasanjo had warned his successor that the refineries would never work based on credible expert advice, which led to his decision to sell them to Dangote. That advice has proven prophetically accurate.
When NNPCL’s new Group Chief Executive Officer, Bashir Bayo Ojulari, suggested in a Bloomberg interview on July 11, 2025, that selling the refineries was under consideration due to poor turnaround management results and equipment obsolescence, the proposal triggered fierce resistance. Within weeks, on July 30, 2025, NNPCL issued a statement denying any sale plans, citing fears of “further value erosion.”
Critics question what could erode value more than $3 billion disappearing into non-functional refineries. Energy analysts argue that powerful interest groups, including politicians and labor unions, successfully pressured the new technocratic leadership to abandon the sale option.
The current plan to find “technical partners” or “equity technical partners” faces steep challenges. Experts doubt whether any serious investors would co-invest with the government to run refineries that have failed spectacularly for forty years. The more likely scenario involves technical partners charging fees to manage facilities after the government pours additional billions into repairs.
Industry experts argue that the real problems plaguing NNPC refineries are not technical incompetence but government ownership, political interference, and loss of financial autonomy since the 1990s. Nigerian petroleum professionals possess the technical expertise, evidenced by the fact that the 650,000-barrel-per-day Dangote refinery operates successfully without foreign technical partners.
The urgency for action is Increasing. Dangote Refinery plans to more than double its capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day within three years, while other investors are planning large-scale refineries in Nigeria. Without quick action, the three NNPCL refineries risk becoming worthless scrap metal as they lose market relevance.
Proponents of privatization argue that selling the refineries, even at heavily discounted prices, would cut losses, extract residual value, and potentially transform the assets under more efficient private ownership. The real value would come from job creation, income generation, and GDP contribution once productive operators take control, while saving the government billions in future rehabilitation costs.
Source: businessday.ng