In 2007, I sat in tense meetings, rooms heavy with political heat, as we tried to convince labour leaders and union chiefs that selling the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries was the right thing to do.
I was Senior Special Assistant to then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, and when we came into office in 2007, the very first existential crisis we inherited as the other half, if you could call it that, of the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua presidency, was to navigate the fallout from what I considered a bold move by President Olusegun Obasanjo in the twilight of his administration. That move—selling two of Nigeria’s notoriously comatose refineries to a consortium led by Bluestar Oil Services Limited—was met with a swift and intense national strike led by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and other affiliated unions.
One of the first major assignments Yar’Adua gave to his Vice President was to deal with the crippling strike by organised labour to protest the sale of the refineries. And this was how the issue landed squarely on our laps.
Labour, obviously prodded by unseen hands, argued loudly and a touch emotionally that the refineries were national assets being sold too cheaply to political cronies. My colleagues in the media fanned the flames, civil society rose in uproar, and eventually, the Yar’Adua administration bowed to pressure, reversing the sales. I could read from the general mood in the Villa that while Yar’Adua wasn’t expressly opposed to the sale of the refineries, he wasn’t going to let the heavens crash down on Nigeria over the matter.
For indeed, by this time, the then all-powerful National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, NUPENG, had virtually brought the country to a standstill. Petrol queues were chaotic, workers were on strike, and the nation was on tenterhooks. The decision to cancel the sale was inevitable.
I personally thought the decision to back down was wrong, and I told them Vice President so; but the circumstances thrust upon the new government, which was already having legitimacy issues due to the “do or die” electoral process that brought it to power, were quite daunting indeed.
Seventeen years later, I still believe that, thanks to Labour and vested interests, backing down was one of the most expensive policy missteps Nigeria ever made.
Since 2007, Nigeria has spent an estimated $25 billion on what we euphemistically call “refinery rehabilitation.” Despite these astronomical investments, the Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna refineries have produced nothing close to value. For years, they operated at less than 10% capacity—often at zero. They’ve become bottomless pits into which public funds disappear, with no accountability and no return.
Now, with renewed efforts under the Buhari and Tinubu administrations, the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries have been once again“rehabilitated” and pressed back into operations. But swiftly again, we see the same old patterns repeating themselves. Despite technical completion, output remains minimal. There are whispers of sabotage, of internal resistance, of vested interests within the oil sector working behind the scenes to ensure these plants do not function properly.
A couple of weeks ago, the Port Harcourt refinery was shut for repairs, fresh from a $1.5 billion overhaul by Maire Technimont SpA. While no one is at all sure of the exact state of the Warri plant, it is loud silence about the Kaduna one. And as we speak, it is a virtual chaos in the government-owned refining sector.
Truth is, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that in a government-run system, failure is often more profitable than success—especially when opaque contracts, inflated procurement, and constant emergency “repairs” keep certain pockets well-lined and smiling to the Bureau de Change across the street.
Let’s be brutally honest: the real reason these refineries have never worked, and may never work under government control, is because they are being sabotaged from within. Their very existence threatens entrenched interests in the refined products importation business—a cabal that has fed fat on Nigeria’s dependency on foreign fuel, and whose stranglehold continues to choke our economy. So long as these assets remain under public ownership, they will be targets for economic subversion.
In over 45 years of their existence, the Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna refineries have hardly operated at optimal capacity for more than a handful of years. Each government that came along poured more money into them—money that could have gone to schools, hospitals, roads, and power infrastructure.
Between 2015 and 2020 alone, over N10 billion was spent just on “staff costs” for refineries that produced zero litres of refined petroleum products. According to a 2020 NEITI audit, total refinery losses during that period stood at over N152 billion. This is not inefficiency; it is financial malpractice as statecraft.
And while we were burning public funds on non-producing refineries, private sector players like Aliko Dangote were building world-class refineries from the ground up. Today, the Dangote Refinery in Lekki is exporting petrol—a private sector achievement made possible by vision, efficiency, and profit-driven management, not bloated bureaucracy or politicised decision-making.
Privatising these refineries isn’t just a sound economic decision—it’s a moral obligation to the Nigerian people.
Done right, privatization would end the haemorrhage of public funds into a failing system. It would unleash private sector innovation and investment, especially from technical partners with global refining experience. It would create real jobs, and put paid once and for all to fuel importation.
Selling off the refineries would stabilise local markets, cut costs, increase transparency, and efficiency through commercially driven operations.
I do not advocate fire sales. No, we must learn from the mistakes of the past. If the sale price was the issue in 2007, let us now commission an independent, professional valuation of each refinery. Let us open the process to both local and international investors, with clearly defined operational milestones and post-sale obligations. Let us build in labour protections and stakeholder engagement frameworks to ensure public buy-in.
But whatever we do, we must sell. And we must sell now.
I understand why labour fought us in 2007. The fear then was job losses, economic imperialism, and elite capture. But what labour failed to see is that the real enemy of the Nigerian worker is non-performance. Workers cannot thrive in a system where salaries are paid for doing nothing, where productivity is zero, and where the long-term viability of a job is tied to government subsidies and waste.
Even now, the NLC continues to view any conversation about privatization as a class war. But what is more anti-worker than a refinery that pays you today only to go bankrupt tomorrow? What is more exploitative than pretending everything is fine while the business dies silently under layers of corruption and sabotage?
Labour unions must evolve. They must fight for decent work under competent employers—not for the perpetuation of a failed state enterprise that offers neither pride nor security.
There are risks, yes. We’ve seen privatization go wrong before. But those failures weren’t due to the idea of privatization itself; they were due to how it was executed. We must learn from those mistakes: poor due diligence, insider deals, regulatory uncertainty. If we build a transparent and accountable process this time, we can avoid the pitfalls.
Besides, the bigger risk is doing nothing. The bigger risk is believing that somehow, under the same public ownership and the same civil service culture that ruined these assets in the first place, we can get different results.
Without ownership change, operational reform will be cosmetic. Without privatization, the same forces that kept the refineries idle for decades will soon drag them back into darkness. It has begun already.
Nigeria deserves better. Our people deserve value for the taxes they pay and the resources this country holds. Let us finish what we started in 2007. Let us give these refineries a real shot at survival—not under the suffocating hands of bureaucracy, but under the stewardship of capable, committed investors with something to prove.
This is not just about petroleum—it is about principle. About facing the hard truths and choosing reform over sentiment, substance over sloganeering.
Let us sell the refineries—and finally get them working for the Nigerian people.
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Ima Niboro is a former Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to President Goodluck Jonathan. He is also the Founder and Publisher of Keeping Them Honest, Nigeria’s digital newspaper.