Maroc - VERACITY.COM.NG - A La Une - 09/Feb 07:49

Atiku backs refinery privatisation, faults Port Harcourt revamp

VP Atiku Abubakar  Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has renewed his call for the privatisation of Nigeria’s refineries, saying the recent admission by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited that reviving the Port Harcourt Refinery is uneconomical vindicates his long-held position. Atiku, who served as Vice President between 1999 and 2007, said in a statement on Sunday that spending about $1.5bn on the refinery only for the company to acknowledge that reopening it amounts to a waste of scarce resources exposed the failure of government-owned refinery management. He said the position of the Tinubu administration showed that continued investment of public funds in non-functional refineries was economically unjustifiable and against the national interest. According to him, paying billions of naira in salaries to refineries that do not produce a single litre of petrol underscores the unsustainability of the current approach. The former vice president recalled that he had consistently advocated privatisation of the refineries over the years but was often accused of attempting to dispose of public assets for selfish reasons. He argued that decades of turnaround maintenance programmes had consumed billions of dollars without tangible results, revealing gaps in capacity, technical expertise and financial discipline. Atiku described the latest efforts to rehabilitate the refineries as politically motivated, insisting that economic policy decisions should not be driven by political considerations. He advised the Federal Government to discontinue any proposed refinery partnerships, including arrangements with foreign firms, warning that such deals merely recycled failed strategies. Atiku said Nigeria would have been better served if the refineries had been sold before rehabilitation, noting that continued public ownership had only increased debt and turned the facilities into depreciating liabilities.