The Refinery Racket and Awkward Gratitude to Dangote

Femi Akintunde-Johnson

The other headline we toyed with is this: “How Nigeria Turned Crude and Steel into Smoke and Scrap, and Why Nigeria Now Thanks Dangote.” As you meander through the article, you may end up on my queue of thoughts regarding Nigeria’s proverbial profligacy and wanton wastefulness in this oily business.

There is something almost therapeutic about brutal honesty, especially when it comes so late in the day. When the Group Chief Executive of NNPC Limited calmly tells Nigerians that our refineries were being run at a “monumental loss” and were, in plain language, “just wasting money”, it lands not as a revelation but as an official confirmation of what taxi drivers, energy analysts and long-suffering citizens have known for decades. The only surprise is that it took this long for someone at that level to say it without blinking.

So here we are. Africa’s largest oil producer, owner of four refineries, and importer of petrol. A country that exports crude oil only to re-import refined fuel, paying freight, premiums and subsidies for the privilege of its own resources. If this were a sitcom, it would have been cancelled after the first season. Unfortunately, it is a documentary, and Nigerians are unwilling extras.

How did we get into this quagmire? The short answer is simple: bad governance sustained by good excuses. The long answer is messier, stretching across military regimes, civilian administrations, technocrats, generals, consultants, contractors, and foreign “technical partners” who arrived with glossy presentations and departed with hard currency.

For over 40 years, successive governments poured billions of dollars into so-called Turnaround Maintenance of the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries. The phrase itself became a running joke – a turnaround that never quite turned, maintenance that produced more memos than molecules. Each administration promised resurrection. Each one left behind invoices, press releases and plants that coughed along at single-digit capacity or went completely silent.

At various points, Nigerians were told the refineries were at 60 per cent capacity, then 70 per cent, then “nameplate capacity”, even as fuel queues snaked across cities and imported petrol quietly filled the gap. We clapped at commissioning ceremonies, only to return weeks later to darkness and diesel generators.

Now comes Bayo Ojulari, admitting that crude was being pumped into these facilities monthly, contractors were being paid handsomely, utilisation hovered around 50-55 per cent at best, and when the books were opened, value was not being created but quietly bled away. No credible recovery plan. No line of sight to profitability. Just patriotic losses, the most expensive kind.

The Port Harcourt Refinery, he says, was turning good crude into mid-grade products whose combined value did not justify the input. In any commercially run enterprise, that discovery would trigger an emergency board meeting. In Nigeria, it triggered another budget line.

And then, almost like comic relief in a tragedy, the NNPC boss said what many Nigerians now mutter under their breath: thank God for Dangote Refinery. Thank God – not for subsidy removal, not for policy coherence, but for one privately built refinery that actually works. Whether you love Alhaji Aliko Dangote or resent his success, the uncomfortable truth remains: one man’s refinery has done more to stabilise Nigeria’s fuel supply than decades of state ownership and state spending.

That admission alone should provoke a national inquest. Because if Dangote can build a 650,000 barrels-per-day refinery in Nigeria, using Nigerian labour, navigating Nigerian bureaucracy, and still make it function, then the failure of government refineries cannot be blamed on destiny, colonialism or sabotage alone. It is a failure of incentives, oversight and political will.

Which brings us to the ugliest question of all: has anyone ever been prosecuted for this monumental heist? The honest answer is no – not in any way that matches the scale of the damage. There have been probes. Committees. Senate hearings. White Papers. Occasional EFCC investigations that flickered briefly in the headlines before fading into bureaucratic mist. Names were mentioned. Fingers were pointed. But over three decades, no senior official has been convincingly held accountable for the billions sunk into refineries that never refined.

This silence is not accidental. The refinery racket has long been a cash cow, feeding a complex ecosystem of interests – contractors who specialised in endless maintenance, middlemen who supplied parts at inflated costs, officials who signed off on payments, and foreign firms who acted as technical partners while the plants decayed politely under their watch.

 It is a system that rewards failure. If the refinery works, there is no justification for another turnaround contract. If it fails, money must be released – urgently, patriotically, repeatedly. Failure, in this arrangement, is not a bug; it is the business model.

This is why the comparison with Ajaokuta Steel Mill is unavoidable. Another industrial monument to national self-deception. Another bottomless pit into which billions disappeared, while steel remained mythical and jobs remained theoretical. In both cases, the tragedy is not merely economic but psychological. They taught Nigerians that government projects are not meant to work; they are meant to be managed.

The involvement of international conspirators only deepens the stain. Foreign contractors and consultants did not force Nigeria to sign cheques; they simply accepted them. They certified work, issued reports, collected fees and moved on. The lesson is brutal but necessary: corruption in Nigeria may be home-grown, but it is often export-quality.

What Ojulari’s candour signals, perhaps unintentionally, is a quiet indictment of the past. If the current NNPC leadership can stop refinery operations because they are commercially unjustifiable, it means earlier leaders chose politics over prudence. They kept refineries running – or pretending to run – not because it made sense, but because shutting them would expose the emptiness of years of spending.

The new realism also exposes a painful irony. Nigeria spent decades resisting private-sector dominance in refining, citing national interest and energy security, only to arrive at a point where national energy stability is being underwritten by a private refinery. And we are now grateful for it.

The lesson from this saga is neither ideological nor sentimental. It is practical. Infrastructure without accountability is a liability. State ownership without consequences breeds waste. And patriotism cannot substitute for balance sheets.

If Nigeria is serious about ending this cycle, we must move beyond polite outrage. The refinery story demands forensic audits, not recycled panels. It demands naming, not nudging. And it demands that failure on this scale finally attracts consequences proportionate to the crime – economic, institutional and moral.

But gratitude must not slide into dependency. Thanking Dangote should not mean enthroning Dangote. No country replaces a failed state monopoly with a private one and calls it progress. Nigeria’s task now is to create the conditions that allow many Dangote-like Nigerians – and not just one industrial titan – to build, own and operate refineries that actually work. Competition, not canonisation, is what keeps prices honest, efficiency sharp and national interest protected. Incentives should reward performance, not connections; regulation should be firm, transparent and predictable, not whimsical or hostile. If the path remains clogged with bureaucratic booby traps, rent-seeking regulators and policy summersaults, then only the bravest or most connected will dare to invest – and monopoly, like nature, will rush to fill the vacuum. The lesson from Dangote is not that Nigeria needs saviours, but that it needs systems that allow competence to flourish and excess to be checked before gratitude quietly mutates into vulnerability.

 Meanwhile, Nigerians will continue to hear confessions long after the damage is done, clap for honesty, queue for fuel, and thank God for Dangote – while the ghosts of refineries past hum quietly in the background, monuments to money burned without smoke.