Marketers Back Tinubu’s Call for Productive Refineries, Flay $7.3bn, 32-year Record Of Failure

The Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria (PETROAN) has thrown its weight behind President Bola Tinubu’s call for refineries that turn a profit rather than merely show signs of activity, even as it tore into more than three decades of what it described as unaccountable spending on the same plants.

In a report on Friday and signed by its special adviser on Media, Chris Odia, and national public relations officer, Dr Joseph Obele, the marketers’ association said $4.15 billion was allocated to the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries between 1993 and 2019, with a further $3.14 billion approved by the Federal Executive Council in March 2021 — bringing total dollar-denominated interventions to roughly $7.3 billion over 32 years without producing a refinery capable of running profitably.

On top of that, PETROAN cited parliamentary and union sources placing separate naira-denominated operating and rehabilitation outlays between 2020 and 2025 at around N11.35 trillion.

“The constraint was never primarily money,” the association said. “It was governance, technical ownership, accountability for outcomes, and the absence of any party whose commercial survival depended on the plants actually running.”

PETROAN said its support for a structural reset “is not deference,” but follows from a record it argued no serious stakeholder can defend. It pointed to Port Harcourt’s on-again, off-again history as Exhibit A: the refinery briefly resumed operations in late 2024, was shut again on 24 May 2025 for what was billed as a thirty-day maintenance window, and has not returned since.

NNPC Ltd’s own internal assessment, completed in February 2026, reportedly found the plants were operating at material losses even when running.

The association said it supports the National Assembly’s ongoing inquiry into how the $7.3 billion and N11.35 trillion were deployed — not as a “search for scapegoats,” but because, in its words, “a rehabilitation programme that cannot explain its own cost history cannot credibly forecast its future performance.”

Against that backdrop, PETROAN commended Tinubu for a distinction it said reframes the entire national conversation on refining. Addressing the newly elected leadership of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) at the State House on Thursday 13 August, the President said the “ordinary flame and smoke of a refinery doesn’t mean it’s working” — a line PETROAN’s national president, Dr Billy Gillis-Harry, called the most consequential sentence uttered about Nigerian refining in a decade.

The association said the remark shifts scrutiny away from commissioning ceremonies and toward the “arithmetic of margin, throughput, availability and return on capital” — a standard, it argued, the $7.3 billion in prior spending was never held to. It also praised Tinubu for accepting the assets and liabilities of previous administrations without assigning blame, calling institutional continuity of obligation “the foundation of investor confidence.”

PETROAN acknowledged data showing Nigeria’s petrol import bill fell roughly 96 per cent, from N2.271 trillion in the first quarter of 2025 to N87.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with domestic refineries supplying 76.7 per cent of national petrol volumes in that period, up from 45.2 per cent a year earlier.

But it cautioned against reading this as proof the refining problem has been solved by private capital alone. Nigeria, it said, has merely swapped import dependence for single-source dependence — a structural risk regardless of whether the concentration sits in Rotterdam or Lekki. Restoring Port Harcourt’s 210,000 barrels-per-day and Warri’s 125,000 bpd capacity, PETROAN argued, would return 335,000 bpd of geographically distributed capacity to the system, strengthening price discipline and negotiating leverage in the downstream trade.

The association also weighed in on NNPC Ltd’s Technical Equity Partnership memorandum, signed in Jiaxing City on 30 April 2026 with Sanjiang Chemical Company Limited and Xingcheng (Fuzhou) Industrial Park Operation and Management Co. Ltd. While calling the equity-based structure sound in principle — arguing a partner who owns a share of the margin has a stake in the plant still running in year five — PETROAN noted that NNPC has itself confirmed the deal remains non-binding and subject to regulatory approval and further negotiation.

Warning that “Nigeria has an unhappy history of treating memoranda as milestones,” the association set out six conditions it wants met before the deal is publicly celebrated:

Conversion to a binding agreement with defined completion dates, throughput guarantees and enforceable penalties for non-performance;

Disclosure of the commercial architecture — equity split, capital commitment, offtake arrangements, crude pricing and treatment of accumulated liabilities; Public summary of technical due diligence, including independent verification of the plants’ residual value and remaining useful life; Guaranteed crude feedstock through firm implementation of the Domestic Crude Supply Obligation under the Petroleum Industry Act; Genuine transfer of technical skills to Nigerian engineers and management, not headcount quotas, as well as secure product evacuation and equitable access for independent retailers, to keep domestic output out of the parallel market.

PETROAN commended NUPENG’s National Executive President, Comrade Salimon Akanni Oladiti, for pushing refinery revival directly before the President, and endorsed the union’s call to end the casualisation of workers in the upstream sector.

The association said it wants Port Harcourt and Warri sustainably operational before the next general election — not as a call to compress safety or commissioning standards to meet a political deadline, but because, in its words, “deadlines are the only mechanism by which this particular national failure has ever been made to move.”