Former Vice President of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar, has called for the immediate suspension of Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd).
NNPCL recently announced a partnership with two Chinese firms, Sanjiang Chemical Company Limited and Xingcheng (Fuzhou) Industrial Park Operation and Management Co., Ltd., to restart Nigerian refineries.
However, speaking via a statement on Friday by his spokesperson, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku alleged that the deal was a gamble with Nigeria’s economic future.
He accused Tinubu’s government of attempting to mortgage critical national assets through opaque arrangements lacking technical credibility, transparency, and national accountability.
“It is both shocking and insulting that after wasting over $2.5 billion on endless refinery rehabilitation scandals, the NNPC is once again asking Nigerians to trust another experiment built on secrecy and questionable competence,” Atiku stated.
Atiku noted that Sanjiang Chemical, though a legitimate petrochemical company, is fundamentally a downstream fine-chemicals manufacturer specialising in surfactants, ethylene oxide, methanol-to-olefins, and light hydrocarbon processing, not crude oil refining.
“There is no publicly available evidence anywhere in the world showing that Sanjiang has ever built, operated, or managed a full-scale crude oil refinery of the magnitude and complexity of Port Harcourt or Warri refineries.
“Processing petrochemical derivatives is not the same as running an ageing national refinery burdened with decades of operational decay,” Atiku noted.
Also, Atiku said the second Chinese firm, Xingcheng (Fuzhou) Industrial Park Operation and Management Co. Ltd., appears to have absolutely no verifiable experience in petroleum engineering, refinery operations, or hydrocarbon processing.
“By every available corporate and industry record, Xingcheng is essentially an industrial park and infrastructure management company, the equivalent of handing over a hospital’s intensive care unit to a real estate developer simply because they can construct buildings,” the statement added.
He further raised an alarm on why the Federal Government and NNPC would deliberately bypass globally established refinery engineering and EPC firms with proven records, only to settle for entities whose backgrounds raise more questions than confidence.
The former vice president warned that the Tinubu administration risks turning Nigeria’s refineries into another expensive black hole of failed promises, reckless experimentation, and opaque transactions.
“It is unacceptable that after years of failed turnaround maintenance scams, billions of dollars squandered, and repeated lies about refinery functionality, Nigerians are now being told to celebrate a memorandum of understanding signed with companies whose core expertise does not align with the technical realities of refinery rehabilitation.
“Nigerians must not allow the same people who destroyed the refineries through incompetence and corruption to now hide behind vague Chinese partnerships to continue the cycle of deception,” he said.
Atiku, therefore, demanded the immediate publication of the full terms of the MoU; a transparent technical due diligence report on both firms; disclosure of the financial commitments and liabilities expected of Nigeria; open competitive engagement involving globally reputable refinery operators; and a full legislative investigation into the billions previously spent on refinery rehabilitation without measurable results.
“The era where NNPC signs opaque agreements abroad and expects Nigerians to clap blindly is over.
“National assets are not toys for bureaucratic experimentation. The Port Harcourt and Warri refineries are too strategic to be surrendered to uncertainty, obscurity, and corporate guesswork”, he stated.
