I had initially planned that Long Range would address a troubling scenario in our nation’s beleaguered history, where religion appears to have stolen the leaders’ and the citizens’ brains while we all scheme to glorify ourselves and vainly attempt to scheme against the one we claim to serve. Have you ever wondered why evil continues its ascendancy in the land when churches and mosques grow uncontrollably in every nook and cranny?
These organisations are mostly meant to conceal our shady interactions, criminal corruption and moral somersaults. This will have to wait today, though, till another auspicious time.
A recent visit by the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers to President Bola Tinubu on Thursday has put paid to this plan (at least temporarily) to avoid being carried away by the much religious matters while the nation embarks on another fruitless venture to please some self-serving, transactional unionists whose actions have done more than enough damage to the progress of the country.
I have waited for three solid days for Tinubu to stoutly refute a statement ascribed to him to revive the nation’s dead refineries during the visit of NUPENG leaders to the Villa led by its Executive President, Salimon Oladiti. It might not be out of place to suggest that the President might have been humbled by the ‘executiveness’ of the union president’s office. I hope I didn’t hear you complain of Nigerians craze for titles.
I may be wrong, but I have a feeling that our dear President must have started hearing some strange voices that sane Nigerians might not be able to understand concerning the promised revival of the dead refineries. If I may ask you, which refinery is Tinubu planning to revive among the obsolete plants in Port Harcourt, Warri or Kaduna? Thank goodness, he hasn’t specified yet.
At the risk of telling the President what he already knows, it may be necessary to remind Tinubu that former President Olusegun Obasanjo sold 51 per cent stake of the refineries in Port Harcourt to an Aliko Dangote-led consortium for $56m before he exited office as President in 2007. NUPENG’s sister labour union, the Petroleum and Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, desperately opposed the sale of the refineries.
OBJ characteristically dismissed the association’s threats by selling the refinery to the Dangote-led Bluestar consortium, but PENGASSAN still pressured the late President Umaru Yar’Adua to reverse the sale of the refinery, correctly described as scraps by Obasanjo, immediately after Yar’Adua mounted the saddle in 2007. Not only that.
The nation opted to pay $25m for cancelling the sale, apart from paying back the initial agreed sum, a development some Yoruba will describe as an ‘Akotileta’ economic model.
Aside from the fact that the refineries hadn’t produced fuel since the regime of the Minna dictator, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (1985 – 1993), Obasanjo, on the recommendation of some experts, said the refineries had become obsolete while the contractors that produced the equipment of the refineries no longer existed. He might have been correct to have described the refineries as scraps.
That the four refineries did not produce a litre of petrol in about three decades did not stop the drama. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation continued to pay idle workers, including hundreds of members of the amorphous NUPENG and PENGASSAN excos, huge wages and maintain comatose facilities for years for zero productivity.
As if the scandalous payment of salaries to idle and non-existent workers was not enough, the former Group Managing Director of NNPCL, Mele Kyari, negotiated and secured a $3.3bilion loan-for- crude deal with AFREXIM Bank under a dubious claim of repairing long-forgotten refineries and boosting crude production in August 2023, right under Tinubu’s watch.
All the consortium of lies to bring back the Port Harcourt refineries to justify the brazen theft of the humongous $3.3bn loan fell flat in 2025 when the facility ignored all human pressure to make it work while more lies continued to fly. So, where is the loan? Where is the money? And where is the working refinery?
While the racketeers are licking their cursed soup somewhere, Nigerians are slaving to pay for this barefaced robbery that took place under our dear President, who is equally planning to bring back dead refineries to life. I never knew before now that, apart from being a deft politician, Tinubu is equally a very powerful prophet, especially at giving life back to dead facilities; this could partly have motivated his promise to resurrect dead refineries.
Can someone do me a favour by reminding the President of the February 4, 2026, testimony of the current NNPCL’s GMD, Bayo Ojulari, concerning the dead refineries Tinubu had promised to bring to life? Ojulari emphatically stated that the corporation was operating the refineries at “monumental losses”, producing comparatively low-value products and that NNPCL presently lacked the capacity to operate them profitably.
I once learnt that Tinubu’s fuel stations in the United States helped to fund the activities of the operatives of Radio Kudirat (including former Ekiti State governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi) and National Democratic Coalition’s chieftains in the Diaspora. I, however, doubt if Tinubu’s current knowledge of the workings of the refineries can match or beat Ojulari’s. In Fela Akikulapo’s word, who is the teacher teaching Tinubu nonsense about the refineries?
Before our dear President ‘carry out his threat’ to embark on the revival of the moribund refineries, which I must admit is ill-advised with due respect, it may be necessary to remind him of a few critical issues to take care of. One of these is to beg him to carry out a comprehensive audit of the funding of previous Turn Around Maintenance of the refineries since 1999 to date.
For some of you who may not know, most of the TAMS contracts in the years past had always been awarded a year before general elections (in the mode of this promised resurrection). Don’t ask me the reasons; I don’t have an idea, but the outcomes had always been the same – dead on arrival, journey to nowhere.
There was a time the Kaduna refinery went up in flames a week after its TAM was completed. A key witness equally died in a strange accident during the probe of the strange fire. Another fire occurred in the facility on November 4, 2002. The fire damaged its Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit — the section essential for producing higher-value products such as petrol. Other incidents before this in other plants were not less predictably curious. Na so we dey run am o!
Like the litany of probes instituted by the National Assembly into many deserving and flippant issues, none of the panels which had sat on the probes of the refinery fire had ever completed their job – no report. Tinubu, therefore, needs to exhume these reports (if ever they exist) from their eternal graves before embarking on another ritual of attempting to start a project that will never be fruitful. It’s not a curse.
Servicing a $3.3bn AFREXIM Bank crude-for-loan deal (as negotiated by Kyari) in a highly controversial manner remains questionable, scandalous and outlandish. The President must tell the nation the status of this fraud-laden deal before ever initiating another move to waste huge sums of our dollars on reviving the nation’s refineries that the NNPCL has equally passed off as operating at “monumental losses”.
I can assure our good-hearted Jagaban, in case he might have been overwhelmed by the pressure of his office (it’s a hot seat, really), that all Nigerians are equal stakeholders in the Nigerian project. A few can’t be swimming in the ocean of our collective sweat while the rest slave daily to shoulder the burden of a debt they never enjoyed the benefits.
If the President fails to act on this complicated $3.3bn loan, I may be forced to leak to him what some concerned personalities have imputed to him concerning this transaction, which would have been impossible without anyone empowering Kyari to ‘take the laws into his own hands’. To learn that the Economic and Financial Crime Commission is not looking into this legacy theft is mind-boggling, very strange.
The President can’t sleep on this deal and mouth the moral right to embark on another wasteful venture to revive dead refineries. This is surely not the way to build a nation that everyone will be proud of no matter the current economic scenario.
Meanwhile, recently, I read about former Vice President Atiku Abubakar carpeting Tinubu for blaming past governments’ actions and inactions for the failure of the refineries. Permit me to briefly transform my presentation into our local mode: Our leaders no get shame at all!
Should an Atiku ever feel he has the moral authority to advise anyone on integrity and moving the nation forward? How can leaders, who took delight in selling state assets to themselves, think that the citizens have forgotten their roles in stripping the nation of its commonwealth? It took Obasanjo as President to practically ‘retrieve’ the old African Petroleum from his VP, using his proxies as fronts. Who has forgotten about other controversial deals perfected as personal entities while serving as a government official?
I make bold to say that Tinubu is not a saint either, just as others who are now parading themselves as presidential candidates in our current political experiment (this word sha after 65 years!) but for some goons to assume the moral vanguards of the nation, which they never possess, is not just inappropriate; it is sour and distasteful.
Those who destroyed the Peoples Democratic Party on the altar of unbridled, self-serving ambition are the same set of people lamenting the death of viable opposition in our political system and expressing the fear of a one-party state. Most times I laugh aloud when I hear our online political warriors trying to sell and defend their ‘heroes’ among Nigerian politicians. The reality in our own clime, at least, is that there is only one political contracting party with many franchising outlets. The practitioners belong to the same political family, no difference, simply substituting themselves at regular and irregular intervals.
It is heartwarming to learn about the housecleaning that Ojulari is reported to be carrying out at the nation’s apex oil corporation, asking some principalities in the firm to volunteer to leave ahead of their original exit time. He needs to go further. Those refinery workers, especially the rapacious unionists, who have been earning wages for doing nothing for about three decades, should all be eased out immediately.
The workers should then be paid from the money realised from the current Chinese investors instead of Tinubu dancing to the manipulations of the unionists by shelling out huge sums on some vague revival of dead entities that won’t birth any fruitful result. If any investors should be supported to succeed, the current loafers feasting on the comatose state of the nation’s refineries should be allowed to take a well-deserved rest at their homes.
The President should be told in clear terms that Nigeria does not need the revival of dead refineries at any moment, no matter the pressure from any quarter. The thought itself should not even come up, let alone the project.
By Ademola Oni