Gov. Sule lashes Buhari administration for spending over $19bn cost of Dangote Refinery on moribund nation’s Refineries

The Governor of Nasarawa state, Abdullahi A. Sule has declared that the Muhammadu Buhari administration spent more than the $19 billion used in building the Dangote Refinery in the maintenance of the country’s refineries.

Governor Sule disclosed this Thursday while featuring on Channels Television Sunrise Daily that was monitored by Gentechnews, adding that the payments of subsidy was occasioned by the country’s non-functional refineries.

Nigeria has refineries in Kaduna, Port Harcourt, and Warri with none of them functioning up until now.

Sule’s stern revelation came days after the House of Representatives also disclosed that over N11trillion was expended on the moribund refineries in the last three years.

The Governor of Nasarawa state, Abdullahi A. Sule Sule who was also a former staff of Dangote Group, said on the programme: “Look at how much the President Buhari administration spent on fixing the refineries. In the eight years, he spent more money than the $19 billion that Dangote spent in building a refinery, that is one and half times the size of our three refineries combined.”

The governor admitted that there was poor handling of the situation by the government, adding: “From the government side, I think we didn’t do a good job. When the (former) President (Buhari) came in, in 2015 prices of crude oil dropped by less than 30 dollars. At that time there was zero subsidy.

“Our three refineries in Nigeria today have a total of 450,000 barrels per day, Dangote is 650,000. He spent $19 billion on building it. We spent, not building a new one, but in maintaining these refineries more than $19 billion in eight years, yet they have not been maintained.”

Governor Sule also decried the complexity of maintaining the refineries due to their about five to six diverse components.

According to him,  “The refinery is actually a component for water, crude, and diesel, about five or six different components that constitute a refinery. The moment the government says we are going to spend $2 billion this year on the refinery. The $2 billion is spent and as far as the President is concerned, they have given $2 billion.

“Now, when it goes to the three refineries that we have in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna; then they say, you now take $700 million, you now take $800 million – by the time they take that, it goes to fix maybe only one component out of the four components that are all bad.”

Sule hinted that the best thing to do would have been to allocate the major funds to one of the refining states to fix it totally before allocating the remainder to the other states.

“So, zero work is done. These are the true realities of what is happening, and that is why none of the refineries is working. These are truly the problem, we have not really managed this thing well,” he emphasized.

Dangote Refinery is Africa’s biggest oil refinery which launched its building plans in 2017 and the project commissioned in May 2023 at the winding down of the Buhari-led government.