Nigeria spends N11trn for subsidy amid wobble refineries performance
Motolani Oseni
Due to the poor performance of Nigeria’s local refineries, not less than N11trillion has been paid for outstanding subsidy claims in the last six years.
Chairman, Senate committee on petroleum downstream, Kabir Marafa, on Thursday disclosed that the Senate approved the payment of N129 billion as outstanding subsidy claims to 67 petroleum marketers.
He explained that the approval followed the adoption of the report of its Committee on Petroleum Downstream on the Promissory Note Programme and a Bond Issuance for Oil Marketers Outstanding Claims.
However, Nigeria’s refineries including the Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company did not refine any crude oil from February 2018 to January this year, the latest data obtained from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation showed.
Also, the Port Harcourt Refining Company was idle from July 2018 to January this year. In fact, the last time the PHRC was functional was June last year when it processed 237,875 metric tonnes of crude, while the KRPC processed 21,855MT in January 2018.
An analysis of NNPC’s latest monthly financial and operations report for January 2019 also showed that of the country’s three refineries managed by the corporation, only the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company was able to process some volumes of crude oil from January 2018 to January this year.
Between January 2018 and January 2019, the WRPC only recorded zero capacity utilisation in January, September and October, in 2018.
In January this year, the Warri refinery processed 104,459MT of crude and posted a capacity utilisation of 19.76 per cent.
The combined capacity utilisation of the refineries in January this year was put at 5.5 per cent.
President Muhammadu Buhari government had promised to increase the performance or output of the nation’s refineries to about 90 per cent by 2019. But this did not materialise during the first term of the President, which elapsed on Wednesday, May 29, 2019.
