Dr Ibe Kachikwu: Nigeria’s oil minister

Under fire petroleum minister and Group MD of the state oil company, Dr Ibe Kachikwu took the Nigerian senate on a verbal tour of Nigeria’s refineries and explained why they are at best epileptic and not working optimally.

He said that the non-performance of the refineries was due to  fraud and lack of holistic maintenance.

The minister said that due to the long period of non- maintenance, a lot of components were bad and as such after every major repair, another component went bad almost immediately.

“We have also had issues of fraud.  It got to a point where I started wondering whether as we repair this, somebody was going out there to destroy, so that contracting will be done.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, we have not done a serious, conclusive turn around maintenance of these refineries; the refineries are averagely 30 to 40 years old, the equipment are far dilapidated.

“We have also had issues of fraud.  It got to a point where I started wondering whether as we repair this, somebody was going out there to destroy, so that contracting will be done.

 

“So, even with the best in terms of top level engineers who are there working night and day and trying to make things work, I just said no refinery is working right now.

“We supplied crude and they started for one day and they shut down because the CD unit packed up.

“So, it is one thing after another, it is an ageing process and the right thing is that we need to holistically refurbish our refineries,” he said.

The minister, however, said that refineries never die, and as such the nation’s refineries could be improved to work perfectly like others; even older refineries around the world were still functional.

He said that scrapping the refineries was not a solution to the challenge.

“The answer is to spend time, put in the right financial resources required, the right skills and get those refineries working. That’s what we are focusing on now,” he said.

He added that part of the restructuring that was done was to give the refineries some level of autonomy; so that they could prioritise their problems, seek third party funding and ensure the refineries worked.