KEY POINTS

• Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has reiterated that the NNPC’s three refineries will never work.
• He recalled that Shell rejected his offer to run the refineries, citing corruption, poor maintenance and small capacity.
• Aliko Dangote paid $750 million for 51 percent of two refineries, but the late Umar Yar’Adua reversed the deal under NNPC pressure.

Olusegun Obasanjo, the former Nigerian president, has doubled down on his blunt verdict on the country’s three state-run refineries: they will never work. He delivered the message Saturday night on television, just as the Nigerian National Petroleum Company hunts for technical partners to run the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna plants.

Obasanjo spoke on Sony Irabor Live and held up the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas, NLNG, model as proof that public-private partnerships work in Nigeria, while the state-owned approach does not.

A long history of warnings

He recalled offering Shell a chance to take 10 percent equity and run the refineries during his time in office. Shell turned him down. He then pressed a top Shell official for the real reason.

“He said first, they want to let me know that they make most of their profits on the upstream, not the downstream, he said our refineries are too small. One is 60,000 barrels, and another is 100,000 barrels, and our refineries are not well-maintained. We call quacks and amateurs to come and maintain our refineries,” Obasanjo recalled.

Specifically, the Shell official cited four reasons: refineries make little downstream profit, the Nigerian plants were too small, amateurs handled maintenance and corruption around the facilities was excessive. Furthermore, Shell did not want to operate in that environment.

The Dangote chapter

The picture brightened briefly when Aliko Dangote, the chairman of the Dangote Group, came forward with $750 million to take a 51 percent stake in two refineries. Obasanjo accepted the deal and the money landed.

“Until one day, Aliko came and offered $750m to take two of the refineries; that will be 51 per cent. I said, ‘Wow, God, you are really a God of miracles.’ I told Aliko to bring the money quickly. They brought the money, and they paid,” Obasanjo said.

However, his successor, the late Umar Yar’Adua, reversed the deal after taking office. Obasanjo said NNPC pressured Yar’Adua into the U-turn, even though Yar’Adua privately accepted that the agency could not run the plants.

Sixteen billion dollars later

Now Obasanjo argues the cost of that reversal is staggering. He said the country has spent roughly $16 billion on the refineries, just $4 billion shy of what Dangote eventually used to build Africa’s largest refinery from scratch.

Notably, Obasanjo gave one official credit for honesty: Bayo Ojulari, the current NNPC group chief executive officer, who has acknowledged the true state of the plants.

In November 2025, NNPC announced a fresh target of June 2026 to finalize the selection of technical partners for the refineries. Ojulari said the rehabilitated Port Harcourt and Warri plants, briefly reopened in 2024 and then shut again, were operating well below international standards.

A view echoed by Dangote

Dangote himself shares Obasanjo’s pessimism. He has said publicly that the NNPC refineries may never work, pointing to the same structural issues Obasanjo flagged decades ago. The two men both built private alternatives precisely because the state plants kept failing.

NNPC’s communications office has yet to respond to messages seeking a reaction to Obasanjo’s claims. With June approaching and the technical-partner search underway, the question is whether NNPC can prove its critics wrong, or whether Obasanjo’s verdict will hold up one more time.