‘$1.5 billion to renovate Port harcourt refinery is suspicious’ – Atiku queries FG

Nigeria’s former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has queried the plan by the federal government to spend $1.5 billion for the rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt refinery.

The  minister of state for petroleum at the end of the Federal Executive Council meeting yesterday had announced the government’s plan, explaining that the repair work would be undertaken in phases for a total of 44 months.

However, Atiku, in a statement  on Thursday described the proposal as a waste of resources, especially coming at a time that the nation’s economy is in dire straits.

The PDP Chieftain submitted , “to therefore budget the sum of $1.5 billion to renovate or turn around the Port Harcourt refinery would appear to be an unwise use of scarce funds at this critical juncture for a multiplicity of reasons.”

He also suggested that the best course of action will be to privatize the refineries for more effective and efficient management.

He described the planned rehabilitation as too expensive, saying shell petroleum development company sold a refinery of similar size in the US last year for $1.2 billion.

“We cannot as a nation expect to make economic progress if we continue to fund inefficiency, and we are going too deep into the debt trap for unnecessarily overpriced projects”, the former Vice President added.

He noted that the country’s debt which has spiked from ₦12 trillion in 2015 to ₦32.9 trillion today, is shocking enough to cause the nation to be more prudent in the way it borrows.