Since his days as Nigeria’s minister of Petroleum and later as Head of State, then General Muhammadu Buhari’s life long ambition has been to have the four country’s refineries operate at installed capacity and make Nigerians enjoy the God given gifts of all petroleum products without hitches.
However, due to PMB’s foresight and unflinching committment, he tried hard through thick and thin to ensure availability of all the refineries’ products to flood the Nigerian markets at affordable prices. That was however not to be due to a number of bureaucratic bottlenecks.
Fortunately, respite began to manifest itself during hus second coming as a civilian President in 2015 under the All Progressives Congress, APC.
In line with his agenda to re ignite the moribund refineries at Port Harcourt 1 and 11, Warri and Kaduna, President Buhari then decided to keep a very close tab on the Petroleum Ministry by becoming the Minister and appointing a Minister of State to assist him run the ministry effectively and efficiently.
The Port Harcourt refinery 1 was top on the agenda as one of his priority projects that he hoped to see the light of the day before leaving office.
It is on record that President Buhari made a number of promises to Nigerians during the campaigns , which include fixing the nation’s moribund refineries, passing the Petroleum Industry Bill, PIB, ending fuel importation and addressing the corruption in the subsidy regime among others.
To achieve these objectives, six months after he was elected President in 2015, President Buhari appointed took charge as Minister of Petroleum Resources, a move that many Nigerians said would engender transparency and accountability in the nation’s opaque oil sector.
The step to redeem the petroleum sector was taken as part of efforts to sanitise the country’s oil sector, which is said to be engulfed by corruption, massive fraud and crude oil theft.
Although the PIB was passed under his administration, the sector faced different challenges including fuel scarcity disruptions that caused suffering for many Nigerians while fuel subsidies continue to gulp huge resources.
In his proactive approach to ‘talk the talk’, President Buhari launched a $1.5 billion rehabilitation project in 2019 to restore the aging refinery to its nameplate capacity of 210,000 barrels per day, comprising of the old refinery with a capacity of 60,000 barrels per stream day and the new refinery with an installed capacity of 150,000 bpd.
There is no gainsaying the fact that the project is a critical step towards boosting Nigeria’s domestic refining capacity and reducing dependence on imported products.
Then comes the 110,000 bpd capacity Kaduna Refinery as one of Nigeria’s four dysfunctional refineries but which PMB strenuously tried hard to revive.
The NNPC Ltd has therefore delivered on its promise to resume production at the Port Harcourt Refinery before the end of 2023 by achieving mechanical completion, flare start-up of the refinery’s Area 5 Plant.
Rehabilitation work has been ongoing at the Refinery for over two years now
The beauty of this milestone by NNPC ltd is that it hopes to keep the prices of petroleum prices in the country stable in order to give comfort to Nigerians and generate more revenue for our country.
It is additionally expected that the re-streaming the Refinery ‘will herald a good omen for the nation’s Liquefied Petroleum Gas, LPG industry, as LPG, also known as cooking gas, is a major bye-product of the Refinery’.
I have no doubt in my mind that former President Buhari is more fulfilled than any Nigerian for the fact that another of his strategic legacy projects has seen the light of the day with the committment of the President Tinubu administration to complete all on going projects at the time of his take over.
