Nigeria’s former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr Ibe Kachikwu has admitted that the Buhari-led administration failed to give Nigerians refineries as promised during electioneering campaigns in 2014.
Kachikwu said this while responding to a question from journalists on Buhari’s administration failure to deliver the refineries he promised, Kachikwu said he’s bold enough to say the administration did not deliver the mandate.
He said, “It is one area where I think we did not deliver the mandate and I am bold enough to say that. Recently, I think I saw something like ‘Kachikwu failed to deliver on his five promises on refineries’. I think it is a misunderstanding of how the system works. I started within as Group Managing Director and also as Minister of State at that point; most of the powers and work were centered on me. If you look at the refineries, the first problem we had was that they were not functioning when I assumed office in 2015 and because of the huge apparent fuel scarcity; it was a major problem for me if I had to wait for vessels to arrive each time to meet the delivery timeline. These were the problems. So I was focused on how to get them working, at least to start, no matter how little and all they gave me was one million litres a day.
“The pipelines that were supplying fuel had all been destroyed and they had entered into a contract before we came in, to supply product by vessels. The cost of those vessels supplied was more than the value of the crude oil that was being supplied. It did not make any financial sense. So I cancelled that and challenged Nigerians who were in this entity to go and use their money to repair the pipelines.
On illegal refineries, Kachikwu said, “the problem with illegal refineries is notably the lack of policy deficiency on the product. The business model for illegal refineries is zero cost of crude oil; nobody is doing that and saying, ‘look I am going to steal it and make something out of it’. That is what it is, from breaking of pipelines to all that stuff, so it is not something we can encourage”.
The tenure of all ministers that formed President Muhammadu Buhari’s cabinet expired recently, as the president ordered all of them to hand over to the permanent secretaries of their ministries by May 28, 2019.