Nigeria, home to Africa’s largest oil refinery (plus four other smaller ones), may yet have to import refined petrol/gasoline because of government malfeasance. This was revealed July 22, in a meeting of top oil/petroleum managers. The meeting came after Aliku Dangote, the owner/operator of the refinery, had charged last week that it was facing headwinds from both domestic Nigerian and overseas sources.
On Monday, July 22, an emergency meeting of the CEOs of the NNPCL, the NUPRC, the NMDPRA and the Dangote Refinery was convened by the Minister for Petroleum Resources, Heinken Lokpobiri. That is, the heads of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, Limited, the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority and Aliko Dangote were all in the same room. And, if you think that that represents a lot of people with a lot of oily hands in one room (or even, country), it gets even worse.
What had happened in the meantime was that the MEMAN, the Major Energies Marketers Association of Nigeria, had revealed that the price of petrol at the pump in Nigeria was about half that of both diesel and kerosene, which led IPMAN, the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria, to charge that the government—in this case the NNPC (which legally “owns” any and all of Nigeria’s crude oil)—was subsidizing the price of petrol without admitting it.
