The Vice President, Oil and Gas, at Dangote Industries Limited(DIL), Devakumar Edwin while speaking to a group of journalists at a one-day training programme, organised by the Dangote Group stated that It appears that the objective of the IOCs is to ensure that Nigeria remains a country which exports Crude Oil and imports refined Petroleum Products.
Mr Edwin said the IOCs are wilfully frustrating the refinery’s efforts to buy local crude by jerking up high premium price above the market price.
“It is either they are deliberately asking for ridiculous/humongous premium or, they simply state that crude is not available. At some point, we paid $6 over and above the market price. This has forced us to reduce our output as well as import crude from countries as far as the US, increasing our cost of production.
They (IOCs) are keen on exporting the raw materials to their home countries, creating employment and wealth for their countries, adding to their GDP, and dumping the expensive refined products into Nigeria – thus making us to be dependent on imported products.
It is the same strategy the multinationals have been adopting in every commodity, making Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa to be facing unemployment and poverty, while they create wealth for themselves at our expense. This is exploitation!”
However, he added that despite these challenges, the refinery is in its final stages of testing and is set to be rolled out next month.
The Dangote Industries Vice President went on to say that the Nigerian government plays into their hands by continually issuing import licences in large quantities to traders who are buying the extremely high sulphur diesel from Russia and dumping it in the Nigerian Market. Since the US, EU and UK imposed a Price Cap Scheme from 5th February, 2023 on Russian Petroleum Products, a large number of vessels are waiting near Togo with Russian ultra-high sulphur diesel and, they are being purchased and dumped into the Nigerian Market. All this, in spite of the fact that Dangote refinery is producing and bringing out diesel into the market, complying with ECOWAS regulations and standard.
“In fact, some of the European countries were so alarmed about the carcinogenic effect of the extra high sulphur diesel being dumped into the Nigerian Market that countries like Belgium and the Netherlands imposed a ban on such fuel being exported from its country, into West Africa, recently. It is sad that the country is giving import licences for such dirty diesel to be imported into Nigeria, when we have more than adequate petroleum refining capacity locally…” he lamented further.
Recently, the government of Ghana, through legislation has banned the importation of highly contaminated diesel and PMS into their county. It is regrettable that, in Nigeria, import licences are granted despite knowing that we have the capacity to produce nearly double the amount of products needed in Nigeria and even export the surplus. Since January 2021, ECOWAS regulations have prohibited the import of highly contaminated diesel into the region.” he said.
Chairman of the Dangote Refinery, Aliko Dangote in a recent interview, said that the oil mafia trying to stop his company from refining petroleum products are “stronger than the drug mafia”. The Crude Oil Refinery Owners Association of Nigeria, CORAN, the umbrella body of operators of the many upstart modular refineries, has also issued a statement affirming that they had repeatedly complained of difficulty in sourcing crude oil but have not received any positive feedback.
We call on President Bola Tinubu who is the Minister of Petroleum Resources to act fast to guarantee a sufficient supply of crude oil and to safeguard our refiners from sabotage, the import licences of traders bringing in contaminated (dirty) diesel should be revoked and banned from bringing diesel or oil into the Nigerian market. The strength of our economic recovery
depends heavily on local oil refining.
