Mele Kolo Kyari, the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has justified the plan to buy a 20 percent stake in the $11 billion Dangote refinery.
“There is no resource-dependent country that will watch a business of this scale, which borders on energy security and has implications for fiscal security of the country, and you don’t have a say,” Kyari said on Tuesday.
He spoke in an interview on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily, while also disclosing that the NNPC planned to borrow to pay for its shares.
He said: “For the Dangote refinery, we are not taking government money to buy it, which is the mistake that people are making. We are borrowing on the back of the cash-flow of this business. We know that this business is viable, it will work and it will return dividends. It has a cash-flow that is sustainable because refinery business, in the short term, will continue to be sustainable. That’s why banks have come forward to lend to us, so we can take equity in this.”
He noted that Dangote refinery will come into production by 2022 and it will deliver over 50 million litres of gasoline into the Nigerian markets.
Kyari added: “We are also working on our refineries, to ensure that we fix them. We have awarded the contract for Port Harcourt refinery rehabilitation. And ultimately we are going to close that of Warri and Kaduna very soon in July, so that all of them will work contemporaneously. The net effect is that you are going to have an environment where Nigeria becomes the hub of petroleum products and supply. It’s going to change the dynamics of petroleum supply globally in the sense that the flow is coming from Europe today and it is going to be reversed to some other direction. We will be the supplier for West Africa legitimately and also many other parts of the world.”