Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo says that the government is working to
reduce the price of petroleum products by encouraging and working with
private refineries and reducing importation. Osinbajo, who is in the UK
to sign the Nigeri
a-UK solar energy agreement, told Bloomberg in an interview...
"We are going to be unbundling the NNPC so that its various
components are effective core centres and are able to do their business
well. We are going to have private refineries at the site of the old
refineries, so they can benefit from the available infrastructure. So, we think that in the medium term, we would be able to get cheaper
pump price, pump price of oil would be cheaper because we would be
importing far less refined petroleum. A lot of that will be produced
locally.
“Now, we have well over 30 modular refineries licences, so
we think a lot of modular refineries would come. Many of them, their
major concern is feed stock, are we going to be guaranteed feed stock?
We are working on that. Once we are able to deal with that, we feel we
would substantially be able to reduce pump price and get the whole
business of importation of refined petroleum and the NNPC just getting
directly involved in business; we are going to reduce that. The
objective is to make the NNPC play more regulatory function.
