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 Nigeria-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.
“They are options that are always there.
But we think that there are ways we can raise our own potion of contribution to
the Joint Ventures. It will only be a last resort and we have not come anywhere
near that.” Osinbajo said
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