Nigeria’s refineries started their 2020 financial year with losses as they posted a cumulative operational deficit of N9.6bn in January.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation manages the country’s three refineries – the Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company, the Port Harcourt Refining Company and the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company.
Latest figures on the financial performance of the facilities obtained from NNPC in Abuja on Wednesday showed that the deficits recorded by the refineries in most of the months of 2019 lingered till January 2020.
On March 26, 2020, The PUNCH exclusively reported that the refineries ended 2019 with N149.23bn loss as they jointly closed the 2019 fiscal year in deficit.
The report stated that the facilities pulled a cumulative revenue of N68.96bn but jointly incurred a total expense of N218.18bn in 2019.
The deficit continued into the new year as data from the national oil firm on Wednesday showed that KRPC, PHRC and WRPC posted N2.1bn, N4.38bn and N3.12bn losses respectively in January 2020.
The expenses of each of the refineries outweighed their revenues thereby resulting in the losses.
Kaduna refinery recorded a revenue of N2.84bn in January but incurred an expense of N4.93bn.
The Port Harcourt and Warri refineries made N10m and N36m respectively as revenues during the period under review.
Their expenses were, however, far higher as the refineries spent N4.39bn and N3.15bn respectively in January this year.
The Group Managing Director, NNPC, Mele Kyari, recently stated that the corporation would no longer be involved in the management of refineries after their rehabilitation.
Kyari had stated that upon completion of the ongoing rehabilitation exercise, the services of a company would be procured to manage the plants on an operations and maintenance basis.
The GMD had said, “We are going to get an O&M contract; NNPC won’t run it. We are going to get a firm that will guarantee that this plant would run for some time.”
He added that the corporation would apply the same process for the running of the other two refineries.
