By our reporter| Nigeria’s minister of finance, budget and national planning, Zainab Ahmed, has said that the pump price of petrol will not be significantly reduced, even with coming on stream of the Dangote Refinery.
The much awaited Dangote refinery is expected to refine 650,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) upon completion by 2021.
Zainab who made the disclosure in an interview with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Ahmed explained that the refinery will sell its products at the international market price.
She said, “What we are doing is enabling the petroleum sector to actually grow. There have been a number of refineries that have been licensed for several years. None of them was willing to start refining under the regime that we had were fuel was controlled.”
“The Dangote refinery is sitting within an export processing zone so they are insulated from that. When we buy fuel from Dangote, we will be buying fuel at the international market price. The only savings that we will be making is the savings of freight which is shipping.
“But we will still have landing cost; labour cost and the marketers will still have to put a margin. These refineries being those that are supposed to have come to operate can now come in because they are assured that when they produce, they can sell at market rate and recover their investments and make some reasonable profits.”
According to the minister, the deregulation of the downstream end of the petroleum sector means that more refineries will open, employ people and refined petroleum products will be readily available in different parts of the country rather than rely on the government for supply.
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