THE WARRI REFINERY DOES NOT BELONG IN JIAXING
The answer to the Warri refinery is not in Jiaxing, but with indigenous contractors, argues
MOHAMMED ABDULLAHI
On April 30, 2026, NNPC’s Group Chief Executive Officer Bashir Bayo Ojulari sat in Jiaxing City, China, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with two Chinese firms for the rehabilitation and operation of the Warri and Port Harcourt refineries. The statement landed three days later. It was presented as progress. Progress toward what, exactly, deserves an answer.
The Warri refinery has been largely inactive since May 24, 2025, when it was shut down for maintenance initially expected to last thirty days. Subsequent technical and commercial reviews revealed deeper structural and financial challenges. By February 2026, NNPC’s own CEO had disclosed that the refineries were operating at significant losses. This follows a rehabilitation that cost Nigeria close to $900 million. A refinery that was declared operational with fanfare in December 2024 and shut down one month later. A national asset that has swallowed billions across decades of turnaround maintenance cycles, each one ending in the same place; broken, shuttered, and extending its hand for the next round of public funding.
The Chinese MOU may feel like a solution. It is a pattern wearing a new address.
Before Nigeria hands a strategic national asset to firms from Jiaxing and Fuzhou, it should look at what its own private sector has been doing; quietly, without fanfare, without MOUs signed in foreign industrial parks — in the same oil and gas sector over the past decades.
Indigenous firms now account for over 60 percent of Nigeria’s current crude oil and gas output. At the forefront are companies like Conoil, Seplat Energy, and Aradel Holdings. We have the local capacity in our private sector to meet this need.
These are not emerging companies finding their footing. They are established operators with proven track records across Nigeria’s most demanding operating environments; the Niger Delta, shallow offshore, swamp terrain, aging infrastructure, security challenges, and regulatory complexity that would test any operator in the world.
Seplat Energy and Aradel recorded strong production growth in the first half of 2025 — driven by fresh asset acquisitions, improved infrastructure uptime, and tighter operational discipline. Seplat has absorbed ExxonMobil’s upstream assets and is reviving wells that had been idle for years. Aradel is operating across the upstream, midstream and downstream value chain simultaneously. Conoil, one of Nigeria’s oldest integrated energy companies, brings decades of downstream operational experience to the table.
Seplat Energy reported total assets of ₦9.36 trillion as of the first half of 2025. Aradel’s balance sheet stood at ₦1.81 trillion. These are not the balance sheets of companies that need to be bypassed in favour of Chinese industrial firms whose primary record of engagement in Africa is infrastructure debt, not operational partnership.
The argument for handing Warri to foreign operators has always rested on the premise that Nigerian companies lack the technical and financial capacity to operate a refinery at scale. That argument was marginal ten years ago. Today it is simply false. The same companies that are producing over 60 percent of Nigeria’s crude output, that are acquiring billion-dollar assets from international oil companies, building gas processing facilities, operating pipeline infrastructure, and managing integrated energy portfolios are precisely the companies that should be in the room when Warri’s future is decided. Not as observers. As bidders.
This is also a question of what kind of industrial economy Nigeria is building. The Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act of 2010 was designed for exactly this moment. It exists to ensure that as Nigeria’s oil and gas sector develops, the technical capacity, the employment, the value creation, and the institutional knowledge accumulate inside the country rather than flowing outward to foreign contractors and operators. Handing the Warri refinery to Chinese firms under a bilateral MOU without a transparent, competitive process that gives Nigerian companies with demonstrated sector capacity a genuine opportunity to bid, is a violation of that principle in everything but the letter of the law.
China’s infrastructure and industrial partnerships across Africa follow a well-documented commercial logic: the projects get done, the debt accumulates, and the strategic assets increasingly serve Chinese industrial and supply chain interests alongside, sometimes ahead of, the host nation’s. That is not a conspiracy. It is a contractual reality that any honest assessment of Belt and Road projects across the continent would confirm. Zambia’s experience with Chinese-financed infrastructure. Ethiopia’s railway. The port deals across East and West Africa. The pattern is not invisible. It simply gets ignored in the urgency of getting something, anything, done.
Nigeria does not need to choose between a broken government-operated refinery and a Chinese-managed one. There is a third option that the Jiaxing visit appears to have skipped: a transparent, competitive privatisation or long-term concession process, open to all qualified bidders, with Nigerian companies carrying the demonstrated capacity to bid given equal access and equal consideration on the merits.
Former President Obasanjo recently made the point that the NLNG, where the private sector holds 51 percent and government 49 percent, is the model that actually works in Nigeria’s oil sector. The lesson is clear: not full government control, not opaque foreign partnership, but structured private sector involvement with Nigerian content at its core.
The Warri refinery has consumed close to $900 million in rehabilitation funds. It has been declared operational and shut down within weeks. It has been the subject of committee reports, expert panels, presidential directives, and now a Chinese MOU. What it has never been is the subject of a genuine, transparent, competitive process that asks Nigerian companies with deep sector expertise to step forward and make their case.
Local players such as Seplat Energy, Aradel Holdings, and Conoil are realigning portfolios and pursuing new development opportunities, reinforcing the role of indigenous operators in sustaining output growth. These companies are not waiting for the government to hand them opportunities. They are building capacity, closing deals, and running operations that would have seemed ambitious a decade ago. The question is whether the government can match that ambition with a procurement process worthy of it.
The answer to the Warri refinery is not in Jiaxing. It never was. It is in Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Abuja; in the boardrooms of companies that have spent decades earning the right to be trusted with exactly this kind of national asset.
Open the process. Set the criteria. Let them bid. The capacity is there. The only thing missing is the political will to use it.
Abdullahi writes from Abuja