Nigeria gov't says has no plan to privatise refineries

By Felix Onuah ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan has no plans to privatise the country's oil refineries, his spokesman said on Friday, contradicting a government pledge to do so last month. The Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) said late last month that Jonathan had approved a plan to sell the refineries, which have a combined capacity of 445,000 barrels per day (bpd), but run far below capacity due to decades of mismanagement in Africa's top oil producer. "The government has no plans to sell any of the nation's four refineries, so it's not true that Mr President approved the sale," presidential spokesman Reuben Abati said by telephone. Oil workers had threatened to strike over the plan. Oil Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke a few weeks earlier had also suggested the government was looking into the idea, which is part of the Petroleum Industry Bill (BIP) being debated in parliament since 2012. Abati declined to say whether Jonathan had changed his mind or whether the BPE statement had been incorrect. A BPE spokesman declined to comment. A government source said threats by the country's two main oil workers' unions to strike over the plan had persuaded the government to shelve the idea for the time being. The white collar Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), with 15,000 members, and the blue collar National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), with twice as many, had both threatened to call strikes unless the government withdrew the plan. A strike would have had little impact on upstream oil production, but there were fears of fuel shortages - a common problem anyway in Nigeria - that sparked some panic buying. Selling off the refineries is one of a range of planned economic reforms that have stalled, with the exception of power privatisation and some agricultural sector reforms. Despite pumping 2 million barrels of crude a day, Nigeria relies on imports for 80 percent of its fuel needs. Fixing its refineries - two in the main oil city of Port Harcourt, one in Warri in the south of the country and another in Kaduna, in the north, would lift growth beyond its current 7 percent, economists say. Several multi-million dollar maintenance contracts for Nigeria's refineries have been handed out over the last decade without much impact on their performance.