Nigeria’s Dangote refinery startup in doubt

The market is growing increasingly pessimistic about the potential timeline for the ‘game-changing’ West African refinery project

Nigeria’s lack of a functioning domestic refining sector has long been something between a running joke and an acute source of national embarrassment. Formerly state-owned NNPC’s elderly refinery assets seem to be in a perennial state of refurbishment, and previous expansion plans and new developments have consistently failed to materialise—much like other large infrastructure schemes in the corruption-plagued nation. At the same time, the government’s politically essential fuel subsidy programme—which is run through NNPC—swallows up significant volumes of the country’s sizeable crude export revenues, a situation that has become particularly acute in the current price environment. Much of th