The Federal Government says it will support the Dangote Refinery and PetroChemical Company with feedstocks when the project is completed. Timipre Sylva, minister of state for petroleum resources, made this pledge when he visited the refinery at Ibeju, Lekki, Lagos, on Sunday.
The minister, who described the project as the most impressive ever embarked upon by a Nigerian investor, said it is important that Dangote Refinery gets every support as this could also encourage other investors to come to the country.
He said the government would be ready to support it by providing crude oil and gas as feedstocks for both the refinery and the fertilizer companies, and urged the president of Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, to put his requests forward for consideration by the government.
Speaking further on the projects, Alike Dangote said the driving force behind the establishment of the companies was that he believed in Nigeria, saying, “There is need to satisfy the Nigerian market. If we don’t do it nobody would do that for us.”
He stated further that the growing population of the country was one of the reasons for putting up the projects, as “our population grows at about 3 percent annually and there is need to meet the supply needs of this population.”
Apart from this, he said Nigeria is supposed to feed the entire West and Central African markets as net exporter of petroleum product.
In his reaction, Mele Kyari, group managing director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), said the NNPC would complement Dangote Refinery to make Nigeria net exporter of petroleum products to the West African market. This, he said, cannot be achieved unless all the stakeholders in both the public and private sector complement each other.
