The Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) appears, belatedly, to be stirring back to life following the Federal Government’s announcement of plans to sell Nigeria’s state-owned refineries. The move is striking not because of its ambition, but because it highlights how marginalised the BPE has become under President Muhammadu Buhari.
The BPE is the statutory agency charged with privatising Federal Government assets. In earlier administrations, its Director-General was among the most visible economic officials in the country—often more prominent in the news than state governors. Today, even seasoned business editors would struggle to name the current head of the agency.
This obscurity is not due to a lack of assets to sell. Rather, it reflects a deeper ideological shift in economic management under the Buhari administration.
From Market Reform to State Expansion
Previous Nigerian governments—at least rhetorically—embraced an economic philosophy that recognised the limits of state ownership and the efficiency gains of private enterprise. The central assumption was that Nigeria’s chronic underperformance stemmed in part from the over-concentration of economic power in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats.
The Buhari administration rejected this consensus. Instead of accelerating privatisation, it expanded state control across key sectors of the economy. According to a senior government source who spoke to Arbiterz, more than 140 memoranda seeking presidential direction on critical privatisation matters were sent to the Presidency within the first two years of Buhari’s first term. None received a response. The government also waited nearly two years before appointing a substantive Director-General for the BPE.
The result was institutional paralysis. Privatisation ceased to be a policy tool and became an afterthought.
The Sudden Return of the Auction List
Against this backdrop, the government’s sudden announcement of a sweeping asset sale programme looks less like reform and more like fiscal distress.
The list of assets earmarked for sale includes Nigeria’s four moribund refineries, alongside NITEL/MTEL, Yola Electricity Distribution Company, Zungeru Hydro Power Plant, NIPOST, Geregu Power Plant, National Integrated Power Projects (NIPP), Tafawa Balewa Square, the Lagos International Trade Fair Complex, and the Transmission Company of Nigeria.
The proposed sale mechanisms range from outright asset sales and core investor transactions to concessions, restructuring, and commercialisation. In the case of the refineries, the government plans a core investor sale—meaning a private investor would acquire 51 per cent equity.
The timeline for these disposals spans January 2021 to November 2022.
Refineries: A Familiar Story of Failure
Nigeria’s four refineries have a combined installed capacity of 445,000 barrels per day but have operated at roughly 15 per cent utilisation for years. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation recently disclosed that it would require about $1 billion to refurbish the Port Harcourt Refinery alone.
This is despite decades of spending on so-called “turnaround maintenance” that delivered no lasting improvement.
The current plan also revives memories of the controversial 2007 sale of the Port Harcourt Refinery to Blue Star—a consortium comprising Zenon Oil, Dangote Oil & Gas, and Transnational Corporation—which paid $561 million for a 51 per cent stake. That transaction was swiftly reversed by President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, in what became his first major economic policy decision.
A Fire Sale, Not Reform
Crucially, this asset sale is not anchored in a coherent reform programme. It is a cash-raising exercise born of fiscal strain.
Nigeria’s public finances are under severe pressure from mounting debt and weak revenues. In 2020, the country spent approximately 83 per cent of its revenue servicing debt. The 2021 federal budget allocated ₦3.12 trillion to debt servicing out of total expenditure of ₦13.6 trillion, while the government planned to raise an additional ₦4.28 trillion in new borrowing.
The International Monetary Fund has repeatedly warned that Nigeria’s debt-service-to-revenue ratio is unsustainable. In a recent Country Focus report, the IMF noted that the current fiscal structure leaves little room for social spending, infrastructure investment, or counter-cyclical policy in the event of an economic downturn.
Who Will Buy—and at What Cost?
Infrastructure assets do not trade on price alone. Their value depends heavily on regulatory certainty and policy credibility.
Here, the Buhari administration is at a disadvantage. Power sector reform has stalled as the government clings to subsidies rather than allowing cost-reflective tariffs that enable investors to recover capital. Announcements on fuel subsidy removal and electricity pricing have been marked by repeated reversals. Opportunities to push reforms during periods of political goodwill were squandered; the government is now too unpopular to risk labour unrest.
In such an environment, only politically connected Nigerian oligarchs—capable of navigating regulatory ambiguity and political risk—are likely to bid for multi-billion-dollar assets. The likely outcome is not competition, efficiency, or reform, but further concentration of economic power in a few hands.
That is not privatisation. It is distress selling.
