Pastor Enoch Adeboye told Nigerians at his yearly Abuja Special Holy Ghost Service to pray for God to help private refineries in the country succeed because of what he called efforts by powerful oil cabals to stop them.
According to Adeboye, powerful people in the oil and gas industry are purposely working against private refinery projects because they think these projects will hurt the fuel importation business, which helps a lot of powerful people.
While Adeboye didn’t name the Dangote Petroleum Refinery by name, his words show the bigger problems that private refineries in Nigeria have to deal with: people who make money by importing fuel have made things very hard for them.
The preacher also talked about how Nigeria’s government-owned refineries have not been working even though billions of naira have been spent on fixing them. He said it was funny that even though Nigeria has a lot of oil, it still spends a lot of money on importing oil goods.
Adeboye remembered the hope that grew when the current government stopped importing fuel, but those who liked things the way they were, like some people in the oil business, were angry about this. Adeboye said that this caused the value of the naira to start falling, and that without divine help, it could have gone down even more.
In his speech, Adeboye also talked about the problems private refineries are having, focusing on the problems one refinery owner is having. Even though a lot of money was spent on building a plant to help Nigeria become less dependent on fuel imports, the owner was reportedly not allowed to access local crude oil, so he had to bring in raw materials from the US.
Even when he was able to get crude oil from nearby, the owner of the refinery still had trouble setting prices and selling finished goods because prices were being pushed down by outside forces.
Adeboye asked why people are against letting a private plant succeed when a lot of money has been spent fixing up government refineries that have been left idle. He said that these kinds of actions would only hurt the Nigerian economy by making oil goods more expensive and making it harder for regular Nigerians to make ends meet.
Adeboye ended by telling everyone to pray that the problems would go away, because the country’s economy is hurting by its continued reliance on fuel imports.
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