FrontLineNews

  The ceremony around the planned visit by the Nigerian President to the Dangote Refinery on May 22, 2023, will peak with a cutting of the ribbon, inaugurating the 650,000 Barrels per stream Day Plant, located in the Eastern flank of Lagos, the country’s commercial city. Everyone, it seems, look forward to the production of petroleum products from the plant after that symbolic activity. But it will not happen. As President Muhammadu Buhari leaves office a week after commissioning one of the largest single train hydrocarbon processing plants on the planet, he could be forgiven for believing he had had his wish to be in such a large place but technology does not sit well with politics. The ongoing technical commissioning process has not gotten anywhere close to the point of introducing raw hydrocarbon into the plant, let alone delivering petroleum products. One key challenge of Nigeria’s chattering classes is that they hardly look up the regulation. Hydrocarbon will be introduced only wh