By Meshach Mejebi in Asaba
Support staff at NNPC Ltd.’s 125,000Barrels Per Stream Day (BPSD) capacity Warri refinery in Nigeria’s Niger Delta basin have not been paid for two months, marking a recurring situation at the facility.
Warri refinery support staff said while technicians, equipment operators and safety professionals have not been paid for 60 days, other categories of support staff, including cleaners, are yet to be paid for all of 2025. Africa Oil+Gas Report reported in August 2025 that Warri refinery support staff were owed 120 days of pay.
NNPC Refineries Coordinator Bayo Adenrele made two successive public appearances at the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry and at the Oil Trading and Logistics (OTL) conference, also in Lagos, on October 22 and October 28 2025, respectively. For refineries to be successful, “Policy certainty is key. Smart financing, looking at PPP models, and human capital investments, investing in human capital is equally critical”, Adenrele said at OTL.
But in a January 16 2026 letter addressed to Mr. Adenrele by the Warri refinery support staff and seen by Africa Oil+Gas Report, the workers said they were writing out of “deep concern, pain and prolonged frustration” at the “suspension of training and capacity-building programmes” and “non-payment of salaries since November 2025”, among other troubling issues.
NNPC’s Corporate Communications office told Africa Oil+Gas Report the company acknowledges payment timeline problems for support staff, “involving certain third-party contractors supporting refinery operations” at Warri. “Payments to the majority of contractors have been completed up to September 2025, while outstanding payments for subsequent periods are currently progressing through internal review and approval processes in line with agreed contract terms”, NNPC said.
NNPC “intentionally curtailed” operations at the Warri refinery in January 2025, “to carry out necessary intervention works on select equipment, including field instruments that were impacting sustainable and steady operations”, the company explained. The interventions were successfully completed by the next month but Warri has remained shut since the first month of 2025. The current management of NNPC has indicated that Warri’s December 2024 restart was “ill-informed and sub-commercial”. The former management, which restarted then shut Warri, had also cancelled allocations of crude oil feedstock to the refinery, exporting the allocations instead.
Warri saw the start of a $492Million quick-fix project to restore 60% of its nameplate capacity by the Nigerian subsidiary of South Korea’s Daewoo Engineering and Construction in June 2022, leading to the refinery’s restart in the closing month of 2024, before the interventions of January 2025 became necessary. NNPC’s three refineries operated below 19% of their combined 445,000BOPD capacity between 2009 and 2019 when Warri refinery’s process units were shut.
Nigerian public opinion was for several years arrayed against the salaries and other overhead costs of the low-performing NNPC refineries. Intense national criticism and the growing casualisation of the workforce at Warri refinery seem to have gone together, with support staff now amounting to almost 70% of the facility’s workers. Warri refinery support staff have not seen any upward review of their pay package since 2015, despite the various cost-of-living crises that have rocked Nigeria in the past decade. NNPC went further and did not renew the contracts of many of the support staff from 2019.
Warri support staff are the frontline keepers of the massive investments represented by the refinery. The support staff also remain responsible for internal revenue generation activities even when the refinery process units are not running, including the operation of facilities that Nigeria’s most successful, privately-owned modular refineries rely on for their petroleum product exports. Warri support staff are also critical to any successful restart of the refinery, as was demonstrated when many whose contracts were not renewed before the Covid-19 pandemic were called back to support the Daewoo quick-fix project in 2022. NNPC in its statement to AOGR said it “recognises the importance” of the Warri refinery support staff “to safe and efficient operations and appreciate their continued engagement and patience”.
“New contracts are being designed to comprehensively address conditions of service, including pensions, taxes, training, and medical benefits, with the objective of providing improved clarity, stability, and protections for affected workers. These contracts are expected to come into effect by June 30 2026”, NNPC told Africa Oil+Gas Report.
The new NNPC management initially said it was open to selling off its three refineries before later ruling out such sales in 2025, suggesting that despite their problematic history and uncertain future trajectory Nigeria’s state-owned refineries are valuable. And the example of the now privately-owned Eleme Petrochemicals facility is that ownership and management committed to commercial excellence may be all that is missing at such national plants.
NNPC said in October 2025 that a “technical and commercial review” of Warri refinery was ongoing “for comprehensive assessment [to] high-grade or repurpose as may be required to ensure optimal performance and sustainability”. NNPC aims to select “technical equity partners who have a track record of operating refineries to international standards”, the company said. Africa Oil+Gas Report reported exclusively in November 2025 that NNPC had narrowed its considerations down to three potential technical equity partners.
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