The Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) has urged the Federal government to fix all the state-owned refineries and also diversify into exploring other mineral resources apart from crude oil in order to expand the country’s revenue base.
The call was made by the President of the association, Mr Festus Osifo, at the union’s national executive council meeting held on Thursday in Lagos.
Calling on the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and other relevant authorities to make all the refineries functional, Osifo argued that in addition to facilitating energy security, fixing the refineries will provide primary and secondary jobs.
“We will also have the opportunity of getting a lot of foreign exchange when these refineries are working because the value chain is quite enormous.
“For us in PENGASSAN, we will continually push until all the refineries are working,” he said.
Harnessing other resources for more revenue
He also encouraged the Federal Government to harness other resources such as gold and bitumen, among others, to boost the country’s revenue.
“However, that expansion of our revenue base must be how to harness our material resources and our mineral resources.
“Nigeria is a country that is blessed extremely with huge mineral resources. Is it the bitumen that you have in Ondo? Is it the tin that you have in Jos? Is it the gold that you have in Zamfara and many parts of Nigeria?
“We can go on and on, but these are lying fallow. The way we can generate jobs is for us to tap into these material resources and not to export them as raw materials but to create value, to add value to them, “ he argued.
Osifo also argued that Nigeria’s 2025 Budget with a total expenditure of N47.90 trillion was too low.
He noted that the country is blessed with human resources and endowed with mineral resources.
“We should be talking about a budget size of $200 billion; we should be able, as a country, to harness the resources that we are blessed with so that our budget size will be much more compared to where it is today, “ he noted.
What you should know
The Federal Government recorded N14.55 trillion in revenue by the end of Q3 2024, according to President Bola Tinubu while speaking on the 2024 Budget performance during his presentation of the 2025 budget.
Nairametrics reported that the President targets N34.8 trillion naira as revenue in 2025, on the promise that he would boost oil production and exports.
He also pledged to boost the Agriculture and mining sectors.
