FG Has No Business Building Refineries -Jonathan

 Dapo Falade and Gill Nsa-Abasi

 PRESIDENT Goodluck Jonathan has declared that the Federal Government has no business getting involved in the building and maintenance of refineries, saying that the task should left to public private partnership venture.

He made this known in Uyo, Akwa Ibom, on Friday while responding to various issues raised by the people of the state during the townhall meting organised by the state government as part of activities lined up for the two-day presidential visit.

 Rather than getting directly involved in building refineries, the president said that the government would be playing the role of a regulator, monitoring the activities of the would-be investors and other stakeholders in the oil industry.

 Stating that his administration would encourage Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the task of ensuring adequate petroleum supply, Jonathan also said that to achieve optimal level in the oil sector, there was the need to arrive at an appropriate pricing system.

 While expressing optimism that the country would get over the problem of perennial acute power supply, President Jonathan  said that it would be out of place for him to be precise about when a fairly stable power supply would be attained.


 On the problem of power supply, I cannot be exactly precise about when the country would attain a fairly stable power supply, even if I am a witch doctor. There is no doubt that we have a target, but it will be out of place to say precisely when we would get there, but we are still widely consulting all the stakeholders on the issue,he said.

The president also dashed the hopes of those who were calling for the return of primary and secondary schools to missionaries as he said that returning those schools to their original owners would be difficult.

 Declaring that the Federal Government had no business in managing primary and secondary schools, he said that there was no point talking about returning some categories of schools to the missions, adding that it would be better for missions who were interested to establish new ones.