The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, on Thursday, explained why the Federal Government is working hard to rehabilitate the country’s refineries.

Sylva, who featured in a Channels Television programme, Politics Today, said the federal government is not in the best position to manage the refineries.

He, however, assured Nigerians that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration would hand over the refineries to professional managers.

The minister’s statement came just 24 hours after the federal government approved contracts worth $1.4 billion for the rehabilitation of the Warri and Kaduna refineries.

He said: “I will agree with you that government is not the best manager of refineries and that is why this time, we are actually going to have professional managers to manage the refineries. We are not going to manage the refineries at all.”

Sylva dismissed claims that the government planned to sell the refineries in their present state.

He added: “We believe that we should get the refineries back to life before we decide on the option of whether we are going to privatise or sell all the refineries.

“If we try to sell the refineries which you call dead refineries, you will be the one first person to say we are selling dead refineries to people.

.“We want to sell live refineries; refineries that are working and I think that is the fairest thing for the government to do. This is why we have decided to get all our refineries working. We want to prove to you that we can get these refineries working.”