Public Sector Performance in the Nigerian Downstream Oil Sector: A Critical Reflection

Despite successive attempts to effectively manage Nigeria’s downstream oil sector by strengthening the country’s institutional capacity, the Nigerian public institutions remain ineffective, inefficient, wasteful, incapacitated, inept, unprofessional and uninspired to drive the reform in the downstream oil sector. Public institutions have failed to successively oversee management of the downstream oil sector. This paper draws on the new public management theory and unstructured interviews to assess the role of public institutions in the distribution and marketing segments of the oil sector. It concludes that poor public sector performance is responsible for the crisis in the oil industry that led to subsidy cuts and efforts to deregulate the downstream oil sector.