AFRICA richest man, Aliko Dangote, has dismissed hopes that Ajaokuta Steel Company, located in Kogi State, would ever work.
He said the company was obsolete and beyond rescue.
Speaking in a video shared on TVC’s X handle on Tuesday, September 16, the president of the Dangote Group stressed that while a strong steel industry was essential for national development, Ajaokuta’s outdated technology made it impossible to operate competitively.
He said: “There is no nation that you can build without a steel industry, and honestly within us here, Ajaokuta will not work. We can keep deceiving ourselves and keep being passionate about it, but it’s not possible.
“It’s like you now, if you remember those vehicles we used to produce from Volkswagen (Igala) if you bring Igala now, would you now compare it to the current Kia. No, things have changed.”
The Ajaokuta plant, located in Kogi State, was launched in 1979 but never reached full operation and has remained idle for more than 20 years despite repeated government promises and billions of naira spent on it.
In 2022, Nigeria agreed to pay $496 million to settle a dispute with an Indian company after a failed concession deal. Later that year, the government announced that 11 firms, including three from Russia, had shown interest in taking over the facility.
In 2023, the Minister of Steel Development, Shuaibu Audu, unveiled a roadmap to revive the plant, and by September 2024, the government signed an agreement with a Russian consortium for its rehabilitation.
In a statement signed by the Head of Press and Public Relations at the Federal Ministry of Steel Development, Salamatu Jibaniya, the ministry said the Russian Federation accepted the proposal after a TPE-led consortium inspected the Ajaokuta steel plant and the Itakpe iron ore mining site in August 2024, a visit that paved the way for the signing of the MoU.
The development followed President Bola Tinubu’s approval in January 2024 of the restart of the light steel section of the plant, after discussions with India’s Jindal Steel Group, which pledged a $5 billion investment in a new steel project in Nigeria during the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023.
However, speaking further on the state of the refinery, Dangote likened efforts to restart the plant to “going to a graveyard to bring back the dead” or asking “someone on a dying bed to run 100 metres.”
“Things have changed and all of us have to keep changing or you will become archaic. You have to change, now, when you carry something like Ajaokuta, it’s like you going to the graveyard to bring a dead person or you go to the hospital to bring somebody who is on the dying bed to come and run 100 metres. It’s totally impossible,” he said.
Mustapha Usman is an investigative journalist with the International Centre for Investigative Reporting. You can easily reach him via: musman@icirnigeria.com. He tweets @UsmanMustapha_M