godfatherx:
If Tons of steel starts rolling out of that factory before 2019 elections, I will change my mind and vote for Buhari.

Hope this is not another Lai Mohammed project.

CSTR1003:
The technology there is obsolete.

I hope they improve on them and get that shitt running again churning out millions of tons of steel.

I am not optimistic about it though. I have zero confidence in the buhari administration.

FriendNG:


https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/nigeria-steel-factory-open-40-years-180616102446497.html

CSTR1003:
The technology there is obsolete.

I hope they improve on them and get that shitt running again churning out millions of tons of steel.

I am not optimistic about it though. I have zero confidence in the buhari administration.

diebuhari1:
Why not wait till it starts production? Only a Yoruba muslim will take this rubbish you wrote seriously.

diebuhari1:
Why not wait till it starts production? Only a Yoruba muslim will take this rubbish you wrote seriously.

SlayQueenSlayer:


"The technology there is obsolete."

Exactly my point. Imported still will still end up way more cheaper. That technology is decades behind.

TonyeBarcanista:
I hope this is not another APC propaganda? Just the way you guys "started" Ogoni clean up since August 2015 yet NOTHING has been done 3 years after...

MartinCorridon:
BruncleZuma so you are so ashamed of your br***less comment, you made it seem i wrote it.

How hilarious. . Have the balls to own it nah as ridiculous as it was

yemmight:
Me I know Buhari really mean well for the nation if not for the likes of Saraki and co.

OMEGA009:
No Nigerian can visit Ajaokuta Steel Company ASC, see investments of more than $8b rotting in the African sun and not cry. i went there, I cried. what exactly is the problem? if I have written severally on this topic, but today let me do a comprehensive post.

Ajaokuta Steel Company is massive, she has 68km road network, 24 housing estates on the project. Some of the estates have over 1,000 homes, a seaport, a 110mw power generation plant, there are 43 separate plants in Ajaokuta alone. It is estimated that if Ajaokuta becomes operational, it will create 500,000 jobs.

There is no industrialized nation on earth that does not have a steel sector it’s that simple. A report by the Central Bank of Nigeria shows that Nigeria currently imports steel, aluminum products and associated derivatives of approximately 25 metric tonnes per annum estimated at $4.5bn, this figure will continue to rise, and the Nigerian economy continues to expand. Ajaokuta is an integrated steel company, it was designed by the Russian to be self-sufficient to get all its inputs from Nigeria and make steel. Ajaokuta strength is also its weakness, Ajaokuta can only work with all inputs available.



this will be a slightly technical post, but please try and follow.



Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon amongst other things, iron is the base metal in steel, to make steel, you need Iron Ore, Coke from Coal, Limestone as main components. these components are mixed in a blast furnace to produce liquid steel which can be long steel for rail lines or flat steel for automobile making etc

To give a simple example, look at steel as making jollof rice, iron ore is the rice, the limestone and coke are the pepper and salt the pot is the blast furnace. At a steel plane the blast furnace is ONLY turned on when the steel company is ready to make steel. Blast furnaces operate continuously and are never shut down. The raw material to be fed into the furnace is divided into several small charges that are introduced into the furnace at 10- to 15-min intervals. this means everything must be in place BEFORE the blast furnace is turned on, the iron ore, the coal, the limestone, everything, why? Because you do not switch off a blast furnace for another 10 years or however its campaign life is.



Nigeria has blessed with all the major raw materials needed to produce steel including iron ore in Kogi, coal and limestone in Enugu.

Nigerian iron has very low iron concentration. Agbaja has the largest iron ore deposit in Nigeria with about 2 billion tonnes but the Agbaja iron ore has a high phosphate content. Phosphate can cause brittleness in steel making it to fracture, thus Agbaga was abandoned for Itakpe. Itakpe iron ore has no issues with phosphate but has low iron content, thus to make steel with Nigeria iron ore, a process called “beneficiation” has to be done to process the Itakpe ores to raise its iron content to meet the required standard for steel production.

Coal? Most of the coal found in Nigeria is non-coking, thus, unsuitable for steel production. coal deposits in Enugu, have no impurities but are non-coking. The good news? Nigeria has abundant deposit of limestone and we have natural gas to provide power



So back to Ajaokuta, what really happened? why can Nigeria not make steel anytime soon? let’s link up the elements

Policy Failure: The Ajaokuta contract was signed between the Nigerian government and the Soviet state-owned company, Tiajpromexport (TPE) the company was scheduled for completion in 1986. In 2012, the Federal Government launched her backward integration policy. Going forward import licenses for steel products was only granted to companies producing steel locally. TPE to ensure they could import steel parts for Ajaokuta simply went ahead and built the rolling mills in Ajaokuta before the actual steel plant was completed, they imported billet from Ukraine to accomplish this. Thus, Ajaokuta was producing steel before the actual steel plant was started. Thus, amazingly Ajaokuta has a functional rolling mills but no operational blast furnace, Ajaokuta cannot produce steel from basic iron ore found in Nigeria in her blast furnace.…this is the definition of cart before the horse.


NIOMCO Factor: The iron ore in Nigeria earmarked for Ajaokuta is from Itakpe, it has low iron content thus the FG built National Iron Ore Mining Company (NIOMCO) a 2.15 metric tonnes beneficiation plant designed to process the low-quality iron ore from Itakpe to iron ore suitable for Ajaokuta Steel. Simply put, if NIOMCO does not operate, Ajaokuta CANNOT operate (unless Ajaokuta uses imported iron ore.) as at today, June 17th 2018, NIOMCO is not operational




Railway: 15m tonnes of iron ore cannot be moved by road, as it will destroy the roads, thus a railway was to be built from Itakpe to Ajaokuta to take iron ore from the beneficiation plan in Itakpe to the Ajaokuta. The. Itakpe to Ajaokuta by rail is just 52km, the rail line was to be delivered by March 2019, but the Minister of Transportation Rotimi Amaechi revised the delivery date to June 2018 and converted the purely commercial railway to also carry human passengers. These changes meant the cost of the project and delivery dates had to change as passenger wagons and train stations had to be built. To achieve this, 12 new passenger stations and 12 access roads had to be designed and built. The Itakpe to Ajaokuta (IA) has two stations. As at June 2018, The station IA1 – Eganyi to Itakpe, is still under design. Station AW1 – Ajaokuta (standard station) (zero per cent work done). Thus the railways are not functional


Blast Furnace: The furnace in Ajaokuta is the heart of Ajaokuta, it is the pot where the jollof rice will be cooked, however it has never been turned on, why? because there has never been any time Ajaokuta has had raw materials available to ensure continuous day in day out production for 5 years. Why has there never been materials? Because there is no rail way to take iron ore from Itakpe to Ajaokuta. Why is there no railway from Itakpe to Ajaokuta? Because NIOMCO in Itakpe is moribund and no functional and cannot convert Nigeria iron ore to high grade ore for the furnace in Ajaokuta.


So, it follows that for Ajaokuta to work, we MUST have three key critical paths



NIOMCO must be functional
Itakpe to Ajaokuta Railway line must be functional
Blast Furnace operational
All three are not functional, so its clear Nigeria cannot make steel in Ajaokuta. Nothing however stops a corrupt government official from importing billets and running them in the rolling mills to deceive tax payers. So, when anyone tells you Ajaokuta will soon work ask them, can a steel plant work without NIOMCO, railways and a blast furnace?



All is not gloom, Kayode Fayemi as Minister was able to secure an out of court about Ajaokuta, we must build on this



In closing, Ajaokuta is the only steel plant in the world built by the USSR, sold to Americans, then to Indians, all these teams have come and gone with their own technical style, there have even been accusations of asset stripping by the Indians.



So why this post? because I am a patriot, I will not sit by and watch scarce resources be wasted in a grand deceit. Probably some corrupt folks have told Mr President that Ajaokuta can produce economically viable steel if “small” dollars are spent. You can already see how the critical rail line delivery dates was moved back to ensure it is done in time for 2019 elections, yet it is still in design stage. Ajaokuta is Nigeria and probably Africa biggest failure. It has failed. Can it be made to work yes but the cost to integrate Ajaokuta with her mines and rails can be used to build new smaller modern turn key functional steel mills. The government should get out of Ajaokuta, sell the place and allows the private sector capital and expertise restructure and own it.



If you want to make jollof rice and there is no rice the solution is not to keep boiling water without rice but to go and get rice.

oneligeria:
Government started Ajaokuta Steel Company many years ago, till now, nothing reasonable is coming from that investment. Does it make economic sense to have investment that is consuming billions of naira without any tangible output?

The problem with Ajaokuta is that we did not follow expert advice for siting the project for easy accessibility to raw materials. It was after installing that we started building rails to link up. That plant ought to have been completed in three years but now it is obsolete.

The steel making technology has changed totally since we started this plant. In terms of size, Ajaokuta Steel Company is the largest integrated steel company in West Africa and has cost the Federal Government an estimated sum of about $7 billion (N1.1 trillion) since it was commissioned by the Shehu Shagari government in 1979. But, unfortunately, the plant has suffered serious set back.

The economic implication is that the cost has increased. So, after finishing, the products may not be competitive again. It means the products will not be sold at the market price that will allow them to make profits, or a reasonable marginal increase.

What is the difference between Ajaokuta Steel Company in Nigeria and Pohany Steel in South Korea ?

There are a lot of differences, but the major difference is viability. For instance, Ajaokuta project started over 30 years ago; up till now, no tangible output is realised from the project. Pohany Steel is the third latest in the world and they finished the first plant in just two years. Pohany Steel started with about 300,000 capacity but has over 8.6million tonnes capacity, showing that the investment is yielding maximum outputs

- Kalu Idika Kalu

Cholison:
Thisvis pure PROPAGANDA nothing is working at Ajaokuta for now.

SlayQueenSlayer:


"The technology there is obsolete."

Exactly my point. Imported still will still end up way more cheaper. That technology is decades behind.

seunny4lif:
AJ don collect bribe.


Who still dey believe AJ
2019 election on the way and APC wan tell us Story
It's story telling time

OMEGA009:
No Nigerian can visit Ajaokuta Steel Company ASC, see investments of more than $8b rotting in the African sun and not cry. i went there, I cried. what exactly is the problem? if I have written severally on this topic, but today let me do a comprehensive post.

Ajaokuta Steel Company is massive, she has 68km road network, 24 housing estates on the project. Some of the estates have over 1,000 homes, a seaport, a 110mw power generation plant, there are 43 separate plants in Ajaokuta alone. It is estimated that if Ajaokuta becomes operational, it will create 500,000 jobs.

There is no industrialized nation on earth that does not have a steel sector it’s that simple. A report by the Central Bank of Nigeria shows that Nigeria currently imports steel, aluminum products and associated derivatives of approximately 25 metric tonnes per annum estimated at $4.5bn, this figure will continue to rise, and the Nigerian economy continues to expand. Ajaokuta is an integrated steel company, it was designed by the Russian to be self-sufficient to get all its inputs from Nigeria and make steel. Ajaokuta strength is also its weakness, Ajaokuta can only work with all inputs available.



this will be a slightly technical post, but please try and follow.



Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon amongst other things, iron is the base metal in steel, to make steel, you need Iron Ore, Coke from Coal, Limestone as main components. these components are mixed in a blast furnace to produce liquid steel which can be long steel for rail lines or flat steel for automobile making etc

To give a simple example, look at steel as making jollof rice, iron ore is the rice, the limestone and coke are the pepper and salt the pot is the blast furnace. At a steel plane the blast furnace is ONLY turned on when the steel company is ready to make steel. Blast furnaces operate continuously and are never shut down. The raw material to be fed into the furnace is divided into several small charges that are introduced into the furnace at 10- to 15-min intervals. this means everything must be in place BEFORE the blast furnace is turned on, the iron ore, the coal, the limestone, everything, why? Because you do not switch off a blast furnace for another 10 years or however its campaign life is.



Nigeria has blessed with all the major raw materials needed to produce steel including iron ore in Kogi, coal and limestone in Enugu.

Nigerian iron has very low iron concentration. Agbaja has the largest iron ore deposit in Nigeria with about 2 billion tonnes but the Agbaja iron ore has a high phosphate content. Phosphate can cause brittleness in steel making it to fracture, thus Agbaga was abandoned for Itakpe. Itakpe iron ore has no issues with phosphate but has low iron content, thus to make steel with Nigeria iron ore, a process called “beneficiation” has to be done to process the Itakpe ores to raise its iron content to meet the required standard for steel production.

Coal? Most of the coal found in Nigeria is non-coking, thus, unsuitable for steel production. coal deposits in Enugu, have no impurities but are non-coking. The good news? Nigeria has abundant deposit of limestone and we have natural gas to provide power



So back to Ajaokuta, what really happened? why can Nigeria not make steel anytime soon? let’s link up the elements

Policy Failure: The Ajaokuta contract was signed between the Nigerian government and the Soviet state-owned company, Tiajpromexport (TPE) the company was scheduled for completion in 1986. In 2012, the Federal Government launched her backward integration policy. Going forward import licenses for steel products was only granted to companies producing steel locally. TPE to ensure they could import steel parts for Ajaokuta simply went ahead and built the rolling mills in Ajaokuta before the actual steel plant was completed, they imported billet from Ukraine to accomplish this. Thus, Ajaokuta was producing steel before the actual steel plant was started. Thus, amazingly Ajaokuta has a functional rolling mills but no operational blast furnace, Ajaokuta cannot produce steel from basic iron ore found in Nigeria in her blast furnace.…this is the definition of cart before the horse.


NIOMCO Factor: The iron ore in Nigeria earmarked for Ajaokuta is from Itakpe, it has low iron content thus the FG built National Iron Ore Mining Company (NIOMCO) a 2.15 metric tonnes beneficiation plant designed to process the low-quality iron ore from Itakpe to iron ore suitable for Ajaokuta Steel. Simply put, if NIOMCO does not operate, Ajaokuta CANNOT operate (unless Ajaokuta uses imported iron ore.) as at today, June 17th 2018, NIOMCO is not operational




Railway: 15m tonnes of iron ore cannot be moved by road, as it will destroy the roads, thus a railway was to be built from Itakpe to Ajaokuta to take iron ore from the beneficiation plan in Itakpe to the Ajaokuta. The. Itakpe to Ajaokuta by rail is just 52km, the rail line was to be delivered by March 2019, but the Minister of Transportation Rotimi Amaechi revised the delivery date to June 2018 and converted the purely commercial railway to also carry human passengers. These changes meant the cost of the project and delivery dates had to change as passenger wagons and train stations had to be built. To achieve this, 12 new passenger stations and 12 access roads had to be designed and built. The Itakpe to Ajaokuta (IA) has two stations. As at June 2018, The station IA1 – Eganyi to Itakpe, is still under design. Station AW1 – Ajaokuta (standard station) (zero per cent work done). Thus the railways are not functional


Blast Furnace: The furnace in Ajaokuta is the heart of Ajaokuta, it is the pot where the jollof rice will be cooked, however it has never been turned on, why? because there has never been any time Ajaokuta has had raw materials available to ensure continuous day in day out production for 5 years. Why has there never been materials? Because there is no rail way to take iron ore from Itakpe to Ajaokuta. Why is there no railway from Itakpe to Ajaokuta? Because NIOMCO in Itakpe is moribund and no functional and cannot convert Nigeria iron ore to high grade ore for the furnace in Ajaokuta.


So, it follows that for Ajaokuta to work, we MUST have three key critical paths



NIOMCO must be functional
Itakpe to Ajaokuta Railway line must be functional
Blast Furnace operational
All three are not functional, so its clear Nigeria cannot make steel in Ajaokuta. Nothing however stops a corrupt government official from importing billets and running them in the rolling mills to deceive tax payers. So, when anyone tells you Ajaokuta will soon work ask them, can a steel plant work without NIOMCO, railways and a blast furnace?



All is not gloom, Kayode Fayemi as Minister was able to secure an out of court about Ajaokuta, we must build on this



In closing, Ajaokuta is the only steel plant in the world built by the USSR, sold to Americans, then to Indians, all these teams have come and gone with their own technical style, there have even been accusations of asset stripping by the Indians.



So why this post? because I am a patriot, I will not sit by and watch scarce resources be wasted in a grand deceit. Probably some corrupt folks have told Mr President that Ajaokuta can produce economically viable steel if “small” dollars are spent. You can already see how the critical rail line delivery dates was moved back to ensure it is done in time for 2019 elections, yet it is still in design stage. Ajaokuta is Nigeria and probably Africa biggest failure. It has failed. Can it be made to work yes but the cost to integrate Ajaokuta with her mines and rails can be used to build new smaller modern turn key functional steel mills. The government should get out of Ajaokuta, sell the place and allows the private sector capital and expertise restructure and own it.



If you want to make jollof rice and there is no rice the solution is not to keep boiling water without rice but to go and get rice.

yemmight:
Me I know Buhari really mean well for the nation if not for the likes of Saraki and co.

BruncleZuma:


Listen child, Ajaokuta is a white elephant project and if you're polite enough I may share research materials I used in doing my MSc thesis on it. So quote carefully and stop typing out of your internet given anonymity kiddo.