Director-General of the National Metallurgical Development Centre, Jos, Plateau State, Prof Linus Asuquo, talks to PATRICK ODEY about steel development in Nigeria, the challenges and prospects
Not much is being heard about the NMDC. Can you briefly highlight its major role in Nigeria’s solid minerals sector?
The NMDC deals with minerals and metals. I believe you know that we have about 44 minerals in about 500 locations in the country. There is no state in this country without minerals.
Are the minerals developed for the advancement of the country?
That is a big question because everybody wants to go for oil. Everybody wants to be a governor and collect monthly allocations, but now that oil is going down, a lot of people are running to mining and that is the future. If we want to diversify our economy, mining is the future. That is why the President is paying attention to mining because that is the direction we should go.
How would you describe your experience as the head of a public metallurgical research centre in the last five years?
In July 2018, I was appointed by former President Muhammadu Buhari to head the National Metallurgical Development Centre, Jos, Plateau State, after a very thorough interview with some experts. I went to the place and discovered that it was established as far back as 1973 as a research lab for the steel industry. You can imagine that from 1973 to 2018 the equipment would have been obsolete; some of them were beyond repair. It was very challenging.
What are the other challenges?
Power was also a problem but one of the things I did was to use an alternative power source – solar. Now, we have solar energy in all the laboratories. We are applying to have our separate power source. The environment was not conducive to any research and development work. There was grass everywhere and the buildings were dilapidated. So, we had to clean up the place to make it a bit conducive for research and development work.
Apart from that, I had to restructure the entire administration. There were about eight departments, which were restructured into six to be more productive. Another major challenge was funding. Research and development are capital-intensive. We are trying to see how we can improve on the funding. I have written a lot of papers on the need for funding in research and development, which we need as a country. We are working very hard. We have done a lot of research about iron ore. We have up to three billion tonnes of iron ore in this country. Jos is one of the places in the world that is known for tin. Apart from tin, we have lead, zinc, clay and columbite tantalite, which are very expensive minerals, and we are doing a lot of work with these minerals to see how they can be of use to this country.
When you don’t have functional equipment, you can’t do research. However, we are preparing the ground for real research. Thank God that my tenure has been renewed. Now, we just have some equipment to start, and we will go into research. I love research, but you don’t just jump into research and development when you don’t have the facilities available. So, the first thing I did was to create a conducive ambiance for research and development by having the right calibre of people, which I am still struggling to do, and by having equipment to work.
Is the agency considering collaboration with public and private sector organisations?
If you depend on the government alone, you will not achieve anything. So, another thing we did was to have collaboration with many agencies. We have collaboration with the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure. We also have collaboration with the Defence Industry Corporation of Nigeria, Kaduna. On January 1, 2020, we signed an agreement with them because they were importing materials from China for their ammunition and armament. So, by the time they came and visited us, we found out that we had facilities to produce what they were importing and we assured them that we could do it.
After the visit by the technical team on December 1, 2020, we signed an agreement with them to produce materials like brass, alloy steel, and so on, which is something we can do. But the limiting factor was our furnaces.
Are there no furnaces?
We have 2,500 KVA electric furnaces that could be used, but they have been exhausted since 2010 without accessories like cranes. So, the next problem was for us to have adequate funding to have accessories and keep the place going. We have been battling with that since 2020, but we are hopeful that that will soon pass. When that is done, it will be a big breakthrough in this country because now, even though private people produce steel, some of them use scraps, which is not the best method. When you start from scrap and you start melting, the final result of what you melt will be porous, but if Ajaokuta Steel, which we are hoping will work, come on stream, it will help to silt the real iron from the iron ore, and from the iron now we will have steel and from steel, we will produce spillage and these will be sent out to all the rolling mills.
So, we are saying that steel is a hub of industrialisation. Without steel, we are just wasting time. There is nothing that steel is not used to produce. Consider the amount of steel imported into the country for just rail transportation; it costs billions of naira. So, if we have a steel plant, we don’t need to import that. We will create wealth, create jobs, increase our revenue and reduce poverty. We shouldn’t be a consuming country. We should be a manufacturing country. We have been consuming everything, including toothpicks.
The Federal Government said the Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited was meant to be used to generate important upstream and downstream industrial and economic activities that were critical to the diversification of the economy into an industrial one. Why is the company dysfunctional?
A lot of people have been asking this question. I worked in Kogi State, where I was a director at the Federal Polytechnic, Idah, many years ago. Ajaokuta was very close to me. I knew when the Russians came and built it. It is a complex thing but to answer your question, it has to do with the political will. It takes leadership to do that. I mentioned to people that the only President who went and sat down there was (the late) Alhaji Shehu Shagari. So, it will take a president to go and sit down there, maybe for two or three days, so that the engineers and administrators can tell them what the problems are. It is not paperwork. Thank God, the new administration has started doing something by creating the ministry of steel development, which has never happened before. I remember that it used to be the Ministry of Mines and Steel, but now that has been divided into two – the Ministry of Steel Development and the Ministry of Solid Minerals. The Ministry of Steel Development will concentrate on Ajaokuta; so there is hope.
Apart from appointing a minister from the state where the company is located, what relevant steps has the Tinubu administration taken to show its commitment to reviving Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited?
The minister went there to find out what the problems were. I believe that with such a political will, something is going to come out of it.
Some Nigerians have called for the privatisation of the Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited and the National Iron Ore Mining Company, having cost the country over $8bn in 40 years with no steel to show for it. Why can’t these assets be sold outright?
I am not against privatisation and I want to advocate that the government has no business running a steel company, but the government has to provide a conducive atmosphere for the company to stand. I have always been advocating the completion of Ajaokuta (Steel Company Limited) and not to just take the government out of it; any good country will not do that. It will have a share in the company even when it privatises, but when it’s not completed and you want to privatise, you will run into a big loss.
Why did you say the government has no business running a steel plant?
Tell me which one company run by the government is working? We have the Aluminium Smelting Company of Nigeria. Is it working? Delta Steel Company, is it working? The government can only create an enabling environment for the running of industries and after that, take its hands off. When we started the Ibom Science Park project, that was the advice I gave, that it should be run as a company because the government has no business in running it.
In specific terms, which areas of the steel company require urgent attention to revamp the company for wealth creation?
Did you know that Ajaokuta is supposed to produce 1.3 million tonnes per annum? All these others cannot produce that amount in terms of capacity. People are saying that the Ajaokuta furnace is an obsolete method, but India is still using that furnace. Russia is still using a blast furnace. I went to India for a conference as far back as 2019, and it was producing 100 million tonnes per annum. It is competing with China. But Nigerians said it (blast furnace) is an obsolete method. A blast furnace can produce large quantities. So, I believe that we should intensify efforts at completing the Ajaokuta Steel Company. The first phase was to produce 1.3 million tonnes of steel or iron, and the second was to produce 2.6 million tonnes and then 5.2 million tonnes. If we can go to that level, this country will go far.
Why do you think President Tinubu has the political will to fix the company?
President Tinubu has shown proactive instinct; he created a special ministry for steel development and production that will focus on Ajaokuta and with that political will, it is possible to achieve that.
You were the Commissioner for Science and Technology in the administration of former governor Victor Attah in Akwa Ibom State. What were the major highlights of your term in office?
Akwa Ibom State was the first state in this country to establish a bureau of science and technology and I was the pioneer special adviser to the governor. The first thing was for us to organise a workshop and invite people from technical schools, and people with technical knowledge to brainstorm. That was the starting point. We had to formulate a policy on science and technology; we called in experts from different parts of the world and we were the first state to formulate a policy on science and technology. The policy is still available. After that, we had to formulate another policy on ICT. When you have policies, they will streamline areas that you have to go into and so on.
What happened to the Ibom Science Park project initiated by the Attah administration?
We started a little projection of the science park and called it the Victor Attah Digital Centre. That was a projection of what would happen. Did you know that a telecoms company took an interest in the place and was paying the government N24m every year? When we started the science park, people came from all over the world, and without taxing them. I think that was a great achievement. We also bought two buses equipped with computers and called it Mobile Internet at Your Door Steps. We took it to primary and secondary schools to teach children how to use a computer.
I saw something recently in a video and I almost wept. In the video, a teacher was teaching pupils, I think in a secondary school, how to use a computer and was using a duster to demonstrate. When I went to Singapore in 2001, I saw pupils in primary and secondary schools using computers. However, if you go to the University of Uyo, you will see many people who cannot operate a computer. We brought in some civil servants and trained them in ICT free of charge. We gave them computers after the training. There was a good foundation for this state.
Despite the vision, the University of Science and Technology was converted to a conventional university while the science park appears to have remained an idea. Are you worried about that?
Yes, I am worried about my people and I mentioned that in my lecture during Obong Attah’s birthday. My people are ‘techno-phobic,’ they hate anything technology. A former Head of State, (Ibrahim) Babangida, gave us a university of technology but people kicked against it and said they didn’t need it. Twenty years later, in 2001, Obong Attah had the vision of establishing a university of technology that was under my ministry at that time. It started running for two years or so but by the time we left, people said they needed a conversational university whereas we had a conventional one – the University of Uyo.
Attah was said to have purchased N2bn worth of equipment for the science park. Where is the equipment now?
Not just N2bn; the whole contract was a turnkey contract and the man (Victor Attah) wanted the contract to be completed. Most of the equipment was manufactured abroad and brought down here and they are still here.
The reason previous administrations have given for abandoning the project is that the location is prone to erosion and could be subjected to an investigation by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission because so much was collected without anything on the ground. Is that true?
The Bible says that people perish for lack of knowledge. They did their investigation. The allegations were that N10bn was given to the contractor, not N5bn. The contractor came with all the papers and showed the amount that was given to them to manufacture the equipment. I can tell you that the first company that came from South Africa went to the 31 local government areas of the state; the purpose was to create interconnectivity in all the local governments and the state. This would have been a hub of technology as of that time. So, those saying the place was prone to erosion don’t have the exposure and experience.
