…Business Mogul Warns Nation on Emotional Attachment To Unviable Assets
By Jeremy Fregene
Founder and president of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has poured cold water on renewed government efforts to revive the Ajaokuta Steel Company, declaring that the long-moribund project “will never work.”
In a viral video released by a TV station yesterday, Africa’s richest man stressed the importance of steel to national development but insisted that Ajaokuta’s outdated technology and history of mismanagement had doomed it beyond redemption.
“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,” Dangote said.
Comparing the plant to obsolete car models, he explained: “If you remember those vehicles we used to produce from Volkswagen (Igala) — if you bring Igala now, would you compare it to the current Kia? No. Things have changed.”
He went further, likening the project to trying to resurrect the dead. “When you carry something like Ajaokuta, it is like 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 declared.
Dangote’s assessment goes beyond steel. He recently raised serious doubts about the country’s government-owned refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna, insisting that they too may never work properly again despite massive investments. As he put it:
“To date, about $18 billion has been wasted to rehabilitate the refineries without any success. Who are the people who spent all these humongous amounts without any result? … I don’t think, and I doubt very much if they will work.”
Built between 1979 and the mid-1990s, Ajaokuta Steel Company in Kogi State was never completed and has been idle for over two decades despite repeated promises of revival by successive administrations.
In September 2022, the Nigerian government paid $496 million to settle an Indian firm’s claim after the revocation of a concession deal struck under the Olusegun Obasanjo administration. By December that year, 11 companies, including three Russian firms , expressed interest in taking over the plant on a concession basis.
On assumption of office in August 2023, Minister of Steel Development, Shuaibu Audu, pledged to revive Ajaokuta, unveiling a roadmap to complete the project and regulate the sector. In September 2024, the federal government signed an agreement with a Russian consortium for the plant’s rehabilitation and operation, raising new hopes of recovery.
Dangote’s comments, however, cast a dark shadow over those ambitions, sparking questions about whether Ajaokuta is a dream too dead to save.