Lost history · 1979 to present
Image: Ajaokuta-factory.JPG — Ilya Volkov, Public domain · source
A schoolboy once found holiday work at Ajaokuta. Decades later, Nigeria is still waiting for the steelmaking future promised there.
When Mustapha Ayenugba was a secondary school boy, he spent his holidays working at the new steel plant at Ajaokuta. Later he got a proper job there, and stayed until he retired in 2004. Today he is the town's traditional ruler.
His father was the ruler when the project arrived. Families gave up ancestral farmland for it, Ayenugba recalled in 2024, because they were promised jobs and business. Traders found customers. Fishermen and farmers found a market. Parents imagined their children working at home instead of in Lagos.
The idea was simple. Nigeria needed steel for buildings, machines and railways, and it was buying almost all of it abroad. Why not make it at home?
Planning started in 1971. In 1979 the construction contract was signed with Soviet partners and Ajaokuta Steel Company was born, on the Niger in what is now Kogi State. Iron ore would come from Itakpe nearby. The first stage was meant to make 1.3 million tonnes of steel a year, with more to come.
This was not one factory but a chain of them: ironmaking, steelmaking, rolling mills, power, transport, all linked. Break one link and the chain stops.
By 1994 the company said 98 per cent of the equipment was in place. It sounds like one last push. It wasn't. Equipment standing in a hall is not a plant that turns ore into steel day after day.
Bits of it did work. From 2004 its rolling mills shaped steel, and some units ran for a while, then stopped when the money ran out. Government after government announced a revival. Concession deals collapsed into lawsuits. The full chain never ran as designed.
By 2026 the federal budget was still paying workers at an idle complex and still funding plans to bring it back to life.
Ayenugba is still waiting too. So are the families who gave up their land. Ajaokuta is often told as a story of billions of naira. In the town, it is a story about jobs that were promised and never came.
