Ann: Bioleaching to upgrade Agbaja Iron Ore , page-25

Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Mr. Musa Sada

• Ajaokuta, NIOMCO to resume production soon

By Patrick Ugeh

The federal government is poised to resolve the major issues stalling the operationalisation of the Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited (ASCL) and the Nigerian Iron Ore Mining Company (NIOMCO), Itakpe, Kogi State.

The federal government is also set to open up the steel sector for the projected production of three million metric tonnes of steel per annum by 2015.

Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Mr. Musa Sada, announced these at a media round-table for the review of the mines and steel development roadmap implementation in Abuja.

Steel production is the fulcrum of industrialisation process, stalled in Nigeria by the comatose state of the two steel plants, ASCL and Delta Steel Complex, (DSC) Aladja, and NIOMCO.

The reactivation of NIOMCO, which is to produce the needed raw materials for the manufacture of steel, according to the government, was particularly essential for the revitalisation of the sector because, once the blast furnace of the ASCL is started, it must have enough raw materials to keep it running for at least 10 years without stopping.

Prominent among the concerns resolved to get the sector revitalised is the agreement for an out-of-court settlement of the legal issues that encumbered ASCL, said to be 98 per cent completed but lying waste for several decades. Under the agreement, ASCL will revert to the government while Global Infrastructure Nigeria Limited (GINL) will take over NIMCO to complete its remaining tenure.

Sada also said a bill was to be taken to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and, subsequently, the National Assembly for enactment towards sanitising the steel industry that has been without a law all along.

Noting that there was nowhere in the world where government fully ran steel plants, he said the federal government would invite the private sector to operate the ASCL and the other steel plants on a PPP basis.

When ASCL becomes operational, it would create about 400,000 jobs, according to the Sole Administrator, Joseph Onobere, who said these would be made up of 10,000 technical staff members and the rest would be indirect workers.

Sada stated that toward facilitating the enactment of the Metallurgical Industry Regulation Act and Regulations Manual, a draft bill had already been produced by his ministry and fine-tuned by the Ministry of Justice.

According to him, once the legal issues were sorted out, and NIOMCO goes on stream, DSC would require the super-concentrates from there in order for it to produce steel.
He said his ministry was collaborating with the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPE) to see to the eventual commencement of operations of privatised steel mills while they were intensifying visits to monitor the privatised companies.

The minister also declared that illegal mining was actually a creation of the government through its indigenisation policy of the 1970s, which forced foreign firms that were well equipped and had the requisite manpower out of the country, leaving the unskilled and unequipped illegal miners to continue, if crudely, from where the multinational miners left off.