The federal steel programme was the single largest industrial commitment in Nigerian history. It comprised four projects: the Ajaokuta Steel Company (integrated blast-furnace plant at Ajaokuta, Kogi State, Soviet-supported, $5bn+ sunk), the Delta Steel Company (direct-reduction plant at Aladja, near Warri), three inland rolling mills (Jos, Osogbo, Katsina) that were meant to roll Ajaokuta's billets into finished bars and sections, and — adjacent in scale and equally federal — the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria (ALSCON) at Ikot Abasi.
The Ajaokuta story is told in detail in Ajaokuta Steel — The 98% Completed Billion-Dollar Graveyard. For the series, the relevant fact is the arithmetic: federal capital sunk between 1979 (groundbreaking) and 2024 (including the periodic resuscitation contracts with TPE-Russia and the various consortium bids) is conservatively estimated at $8 billion in then-year dollars (well over $20 billion at 2024 prices); commercial steel coil rolled in 45 years is zero. The plant has been kept in care-and-maintenance custody almost continuously since 1994.
Delta Steel (Aladja) is the partial counter-case. The plant did roll commercial product — billets, wire-rod, light sections — between 1982 and 1996, supplying a fraction of Nigerian construction-steel demand. Its problems were three: the direct-reduction process required imported scrap and natural-gas inputs at hard-currency prices the FX scarcity of the late 1980s and 1990s could not sustain; the inland rolling mills that were meant to take its billets never operated at scale; and the Aladja gas supply (from the Escravos field) was repeatedly interrupted. Delta Steel was sold under privatisation in 2005 to Global Infrastructure Holdings (an Indian/Mittal-related consortium) for ~$30m — a fraction of replacement cost. Production resumed sporadically and largely ceased by 2008. The plant has been the subject of repeated ownership disputes and federal recovery actions since.
The three inland rolling mills at Jos, Osogbo and Katsina were each designed for ~400,000 tonnes/year of long-product rolling, drawing billets from Ajaokuta and Aladja. Because Ajaokuta never produced and Aladja produced intermittently, the mills operated on imported billets at hard-currency cost — destroying their unit economics from the outset. All three were privatised between 2006 and 2010; all three are operating well below nameplate as of 2024.
ALSCON — the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria at Ikot Abasi, commissioned 1997 — was the federal attempt to add a downstream aluminium industry to the Niger Delta gas economy. Designed for 193,000 tonnes/year of primary aluminium ingot, drawing electricity from a dedicated gas-fired power plant. Mothballed 2013 after the failure of the privatisation process to deliver a functional operator (the long-running BPE-Rusal-BFI Group dispute is the subject of a separate legal record). As of 2024, ALSCON has produced almost no commercial aluminium since 2009.
The combined federal capital across the four projects, at then-year dollars, is approximately $12–14 billion. The combined commercial steel and aluminium output across forty years of federal investment is a small fraction of a single year's domestic demand. Nigeria as of 2024 imports approximately 90%+ of its primary steel and 100% of its primary aluminium.
The political economy of the steel programme is the most documented case of subsidised-industry capture in Nigerian history. Each of the four projects sustained a federal ministry, a parastatal management, a stream of contracts, and a constituency of suppliers — but never produced a saleable commercial product at scale. The contrast with Dangote Cement and BUA Cement, built privately and at full commercial scale within a decade each, is the analytical counterpoint the series returns to repeatedly.