The Federal Government has paid workers of the moribund Ajaokuta Steel Company the total sum of N38.9bn as salaries and allowances in 10 years, report revealed.
This is despite the inability of the company to produce a single sheet of steel since its inception.
The Ajaokuta Integrated Steel Complex, conceived in 1979, was developed to establish a Metallurgical Process Plant alongside an Engineering Complex and various auxiliary facilities.
On its website, the company said it directly employed about 10,000 workers at the first phase of commissioning while the upstream and downstream industries that would evolve all over the nation would engage no fewer than 500,000 employees.
By 1994, the plant was estimated to be 98 per cent complete in terms of equipment installation.
While some units of the plant were operational at various times, 40 out of the 43 planned units had been constructed. However, due to mismanagement, the project remains incomplete for over 45 years later.
In January 2024, Tinubu opened discussions with a Chinese steel company, Luan Steel Holding Group, to revive the Ajaokuta Steel Company.
That discussion has not yielded any results.Despite its inactive status and reports of an ineffective workforce, the company continues to receive substantial annual budget allocations from the government.
Furthermore, the salaries of its employees are still accounted for in the government’s annual budget.
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A breakdown of the company’s annual budget between 2014 and 2024 showed that it paid a total of N29.11bn in salaries and wages, and N9.8bn in allowances to its staff.
Further analysis revealed that the government disbursed N3.82bn for personnel costs in 2014, reduced marginally to N3.8bn in 2015, N3.55bn in 2016 and N3.84bn in 2017.In 2018, an unverifiable number of workers at the company received a total sum of N3.76bn for salaries and allowances, N3.2bn in 2019, and N3.5bn in 2020.
The cost increased to N3.89bn in 2021, and N3.94bn in 2022 but dropped significantly to N1.22bn in 2023.
At an investigative hearing recently, the lawmaker representing Kogi Central, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, took up the Sole Administrator of the Steel Company, Summaila Akaba, on several workers collecting salaries from the N4.2bn appropriated for personnel costs in the 2024 budget.
Natasha said, “The sum of N4.2bn was appropriated for personnel cost in 2024, but from several visitations I’ve made to the complex, hardly were 10 people sighted to be around or doing anything.
“So, who are the workers collecting monthly salaries from the appropriated N4.2bn?”
In the 2024 budget, the National Assembly has however increased budgetary allocation from N4.45bn in the proposed 2024 budget to N5.18bn in the approved version for the dormant Ajaokuta Steel Company.
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