An expert in Metallurgical Engineering, Mr. Daniel Obikwelu, has said Nigeria will experience rash development if she de-regulates steel production and all materials and metallurgical industries, including aluminum smelting, glass and cement industries.
This, he said, would redeem Nigeria from dying industrially, even as it would boost the country’s industrial life.
Obikwelu, a professor of Metallurgical Engineering and former Head and founder of the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, University of Nigeria Nsukka, spoke at the 79th Inaugural Lecture of the University in Nsukka.
Presenting his lecture titled, “Metallic Materials: Challenges in the 21st Century Nigeria and Didactic Lessons from the 18th Century Industrial Revolution”, he said that steel is strategic to the country’s socio-economic and industrial development. As such, all efforts to replace imported consumables with locally available materials for use in the Nigerian steel industry would help in making steel production a feasible project in Nigeria, adding it will create employment for the youth.
Steel production, according to him, is a serious business and the government and people should be involved in the development, adding that no opinion of the World Bank and/or International Monetary Fund would be allowed to derail the country in her survival efforts and policies.
Obikwelu urged the government to empower entrepreneurs to establish mini-rolling, billets mills/medium electric arc-furnaces, ferroalloy production industry, refractory production industry, beneficiation plants of low capacity, lime plant, foundry shops and mini-iron ore reduction plants, among other small units. These units, according to him, would preferably be located at regions where there are iron ore deposits and where iron smelting was practised early in history.
He argued that closing the blacksmith’s shops is not the better way to develop skills envisaged for industrial revolution in Nigeria. He said the best way to achieve industrial revolution in the country is by repositioning the mindset of Nigerians through education and radical policy measures by government to absorb the local blacksmiths, encourage, control and equip them.
If the government cannot run the steel industries, he suggested that other people or group of professionals should be allowed to run the industries for the government on some conditions. This, he said is because, without steel, Nigeria cannot develop.
He noted that importing almost everything from other countries places the country at acute disadvantage in all aspects of life, thus leaving the country in a downright poor living situation.
Obikwelu regretted that there is no effective defence industry in Nigeria for the manufacture of such simple combatant weapons like rifle, grenades and land missiles for the defence industrial sub-sector.
According to him, Nigeria has become a dumping ground for arms, especially pistols and automatic hand weapons used or manufactured elsewhere, making the country vulnerable to foreign attack.
Colonial masters stopped ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgical practices which were widespread in many cultural groups in Nigeria. Obikwelu said if these practices were not stopped by the Whiteman early in history, Nigeria and other African countries would not have missed this important industrial revolution phase, and would have been in the same position industrially with Britain, Europe and America.
“Awka people used a type of furnace in the form of anthill to produce pig iron which they forged to domestic implements like knives, hoes and machetes for farm work. In the Nok, Igboukwu and Benin cultures of the 9th Century, there were non-ferrous metallurgical practices with bronze, brass and tin ore. These people had used iron and its furnace in one form or the other to improve their standard of living,” he said.
Obikwelu condemned the cut-and-paste or turnkey approaches adopted by the government; where some technologies from countries such as Russia, India and Germany were cut and pasted in Nigeria as if Nigeria was a piece of blank paper. These are the cases with Ajaokuta Steel Company, Itakpe Iron Ore Company and Delta Steel Company. According to him, these cut-and-paste approaches were counter-productive for the development of Nigeria.
He praised the government for having successfully and wisely recovered Ajaokuta Steel Complex from the Global Steel Holdings/Infrastructural Nigeria Limited (an Indian-based company). He suggested, as a short-term measure, that government should make money available to accomplish the following for a final outright selling of the steel industries to the prospective entrepreneurial persons or consortia.
These measures include inaugurating Billet Mill, Light Section and Structural Mill, Thermal Power Plant Forge and Fabrication, Mechanical Repair Shop, Rubberising and Refractories and Lime Plants which have been 100 per cent completed; inaugurating all completed units namely, the Thermal Power Plant, Power Plant Repair Shop, Refractories and Lime Plant Production Plants, Foundry Shop and Mechanical Repair Shop and selling them outright; repairing Itakpe Iron Ore Company and selling it; selling all the seven units at the Delta Steel Company: the Pellet Plant, Steel Melt Shop, Lime Plant, the Foundry Shop, Central Mechanical Maintenance Shop and Auxiliary Plants.
As Nigeria has missed the industrial revolution phase in her development, Obikwelu said the government should go back to the drawing board, taking a cue from Japan which also missed the industrial revolution phase sometime by using the veritable human resources in the universities, research institutes, existing highly skilled blacksmiths in the existing blacksmith’s shops all over the country to develop the indigenous technologies.
