The federal government weekend hinted of its intention to come up with holistic roadmap modelled alongside, India, China, Russian and some Nigerian institutions template to address the bottlenecks hindering the full utilisation of Ajaokuta steel mill plant which is already at 98% completion stage.
The much anticipated roadmap government said would be ready in May, precisely three months time.
The Minister of Steel Development, Prince Audu Abubakar while briefing the journalists in Abuja said plans are in top gear to launch the roadmap before the next three months.
His words: “What we have done is, we have already prepared an internal roadmap which we will then commission to consultants to bring in global perspective.
“We have the target of reviving the Ajaokuta steel plant within 3 years. In our roadmap, we need to achieve immediate success or short term success.
The three year plan, Auidu said was for Ajaokuta steel to start working in near full capacity or in full capacity.
He added: “We will concession it to concessionaires who have the knowledge about steel production.
“We don’t have the capacity to produce rods and other steels at the moment, but we need to start from somewhere. We need to listen to potential concessionaires to know if they have the knowledge about steel production.”
According to him, We have our our views internally because, sometimes, it’s good to bring in someone with different perspective and this is how it works in India, China, South Africa and Egypt and lessons can be learned from the mentioned countries to make Nigeria steel industry grow.
“We also, even though we have given our own different views, we need to take views from various interest society’s Nigeria Society of Engineers (NSE), Nigeria Methurlugical Society and the Nigeria Society of Architects. Different people that play an important role in the sector.
“It is not as simple and it’s going to cost us money. All things been equal, in the next three months we should have the roadmap. The reason why it hasn’t come out is because of some funding constraints.