Looking under the carpet
LET me tell you about my new hobby. It is called, believe me, looking under the carpet. Sounds rather crazy for a hobby but that is the beauty of it. The carpet is an ordinary piece of home furniture. Its primary purpose is to collect dust brought into a room and still leave the room looking clean and decent.
But the carpet serves a greater utilitarian value than that. It is perhaps the most reliable source of confidence in government circles in all countries. Rulers, big and small, hide a multitude of their sins of omission and commission under the carpet. They trust the carpet to keep their secrets. The carpet obliges them too. Once they sweep what they want to keep away from the public under the carpet, their secrets are safe and the ignorance of the public in matters of public interest is assured. The only time a carpet is obliged to yield its secret is when a nosey poker, also known as a reporter, picks up an unpleasant smell and decides to follow where his nose leads him.
So much is hidden under the carpet and so much can be uncovered from looking under the carpet. My new hobby resulted from my curiosity as to why rulers and their minions have so much confidence in the capacity of the carpet to keep faith with them and keep their secrets. My curiosity led me to look under the carpet of the federal government. It is easily and understandably the biggest carpet in the country. I found it an unbelievable treasure trove of our developmental history; what we have made and unmade of our nation in all areas of human development and resource management.
Under it, I found promises not kept, plans abandoned or half completed, movements that morphed in a mere motion, the squandering of riches, the squandering of opportunities, wasted and lost opportunities for national development, abandoned projects that replaced the people’s hope in their governments and rulers with cynicism, wasted financial and human resources not harnessed towards a more humane, united and egalitarian society. And I came to know why this great country so greatly endowed with human and natural resources, has remained stuck at point A and is unable to move to point B in steady steps of focused development towards realising its greatness.
I saw why the cankerworm called corruption which has been the enemy of all Nigerian rulers since January 15, 1966, has proved too powerful to be dislodged and instead digs deep and shames the commanders of the forces of the war against it. And I came to appreciate why former President Ibrahim Babangida once perceptively observed that the country has “... witnessed ( its) rise to greatness followed with a decline to the state of a bewildered nation.” And I know that the carpet plays a more important role in the affairs of men, women and nations than making our living rooms look beautiful.
In the service of my new hobby, I would occasionally look under the carpet of the federal government and persuade the carpet to yield some important information on the history of our successes and failures as a nation. I
would then serve my finding in an occasional column titled, Looking under the carpet. A few days ago, as of this writing, I looked under the carpet and here is what I found.
Steel is the bedrock of every nation’s industrialisation and development. Sometime in 1971, the federal government under General Yakubu Gowon, took its first major step towards taking our country into the comity of modern, industrialised nations. It established the Nigerian Steel Development Authority, NSDA. Its enabling law was decree 19 of that year. The first assignment of the authority was to carry out the survey of local raw materials for a steel industry. It carried out this assignment and presented its preliminary report in 1974. The report indicated that there was a huge iron ore deposit at Itakpe in the Ajaokuta area of Okene division in Kwara State.
The preliminary report was followed by a more detailed project report in 1977, fully confirming the preliminary findings in respect of the availability of the necessary raw materials for the steel industry in the country. The Obasanjo military administration approved the report as well as the recommended steps to kick start a steel development project in the country. What is technically called global contract “for the construction of steel plant at Ajaokuta were all commissioned and executed under the NSDA” by 1979. The departing military administration thereafter dissolved NSDA and formally set up the Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited, ASCL, on September 18, 1979, under decree 60.
The company defined its vision as “the production of quality steel for the industrialisation of Nigeria while meeting all standards.” The Obasanjo military administration certainly had the same vision in setting up the company. The company’s potentials were huge. It would be the most strategic industry in the country. Its capacity for employment surpassed the capacities of all existing industries in the country put together.
From what I could gather about its huge potentials from its website, “It would provide materials for infrastructural development, technology acquisition, human capacity building, income distribution, regional development and employment generation. While the project would directly employ about 10,000 staff at its first phase of commissioning, the upstream and downstream industries that will evolve all over the nation will