The National Steel Raw Materials Exploration Agency is charged with the responsibility of exploring steel raw materials in all parts of Nigeria and beyond for the Iron and steel industry. In this interview with Ruth Tene Natsa, the Acting Director General/ CEO , Alex Abaito Ohikere, enlightens? on the activities of the agency.
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Tell us more about NSRMEA
NSRMEA is an acronym for National Steel Raw Materials Exploration Agency, mandated to carry out detailed exploration of raw materials that are needed for the production of steel. Apart from the steel making metallic materials, you also need to have refractory materials needed for refractory lining because your furnace has to be lined using refractory materials.
These are materials that can withstand very high temperature, higher than the melting point of the Iron Ore, so we use things like refractory clays, dolomite and bauxite to line the furnace. There are many materials involved in the making of Iron and Steel, the major ones are Iron Ore and Coal, because coal is required to supply the carbon and energy for heating up the system. Iron has to be smelted, because the Iron Ore you see is not pure, it is not 100% iron, like the Itakpe Iron ore deposit is about 36% iron. So you need to remove the other things (gangue) that? you do not require, like the silica through the process of beneficiating to make it 63% to 68% Iron before you can feed it into the blast furnace to get your steel.
Does Nigeria have enough Raw materials to make steel?
I think we have enough, apart from the coal which we are still having problems with, because it is not just any type of coal that is used for steel production. We need coking coal, the one that is cokable ,that is the metallurgical coal. Most of the coal deposits we have are not? for cooking, it is not that they are useless; they can be used in other aspects of the economy like the energy sector to generate power for electricity.? Incidentally, we have worked in detail on one of the fairly coking coals in the country, in Obi-Lafia in Nasarawa state and concluded the studies and it was found to be moderately coking.
We have gotten to the final stage of designing the mine and feasibility studies but there are some problems associated with the deposit, as it is highly faulted. You find so many faults which when you want to mine,? you have to be very careful.? There is also the outstanding work which we call In Seam exploration through which you can make a roadway, it is a sort of? pilot mining. There are about 36 coal seams in the Obi-Lafia coal, out of which only 3 are of economic value that can be produced in commercial quantity. You have to do underground mining because it is not occurring on the surface, so we have to be careful how we design the mines, you can see what is happening in other parts of the world where you have accidents inside the Coal mines. Recently, it happened in the South Africa, so we need to avoid that? and that is why we still need to do more detailed mining investigation before actual mining.
How do your activities relate to those of the Nigerian geological survey Agency?
Both of us are in the same ministry, they are a parastatal? like us. The geological survey actually is supposed to discover the mineral deposits through aeromagnetic survey and geological mapping.? They map on a scale of 1 in -100,000, they do what is known as regional geological mapping to cover the entire country. During that process, they locate/identify mineral occurrences, then we take over from there, we pick on these mineral occurrences that they identified, and then carry out detailed exploration involving many activities like topographical work, ground geophysical work. .
It is quite different from the geological survey, but then we work together because somebody has to identify the materials. These days you find that farmers in the process of their work come across certain minerals. It is not possible for us to cover every inch of the country. So they (farmers) sometimes bring samples which when we analyse and find interesting results, we follow up and once sure that it is occurring, we start carrying out the necessary activities including core drilling , analyses and determination of the thickness of the various beds, which will be used for the calculation of the reserve, to know how many tons of the materials you have , it is then? that you can say the? deposit is investor friendly, because you have the data necessary for mining.
What would you say is the major problem of the steel sector in Nigeria?
It is a pity, we had this zeal in the 70s to make Nigeria a steel producing country, that was why the country went into partnership with the Russians, they came in and we worked with them, like the Itakpe Iron ore deposit , the Russians were involved. They participated, but something happened along the line, because before you start to produce steel, your plant must be 100% ready, the plant was not ready, that is the building of the plant.? Sometimes, they would tell you that it was 85% completed, other times they would say 98% completed.?
Nobody should blame government, if we are going to blame anybody we should blame ourselves, because if we had the zeal and wanted to get results we would have gotten it. If you go to Ajaokuta? and see the structure, it is gigantic and you also see that there are many civil works apart from the major works,? you find many housing units , maybe money should have been saved from the housing units and put in the plant.? I am optimistic that the interest presently shown in this project by Mr. President and the zeal of the Honorable Minister of Mines and Steel Development will change the situation for good. We thought privatisation would make things work, but you can see, it has not helped us; we need to make things work. Things can work under government enterprise if we are serious. We have an outfit like ours in India and they are working.
Is it possible to reform the mining sector to compete with the oil sector?
It is possible, with all the resources we have, there is virtually no metallic materials that we do not have, ranging from Iron Ore, Gold, Copper and recently,? very rich Iron Ore deposits in other parts of the country, not only Kogi.?? The oil oil wells will one day dry because they are not replaceable materials Solid minerals are also not replaceable, but we have not tapped anything so far. There is one place where we have underground mines. It is in Enugu and even that one is not active, so we need to do a lot of work because there are so many materials not even found on the surface , talk less of mining them under ground.
What would you consider a solution to the Ajaokuta /Itakpe industries now?
Government pumped a lot of financial resources into the iron & steel sector in the seventies and early eighties. I think there is still need for government to make additional sacrifice from the scarce resources we have to achieve completion of the Ajaokuta plant. I am sorry to say that the Indians may not be the ones to bail us out, we have to do it ourselves while partnering with genuine and sincere investors.
What Prospects do you see for Nigeria as a whole?
There are prospects, I am optimistic that Nigeria will become prosperous in the near future,? you know we have the vision 20:2020 , there is nothing stopping us from getting there before that year,? but we need to use the various resources that we have, both material, human resources, landmass. So many youths are unemployed, if we develop our agricultural and mining sector; we would not have those problems.
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