The political atmosphere in Abuja turned electric this week after a video surfaced of President Bola Tinubu ridiculing the privatization legacy of his rival, Atiku Abubakar, by highlighting the failure of the Ajaokuta Steel Company. Addressing a crowd of supporters, the President pointedly asked if the facility was working today, drawing a resounding “No” from the audience. However, the mockery has quickly turned into a PR nightmare for the Presidency as fiscal activists point to the administration’s own contradictory spending habits regarding the moribund giant.
Despite acknowledging that the plant is a non-functional relic of the past, the Tinubu administration has overseen a massive surge in taxpayer funding for the facility. Budget records show that ₦5.18 billion was allocated to the idle plant in 2024, a figure that climbed even higher to ₦6.21 billion in 2025. Critics are now calling out the “callous” irony of mocking a project’s failure while simultaneously funneling over ₦11 billion into it within just two years, most of which disappears into personnel costs and “ghost” maintenance rather than actual steel production.
The Ministry of Steel Development has attempted to justify these staggering sums by claiming the funds are necessary to protect the site’s massive infrastructure and pay the thousands of workers who remain on the payroll despite the furnaces being cold for decades. Government officials insist this is a “holding pattern” while they finalize a new rehabilitation deal with a Russian consortium. Yet, for many Nigerians, the optics of the situation remain grim. The President’s critics argue that if Ajaokuta is truly the failure he claimed it was in his speech, then continuing to pump billions into its “personnel costs” is nothing more than a legalized drain on the national treasury.
As the video continues to circulate on social media, the narrative has shifted from Atiku’s past failures to Tinubu’s current fiscal choices. The administration now faces intense pressure to explain why a “dead” asset is receiving more funding than many functional hospitals and schools, leading to accusations that the “Renewed Hope” budget is being used to sustain a massive, unproductive bureaucracy.
