A plant that has outlived the two states that financed it.
Ground was broken at Ajaokuta in 1979 under a Soviet technical-contract that assumed commissioning within a decade. Four military governments, two democratic transitions, a concession, a reversal of that concession, and repeated recovery appropriations later, the integrated complex has never entered sustained commercial production. The rolling mills have, intermittently, processed imported billet. The blast furnace — the thing that would make this a steel plant rather than a finishing shop — has not run commercially.
The cumulative figure that matters is not any single year's budget line. It is the total the sunk-cost fallacy has protected for forty-six years.
This was always a make-or-buy question, priced as a nation-building one.
Strip the symbolism and the decision reduces to a single comparison: the delivered cost of a domestically produced tonne of steel against the delivered cost of an imported one, discounted by the probability the domestic tonne ever arrives. For forty-six years, that third term — completion probability — has been treated as one. It is not.
The bear case the consensus is missing is rarely a new fact. It is the base rate the room has agreed to stop counting.
Set the completion base rate against comparable integrated greenfield steel projects across the region since 1975 and the pattern is not encouraging. The build case survives only when each new appropriation is underwritten as if the prior forty-five years never happened — as if this tranche, unlike every tranche before it, closes the gap.
The disciplined move is to buy the steel and redirect the build.
Once completion probability is priced honestly, the domestic tonne is not marginally more expensive — it is multiples more expensive, before the opportunity cost of the capital held hostage to it. For an operator or a sovereign principal weighing exposure to the complex, the conclusion follows from the arithmetic, not from sentiment about industrial sovereignty.
Treat the sunk $8bn as sunk. Underwrite the next dollar on its own completion odds — and those odds say import the billet, redirect the capital, and revisit only against a financed, contracted commissioning date that has never yet existed.
None of this requires a view on steel demand, on the naira, or on the political will of any government. It requires only that the completion term be set to its observed value rather than to one. That is the whole of the analysis, and it is the part the story leaves out.