New York Said the Words. Ajaokuta Is Still Waiting to Hear Them.

By Ademola Rabiu, CEng

Why President Tinubu Must Turn “Strategic Public Investment” from a UNGA Line into a National Industrial Strategy

One hand does not lift a log. Our elders did not say this to excuse weakness. They said it to teach that some loads are too heavy for a single pair of hands, no matter how willing, and that pretending otherwise is not principle. It is delay wearing principle’s clothes. What our elders left unsaid, and what I will argue here, is how many hands a log the size of Nigeria’s industrial future actually needs. Two is not always enough. Sometimes it takes three.

I write this as someone who has argued, for three years now within the Renewed Hope Agenda camp, that private capital is necessary but never sufficient for a country in Nigeria’s position. So when Vice President Kashim Shettima stood at the 81st United Nations General Assembly in September and read, on President Tinubu’s behalf, that “through sound macroeconomic management, stronger institutions, private-sector development and strategic public investment, we seek to give practical meaning to our sustainable development commitments,” I felt something close to vindication. That is the correct philosophy. My worry is the oldest one in Nigerian governance: the gap between the podium and the plant floor, between promises and realities, and between implementation and visible and sustainable impacts.

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Credit where it is due

Before the argument, the praise, because an honest column gives both.

This administration has done something few Nigerian governments have had the stomach for. It admitted failure in public. When President Tinubu told power sector stakeholders that privatisation had not met its objectives, that over 90 million Nigerians still lacked electricity access, and that the national grid served barely 15 percent of demand, that was not weakness.

It was the first honest sentence spoken about Nigeria’s power sector by anyone with the authority to fix it. Last October, then Minister of Power Adebayo Adelabu went further, announcing at the Nigeria Energy Forum in Lagos that government would introduce a minimum capital adequacy requirement for DisCos ahead of their 2028 licence renewal, warning that underperforming distributors would not have their licences renewed. That is teeth, finally, where for a decade there was only rhetoric. It now falls to his successor, Minister Joseph Tegbe, to make it bite.

And in at least one sector, this government already runs a version of the playbook I am about to urge on it elsewhere. Under the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative, now restructured under the Ministry of Finance Incorporated, Nigeria’s fertiliser blending plants have grown from about 4 in 2016 to over 90 today – given the country the largest blending capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa. And in 2026 alone strategic contracting arrangements saved the value chain ₦61.58 billion. That is government coordinating and derisking, not competing. And it works.

“Government has no business in business” is a slogan, not a doctrine

For 40 years that line has been recited like scripture, usually by people who cannot explain why the doctrine suddenly stops applying everywhere else the market fails. Britain, the birthplace of Thatcherite privatisation, is in the middle of taking its own railways back into public hands.

Under the Passenger Railway Services Act, operators are being folded back into a new public body, Great British Railways, as their franchises expire. South Western Railway returned to public ownership in May 2025, c2c in July and Greater Anglia in October, and Great Western Railway follows on 13 December 2026. This is not a socialist experiment. It is a Labour government correcting three decades of the exact ideology Nigeria still treats as gospel, because fragmented private franchising gave British commuters worse trains at higher fares than British Rail ever did.

If the country that taught the world privatisation is un-teaching itself on rail, Abuja need not feel embarrassed admitting some sectors need the state’s hand on the tiller.

The point was never government ownership for its own sake. The point is that “government has no business in business” was always a rhetorical shortcut, and Nigeria has paid for treating it as law.

Where the wait has gone on too long

STEEL. Ajaokuta was conceived in 1979. Forty-seven years later, the Minister of Steel Development himself admits it “hasn’t produced any sheet of liquid steel since its inception.” The 2026 budget allocates roughly ₦6.69 billion to the company, over 90 percent of it to personnel costs rather than production – while Nigeria spends an estimated $3.3 billion every year importing steel it could be making at home.

However, there is real movement: a twenty-year gas supply deal signed this year, and talks with a Chinese investor reportedly close to a $1.5 to $2 billion revival agreement before the end of 2026. Private capital is not waiting idle elsewhere in the sector either: Inner Galaxy Group’s $400 million Stellar Steel Plant in Ogun State proves steel investment can happen in Nigeria when the terms are right. Ajaokuta’s problem was never that steel is unbankable. It is that Ajaokuta has never had an ownership structure serious investors could trust past the next change of minister.

POWER. The diagnosis is now on record from the President’s own mouth. Available generation capacity has grown from 4,214 MW in 2013 to 7,311 MW as of May this year, yet the grid dispatched an average of only about 4,222 MW, against a 40,000 MW target that was due by 2020. Then Minister Adelabu told the Nigeria Energy Forum last October that over 10,000 MW of capacity sat stranded, energy that could power factories but cannot reach them.

The announced minimum capital rule and the threat of non-renewal in 2028 are welcome. But a threat is not a structure. What happens to a DisCo that fails the capital test? I will come back to that question, because it carries the most important part of this argument.

RAIL. Nigeria has promised the Kano to Maradi corridor since 2020. President Tinubu has now pledged completion of the 284 km Kano-Jigawa-Katsina-Maradi line by the end of this year. Lagos-Ibadan is a genuine success, finished and running. It proves the model works when government actually finishes what it starts. The Lagos-Calabar coastal line and the Port Harcourt-Maiduguri eastern corridor remain, by the transport ministry’s own account, largely promises on paper.

ASPHALT. Nigeria sits on an estimated 42.74 billion metric tonnes of untapped bitumen, the world’s second-largest deposit, concentrated in Ondo, Ogun, Lagos and Edo States. Yet we still imports roughly 80 percent of the asphaltic material we use for roads, at a cost of over ₦300 billion a year, while bad roads themselves cost the country over ₦1 trillion annually in lost time and ruined vehicles.

Private carriers are necessary. They are not sufficient either.

Minister Keyamo’s decision to back private carriers rather than resurrect the Nigeria Air state-equity project was defensible. United Nigeria’s fleet growth and its push into New York, Dubai and London routes are genuine progress, and no one should discourage it. But a thriving private carrier is not a substitute for a national carrier, and the industry’s own numbers show why.

Nigeria is not short of a legal right to fly its skies. It is short of the capital to use that right. No fewer than 30 foreign airlines currently fly over 90 bilateral air service routes into Nigeria, while Nigerian carriers routinely underutilise their own entitlements, limited by infrastructure and capacity rather than by any designation rule.

A country of over 200 million people, with one of the largest diasporas and remittance flows on the continent, sitting at the hinge of the West African market, should not be ceding 90% of its own international air travel to other people’s flag carriers.

The lesson next door makes the point better than I can. Ethiopian Airlines is wholly owned by the Ethiopian government, yet it operates with full day-to-day autonomy, the government deliberately staying out of route decisions, appointments and operations. That distance, not the ownership, is what analysts credit for turning it into Africa’s largest airline by fleet, destinations and revenue.

Ethiopian has gone on to take equity stakes in half a dozen other African carriers – Malawi, Zambia, Togo and now Congo, precisely the scale and balance sheet that lets a national carrier actually use the bilateral rights its government has signed. That is the model:

government ownership, private-grade management, full commercial autonomy. It is NLNG with wings.

This is where Transformative Governance Forum’s P4 formula applies as cleanly as anywhere in this piece. A reconstituted national carrier, government holding anchor equity, a credible operator running it, zero political interference, and a retail or diaspora equity window letting ordinary Nigerians and itinerant nationals abroad buy into the airline that carries them home, would give Nigeria the one thing neither Keyamo’s private-carrier policy nor the old Nigeria Air project ever delivered.

It will give us a single, well-capitalised anchor carrier large enough to fly the frequencies Nigeria is already entitled to, operating alongside United Nigeria, Air Peace and whichever other private flag carriers rise to the competition. Government does not need to pick between a national carrier and a private aviation sector. Ethiopia didn’t. The two can fly the same skies, and the competition between them is what keeps both honest.

Two hands are not always enough. Here is the third.

NLNG and Norway’s Equinor both teach the same two-leg lesson: government holds equity, professionals hold management. The NLNG is owned 49% by the FG through NNPC, 25.6% by Shell, 15% by TotalEnergies and 10.4% by Eni, and an independent board that international partners police jealously. It has fully repaid the $5.45 billion its shareholders invested and paid out as much as $36 billion in dividends over the years, and is routinely called the most efficiently run business in the country. Equinor, about 67% owned by the Norwegian state, is run the same way, a listed, professionally managed, globally competitive company that still answers to its majority shareholder, the public.

But that is only two legs of the stool TGF has stood on since our founding. Our own Founding Principle document said it before I ever went looking for a Nordic precedent. It argues that government’s role should be limited to ownership while management stays in private hands, citing NLNG as the proof.

But it goes one step further: that a PPPP, or P4, model, bringing the People or Community in as a third stakeholder alongside government and private operators, would do even better for sectors like power, iron and steel, oil and gas, and security and defence.

Government ownership. Private management. A people’s stake.

That is the full formula, and the uncomfortable truth is that Nigeria has already written half of the third leg into law, then quietly let it collapse.

When the Jonathan government privatised eleven, 11 electricity distribution companies, DISCOs in 2013, the structure was supposed to already contain that third leg. 60% went to private investors, and the remaining 40% was meant to stay with government only long enough to be listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. This is to ensure that, “every Nigerian can be a shareholder in these companies.”

That listing never happened. Twelve years on, the people’s leg of the stool was quietly sawn off, and ordinary Nigerians who pay crushing tariffs for erratic power own no part of the companies that bill them.

That is the gap TGF’s P4 model exists to close, and it is exactly where the 2028 DisCo licence review should aim. Not another round of selling a failed private owner’s shares to a different private owner, with government and the public still locked outside the boardroom. A genuine NLNG-style joint venture, government holding a minority anchor stake, a competent operator holding management, and this time, finally, a real retail or cooperative tranche for the Nigerians who have spent twelve years funding these companies through their tariffs without ever owning a share of them.

What I am asking for, concretely

1. Convert Ajaokuta into a government-ownership, private-management, people-stake joint venture: government equity capped well below fifty percent, the incoming Chinese or other technical partner given real operational control from day one, and a cooperative or NSIA-administered equity window reserved for Kogi’s steel-belt communities and Nigerian retail investors, not another decade of “advanced discussions.”
2. When the 2028 DisCo licence review arrives, finally deliver the 40% people’s stake that was promised in 2013 and never listed. Restructure failed DisCos as NLNG-style joint ventures: government as minority anchor shareholder, a professional independent board, and a listed retail tranche so that paying customers can become paying shareholders.
3. Place a ban on impirtsion of road asphalt. Compel contractors to use Ondo and Ogun bitumen for federal and state road contracts, with host communities in the bitumen belt given a direct equity or royalty stake in the licensed mining operators, not just jobs and promises.
4. Apply the Great British Railways “fold-in” principle to our own stalled corridors: where a contractor underperforms, the project reverts to a public delivery vehicle structured the P4 way – government equity, private contractor management, and a transport cooperative or community trust holding a stake in the completed asset, rather than let sitting. Good example include the Osogbo Steel Rolling, Osogbo machine tool etc.
5. Scale the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative’s governance template, government-coordinated procurement and risk-sharing paired with private operation, into power distribution and steel feedstock supply, and add the missing third leg by inviting farmer cooperatives to hold equity in the blending plants that are already serving them.
6. Relaunch a national carrier on the Ethiopian Airlines template, government as anchor shareholder, an experienced operator holding full management autonomy, and a diaspora and retail equity window, to fly alongside the private carriers rather than instead of them. Then, Nigeria can finally use the bilateral and Open Skies capacity it has spent decades signing away to foreign carriers.

A word on private capital, because I have never argued otherwise

None of this is a call to frighten investors. Private capital remains indispensable, and nothing here should be read as nostalgia for the command economies that stalled Africa’s development last century. The P4 model is not a dilution of private management. It is an addition of ownership, a third hand on the log, not a replacement for the second. NLNG did not become Nigeria’s best-run company by shutting out professional management. It became that by keeping government’s hand light and structural rather than operational.

The people’s stake works the same way: Nigerians as shareholders, not as managers, giving them a reason to defend these assets rather than watch them get looted or run aground.

What Nigeria cannot afford is the false choice the old slogan forces on us, as if the only options are full privatisation or full government control. We have had a third option on TGF’s books since the Founding Principle was first drafted. The DisCo privatisation of 2013 even had a dotted line for the public to sign. Twelve years later, that line is still blank.

Mr. President, you said the words in New York. Say them again standing in the Ajaokuta furnace hall, in front of a DisCo balance sheet that finally has to answer to a professional board, and in front of a notice listing shares that ordinary Nigerians can finally buy in the power company that bills them every month, and the airline that flies them home.

Strategic public investment is not a phrase for a foreign audience. It is an instruction to your own cabinet, and it has three addressees, not two: government, the private operator, and the Nigerian people who have been waiting outside the boardroom door for too long.

Ọ̀wọ́ kan ò gbé igi dè orí. One hand does not lift a log, and as it turns out, neither do two. Government, private management, and the people.

Three hands, one log, and Nigeria’s industrialisation finally moving.

Ademola Rabiu, a Chartered Engineer, Academic and Strategic Consultant, writes for TGF Perspectives, a publication of the Media and Policy Affairs Directorate, Transformative Governance Forum, Abuja, from Cape Town.

©️ TGF Perspective is a publication of the Transformative Governance Forum (TGF). The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Forum.

For Media Inquiries: www.tgf.org.ng

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