As demolition of structures along the right-of-way of the proposed Lagos-Calabar coastal road continues, scrap metal dealers have been enjoying an unusual boom in business.
Amid the controversy surrounding the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway, the Minister of Works, David Umahi, had, on Saturday, 27 April, kick-started the demolition of structures situated along the road’s right of way.
As the excavators began demolition, leaving owners in anguish, the metal dealers and their employees, mostly young men, have since been leaving the site with truckloads of iron rods and other metals.
The young men move in the trail of the excavators, searching for iron rods and other metals in the rubble and loading their finds into trucks.
Musa is one of the 21 workers employed a week ago by a scrap metal dealer at the demolition site. The Kano-born waste picker earns an average daily wage of N4000 from working at the site.
According to Musa, his employer bought all rights to the “condemned” iron and has loaded about five trailers of iron rods and other metals from the site. In his estimation, his boss’ profit would run into millions of naira.
In Nigeria, recycling of scrap metals is lucrative as demand often outweighs supply.
According to a former Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Abubakar Bawa Bwari, “over 95 per cent of the current steel production in Nigeria is from scrap metals.”
The heavy reliance on scrap metals for the production of iron and steel bars is a reflection of Nigeria’s under-performing steel sector.
Despite an estimated deposit of 3 billion tonnes of iron ore, Nigeria Imported $271.96 million worth of iron and steel in 2023, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade.
The situation is further worsened by the fact that the two integrated steel plants, Ajaokuta Steel Company (ASC) and Delta Steel Company (DSC) have become moribund.
While the DSC thrived for a few years, the ASC is said to have never produced a single steel despite the Federal government’s spending of $10 billion on it in more than four decades.
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