I’ve been reading Ed Conway’s entertaining new book Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future. So far, the book has achieved the feat of making me look at a lot of things in our world very differently — sand and salt will never just be sand and salt to me again.
But there is a section of the book that gave me the opportunity to get angry all over again at perhaps the most disgraceful industrial policy by any government anywhere in the world (maybe I’m exaggerating, but only just).
The journey to making silicon chips involves a few mind blowing processes and one of them — turning quartz into silicon metal — took my breath away. A single furnace used in this process requires about 45 megawatts of electricity. After the silicon metal is poured out of the furnace and solidifies, it is broken into tiny pieces of granulated metal to get to 99% pure silicon. And yet that is only the beginning of the process because for silicon to become usable in chips (i.e. semiconductor grade polysilicon), it needs to be purified to 99.99999999% — that is TEN NINES. Or to put another way — only one impure atom can be tolerated for every 10 billion pure atoms. And this is only one part of the process. The journey to actual chips in our electronic devices contains several other twists and turns.
The book then offers a juxtaposition with cement production that illustrates just how easy it is to make compared with most other types of products. For one thing — as I like to say all the time — humans have been making cement for a very very long time. Cement use was found in Neolithic ruins dug up in Turkey that go back at least 10,000 years. And of course the Romans used opus caementicium in their buildings before Jesus Christ was born more than 2,000 years ago.
Here is a passage from the book:
The original recipe for concrete was lost for hundreds of years after the fall of the Roman Empire, and interest in it was only reignited in the fifteenth century, when On Architecture, a manuscript by the Roman architect Vitruvius, was discovered. Vitruvius’ book was translated into French and then English, triggering a great scientific quest to rediscover the secret of concrete. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inventors and industrialists raced to come up with new concoctions that could replicate or even outdo the Roman recipe. Indeed, even today scientists are still trying to reverse-engineer that original Roman concoction, with researchers at MIT claiming fresh breakthroughs as recently as 2023.
But the recipe for the cement we mostly use today was patented in 1824 by a man called Joseph Aspdin. He called it Portland cement, because its colour resembled the Portland stone quarried in Dorset. In truth, however, there were all sorts of vying recipes around the same time, and no one is quite sure whether Aspdin, a slightly shady character, really won the race or actually purloined his blueprint from somebody else
In other words, there is nothing really special about cement or the recipe behind this. The book also includes a famous quote by the French architecture and design critic Georges Gromort — ‘Le béton? Mais c’est de la boue!’ If your French is rusty, that translates as ‘Concrete? But it’s just mud!’
The thing that really makes my blood boil, however, about Nigeria’s cement policy is that nearly two decades after it came into being, there has been practically zero technology transfer. It is incredible that the same Chinese company — Sinoma (China National Materials Group) — has been building cement plants for two Nigerian cement billionaires. When you go on Sinoma’s website, you see several Dangote cement Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contracts the company has fulfilled:
The same company at the same time is selling the same technology to BUA Cement, owned by another Nigerian billionaire, Abdulsamad Rabiu. This would be hardly believable if it wasn’t actually true. Their website has a link showing Rabiu going to Beijing to sign the contract to build multiple cement plants for his company.
Including:
EDO 2nd line with cement production 6000t/d is invested by BUA group. This project is located in EDO state of Nigeria in EPC model. The scope of the work is from limestone crushing to cement packing and shipment, which include the engineering and design, procurement, erection, training and commissioning.
They do everything and hand him the keys (maybe they don’t even hand over the keys) and money is printed. I cannot stress this enough — Aliko Dangote and Abdulsamad Rabiu have become billionaires — in dollars — by taking advantage of extremely favourable government policy and Chinese technology. There is no evidence that either of them can today construct a cement plant on their own without Chinese technology from start to finish. The Chinese contractors crush the limestone, they pack the cement, they ship it, they do the engineering. The Nigerians become billionaires.
A couple of days ago, Dangote Cement announced its latest set of results:
Dangote Cement has released its financial performance for the half year (H1) ended June 30, 2023, with sales volume hitting 5.4Mt. The pan-African region includes all the cement plant’s operations outside Nigeria. Total sales volume for the Group within the period was 13.4Mt.
The group’s revenue rose by 17.7 percent to N950.8 billion. Recurring profit after tax was up by 37.4 percent to N292.2billion while Profit After Tax (PAT) rose by 3.8percent to N178.6 billion.
A further thing discussed in the book is how China continues to struggle with the latter stages of silicon chip manufacturing. And they’re trying very hard to master this. Some important parts of the process are controlled by single companies in the Netherlands or Japan so it has been relatively easy for the US and allies to limit China’s access to the technological know-how that can complete its knowledge of chipmaking.
But China has no such issues with cement technology and production. A few years ago it had well over 2,000 cement manufacturers across the country but following a government mandated wave of closures and mergers (mainly for environmental reasons), the number is now just over 800.
The implication of this juxtaposition is straightforward — if you cannot master cement, you have no hope of mastering almost anything else. Nigeria has chosen an industrial policy where the measure of success is effectively the creation of billionaires. There is practically no discussion whatsoever of mastering and domesticating the relatively simple technology behind this ancient and diffuse process.
Nearly two decades after this policy began, the country is happy to tolerate this level of failure in full public view.
When you understand that Nigeria's economy is in a state of institutionalized poverty and intentional stagnation, a lot about the becomes clear about why things are the way they are.