Kano Fertiliser Plant Closed Over Alleged Adulteration

The Kano State Fertiliser Company Limited has been shut over allegation of product adulteration and manual mixing of the components of the NKP blend.

It was gathered that the Federal Government, through the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority, on May 29, 2020, ordered the suspension of activities in the company.

Economic Confidential learnt that the firm’s two fertiliser blending plants developed a fault and were abandoned by the management.

Our correspondent learnt that the lack of blending plants led to the workers mixing the raw materials manually with shovels.

A source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed fear that the manual mixing of the raw materials could endanger the lives of the workers.

He said, “KASCO owns two fertiliser blending plants but they developed mechanical fault due to lack of maintenance. Labourers at the factory are now mixing the raw materials manually with shovels and filling bags on the factory floor.

“Hazardous chemicals are used to blend fertilisers and, if badly handled, can endanger the lives of people; when they are not in the right proportions, the chemicals can also destroy the soil and permanently compromise its ability to produce valuable crop yield.

“The company is also adulterating the NPK 20:10:10 blend of fertiliser and selling it to unsuspecting members of the public.”

When contacted the Managing Director of KASCO, Bala Inuwa, debunked the claim that the company was shut due to fertiliser adulteration.

Inuwa noted that the company was shut due to lack of urea for the production of fertiliser.

He said, “It is not true that we are adulterating fertiliser; we have never done it and we will not do it now. What happened was that we had issues with a collateral manager called Umar, who complained that his employers did not pay him.

“When he complained that he was not paid, we asked him what we could do and he said we must be giving him money to be comfortable. We told him that we could not be giving him money anyhow, because we were doing what we were supposed to do. He later said we should reach a compromise, and we told him we would not do that.

“During the Ramadan, we gave our staff members money to celebrate and we extended the gesture to Umar. When he got the money, he thought we were settling him and he started making noise that the money we gave him was too small, and the next thing I knew was that he started circulating a video on the social media that KASCO was blending fertiliser manually.

“He was circulating a fake video, because we didn’t give him money. We suspended operations because the company supplying urea has shut down due to the COVID-19. KASCO was not shut down for fertiliser adulteration.”

The Managing Director, NSIA, Uche Orji, told our correspondent that operations at KASCO were temporarily suspended to test some batches of the product produced by the company.

“We received a report and investigation is ongoing. KASCO had equipment breakdown and we suspended production to check some batches of the company’s products,” he stated.