By Our Reporter
The Minister of Solid Mineral Development, Dele Alake, has said that preliminary reports by a Germanfirm, GeoScan, indicated that the nation is blessed with natural minerals worth a conservative amount of $750 billion.
Alake made the disclosure on Monday at a two-day national stakeholders’ roundtable on sustainable development of the mining industry.
The roundtable meeting was organised by the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Sudies with the theme: ”Sustainable Development of the Mining Industry in Nigeria,” at Abuja.
In his address, the minister said the mining sector has the potential to contribute a large part of the nation’s goal of chieving a trillion dollar economy, as pushed by the Tinubu leadadministration.
He added that this was the reason behind the insistence on pursuing local value addition in products mined in the country.
However, Alake noted that availability of data is important to attract investors that will establish plants in Nigeria to process the minerals and create multipliereffect on the job creation and growth in the economy.
He added that the government is working to ensure the country becomes an investor’s destinationin solid minerals development.
His words: ”We are working with the World Bank, Excalibur and GeoScan, a German company, to get the necessarydata on the sector. That is why the federal government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with GeoScan and they did a preliminary survey of our minerals on the output and potential. They gave us a figure of $750 billion worth of minerals embedded under the ground of Nigeria.
”That is conservative estimate, by the time we conduct a serious, accurate data exploration, we will discover that we will have trillions of solid minerals embedded under. So, the president’s projection of one-dollar economy is not a fluke. By the time weare done with all of these efforts, inputs and policies we are putting in place, trillions of naira will be a child’s play and we will be nudging trillions of dollars.”
The minister noted that the current government was putting in place concrete measures that would shift attention away from fossil fuels to solid minerals as a way of generating revenue for the government.
