2024 Budget: National Assembly Will Support Solid Minerals’ Development, Senate Tells Alake

Sunday Aborisade in Abuja

The Senate Committee on Solid Minerals has assured the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, of its readiness to support the ministry with budgetary allocation to enable it generate necessary data that would attract investors to the sector.

The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Samson Ekong, gave the promise when Alake appeared before the panel to defend his 2024 budgetary allocation.

Alake had earlier told the committee that the ministry under his leadership requires huge funds to generate geo-science data on about 44 mineral deposits across the country.

A cursory look at the ministry’s budget proposal showed that N24,917,158,629 has been earmarked for capital expenditure in 2024 out of its total allocation of N29,243,373,419.

Alake said the availability of the data would help to attract investors into the sector.

He said: “The first thing is to create the attention necessary for this sector before the international community, before local investors

“ I want to state categorically that we’ve been able to achieve that in the last 100 days more than what had been achieved in that sector in several years.

“Today, international investors are on our necks making inquiries as to which minerals they are interested in, that they want to pump in their foreign direct investment and all of that.

“Even a few days ago, I was at the mines and money conference in London, which is an annual thing with members of my team and the degree of interest that our presentations generated there was quite enthusiastic and very encouraging.

“In fact, during the conference, the US Under Secretary of State came to me. We had a meeting, very useful meeting, expressing serious interest in our solid mineral sector and said categorically that in the last couple of weeks, the attention on that sector had generated their own interest that they didn’t even know before that we had all of these things. Now they are interested to come with their money, which we need,” he said.

Alake added that his team also had a meeting with the UK Deputy Prime Minister in Downing Street, who he said was very interested in Nigeria’s lithium.

“In fact, the man gave us some tips that I will share with you in camera and asked that our president should come. I delivered the message immediately to our president to further consolidate this process.

“Now, having diverted attention to the sector, the next best thing we should do, is the generation of the necessary data, geo-scientific data, without which no investor will make an informed decision or projections,” he added.

He stated that for instance, previous work in the geo-data section had shown  that Nigeria had at least 44 minerals that are in demand globally.

“However, we do not have the data that will tell us the quantum of what we have in Zones A, B, C and D.

“So what the investors are doing is partly speculative and no big player will come into your sector based on speculation. No serious investor would do that.

“They want to be able to make calculations and project how much they are investing, how long it will take them to recover, and all of that.

“All of these are contingent on the geoscientific data that we can’t generate and these things don’t come cheap. We don’t have the equipment locally. We don’t even have certain personnel that are highly technical and professional.

“So we rely on external assistance, which means we need your assistance in this area in terms of budgetary allocation, specifically to this sector, without which we will be playing at medium level of artisanal, illegal miners, and speculators as scavengers at the best,” he noted.