Nigeria’s extractive industry is practically a crime scene. Just like the country is losing billions of dollars annually to the theft of crude oil, her current economic mainstay, the same pillaging of the country’s natural resources, is happening in the solid minerals sector, described as the next oil, a metaphor for her next biggest income earner.
Available geo-scientific data estimates Nigeria’s solid minerals wealth at about $750bn; however, Nigerian authorities say that further surveys will show that the country has much more.
Minister of solid minerals development, Dr Oladele Alake, revealed that a preliminary survey of the nation’s minerals by GeoScan, a German company, gave a figure of $750bn worth of minerals buried under Nigerian soil, but that it should be more.
“That is a conservative estimate. When we conduct a serious, accurate data exploration, we will discover trillions of solid minerals embedded under it. By the time we are done with all of these efforts,…
Source: Leadership Newspaper
