Long before the first barrel of Nigerian crude was pumped and sold, our solid minerals sector was already carrying the economy. Tin from the Plateau and coal from Enugu were, alongside agriculture, the twin engines of the colonial economy – established industries with real infrastructure, real export volumes and real employment, more than fifty years before oil and gas became the story Nigeria told itself about its own wealth.
That mining sector didn’t vanish when the oil boom arrived. It went underground – almost literally. As petrodollars crowded out every other conversation about growth, Plateau’s mines de-industrialised into artisanal, largely unregulated activity: labour-intensive, poorly capitalised, with little regard for safety and the environment. Tin, tantalite and columbite kept coming out of the ground and kept creating wealth, but too much of that wealth left the country, officially and unofficially, facilitated by foreign interests who took the ore and left little value behind. Oil and gas remained the only Nigerian resource story that mattered – for decades.
‘The government has made a deliberate effort to build an enabling regulatory environment for serious investors while cracking down on the speculators and smuggling networks that have bled value out of the sector for decades.’
The world has since moved on, and Nigeria has an opportunity to move with it.
Why the ground beneath us matters again
The global energy transition needs more than solar panels, battery storage, and electric motors – it needs the critical minerals to build them. Even many who grew up around the tin fields of Plateau, Kaduna, Nasarawa and others don’t fully appreciate that alongside tin sat lithium, rare earths, columbite, tantalite and much more – critical minerals now essential for batteries, defense systems, medicine and other advanced technologies. Oil and gas have not gone away; if anything, they have staged their own comeback amid renewed energy security concerns. But it is no longer oil versus minerals. Both are now strategically indispensable, and Nigeria happens to be one of the few countries that sits on both with impressive volumes.
Over the past two decades, global supply chains for these minerals have consolidated around a small number of players with the capital and patience to invest in hard-to-reach deposits. That concentration is now prompting a broader push, across multiple industrial economies, to diversify where these minerals are sourced and processed. Access to critical minerals sits near the top of the priority list for every major industrial power today, and, for example, it features prominently in how the current American administration approaches international commercial engagement.
Quietly, in the background, a number of us who never stopped believing in the promise of Nigeria’s solid minerals spent the past several years on the difficult work of systematically proving the nature, quantity, and commercial viability of Nigeria’s mineral resources endowment. That patient work is starting to pay off – Nigeria now features prominently in several global conversations on the diversification of critical minerals supply. Interest is not limited to just production of raw ore or concentrates – there is also strong global interest in supporting Nigeria to develop the processing capacity and infrastructure to take our mineral endowment from ore to finished products. This breadth of interest positions Nigeria and our local companies to negotiate partnerships on the global stage that provide long-term mutual benefit.
Learning from our own history
It took Nigeria’s oil and gas industry more than fifty years to build a critical mass of indigenous production assets, and also decades before any meaningful value addition like refining or production of petrochemicals happened on Nigerian soil. We exported the foundations for other countries’ industrialisations for many years before we started keeping more of the value at home.
We don’t need to follow the same path with critical minerals, and to its credit, our current government clearly understands this. For example, the current administration has provided active support for the establishment of lithium processing capacity within Nigeria to replace the export of raw ores. The government has made a deliberate effort to build an enabling regulatory environment for serious investors while cracking down on the speculators and smuggling networks that have bled value out of the sector for decades.
The numbers tell the story of potential, not achievement – yet.
Official figures put the solid minerals sector’s current contribution to Nigeria’s GDP at under one percent, a startling number given the size of the resource potential – more than 44 commercially viable minerals across upwards of 500 locations nationwide. But the trajectory is one that should get every serious investor’s attention. The sector posted real growth of roughly 33.5 percent in 2025, against overall GDP growth of under 4 percent – meaning mining is already growing close to nine times faster than the rest of the economy. Government revenue from the sector has climbed from roughly ?16 billion in 2023 to over ?70 billion in 2025 (a more than threefold increase in two years), while reform-driven investment commitments since 2023 have reached an estimated $2.6 billion, including a $1.3 billion alumina refinery-the single largest mining investment in Nigeria’s history.
The federal government has set a target of taking the sector’s current GDP contribution of under one percent to roughly three percent by 2030. For an economy of Nigeria’s size, that amounts to the addition of several billion dollars to the economy, with the broad-based employment, infrastructure development, and other ancillary benefits that would follow
This growth would mirror a genuine global wave. The worldwide critical minerals market was valued at roughly $328 billion in 2024 and is projected to approach $587 billion by 2032. The International Energy Agency expects clean-energy mineral demand to nearly triple by 2030 based on current trajectories, with lithium demand alone more than doubling over that period and continuing to climb sharply through 2040. These are not speculative numbers built on hope; they are driven by demand for grid storage, defence procurement, datacentre infrastructure, and electric vehicles that are already being built. Nigeria has the lithium, tin, tantalite, columbite, rare earths, gold, iron ore, copper, tungsten, and others that the rest of the world is racing to secure. This is not a resource story we need to go looking for – it has come looking for us.
Building it the Nigerian way
Capturing this moment requires more than digging faster. It requires building domestic capacity in geology, mine development, smelting, mineral trading, and mining finance so that Nigeria is not simply exporting ore again. Nigerians are fast learners. In renewable energy over the past decade, we have seen a new sector explode from almost nothing, with Nigerian companies now leading not only at home but across the continent. Even the National Assembly and Aso Rock are now powered by solar panels! There is no reason mining cannot follow the same arc – and do so even faster.
I am proud to stand alongside the pioneers of the mining industry – investors, geologists, engineers and policymakers – who have been building toward this moment long before it became fashionable to talk about critical minerals. We are grateful for the genuine support of Nigeria’s current administration and for global partners who, until very recently, did not have Nigeria anywhere near the centre of their critical minerals strategy.
Let this be Nigeria’s moment and let us plan for it with a long horizon: professionally and systematically develop our resources for the benefit of Nigeria and local communities, lock in partnerships that are genuinely mutually beneficial, insist on local value addition from the outset, and build a mining sector that is unapologetically Nigeria-first but welcoming and friendly to global investment and partnerships.