70% Solid Minerals In The North – Fayemi

Northern Nigeria has the potential to become a global mining destination, as it has over 70% of Nigeria’s metallic mineral deposits located in the region, Minister of Solid Minerals, Dr Kayode Fayemi has said.
“We are giving licenses to a number of operators in mining. 70% of metallic minerals in Nigeria are located in the North. Solid minerals is to the North what oil is to the South,” the minister said.

According to him, with a huge deposit of gold in Kaduna, tin and columbite in Jos, lead in Zamfara state, sapphire, emerald, tantalite among others, located in other parts of the region, Nigeria needs commitment, determination and resilience for the country to realise its full potentials in solid minerals.
Addressing a town hall meeting organised by the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture to present the one year scorecard of President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday in Kaduna, the minister said there was the need to formalise the sector, register them, organise them into cooperative societies for easier financing.
“We are endowed with resources, the challenges is often persecution and trust. We can be mining destination with determination, commitment and resilience. The key challenge is organising the sector in a way that the people will get social benefits. Over 5 million Nigerians are involved in mining informally, they don’t have license but we can organise them to be useful to themselves and to the country.
“We can formalise them, organise them into cooperative, empower them through capacity building and finance them.

The quantity, quality and commercial viability of our endowment, we have gold in abundance in Kaduna but we still need to do more exploration in the state in partnership with the state government.
“Mining is a capital intensive business, we are working with Bank of Industry and commercial banks to provide intervention fund to develop those involved in the business. Nigeria spends less than other neighbouring countries on exploration. Burkina Faso spends $50 million on exploration annually, while Nigeria spends $300, 000 annually. Our mineral resources must work for Nigerians to generate revenue and create jobs.”

Also in a remark, Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said the town hall meeting, the second in the series is part of the concept of participatory democracy “for the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari to give account of its stewardship since coming into office on May 29th 2015. “This is the right thing to do because we entered into a contract with you during electioneering campaign to do certain things, and it is only right that we let you know how we have fared since we assumed office.”
Mohammed, who spoke on insecurity, corruption and economy, said the Buhari administration has crushed the Boko Haram insurgents, limiting the group to soft targets, adding that the administration was routing out corrupt personalities, whose practices have had negative impact on the people, and is bringing back the economy from the doldrums.

“But let me focus on the administration’s strategy to lift millions of Nigerians out of poverty. We plan to do this through six social intervention areas that will greatly impact on the economy as well as on lives: 500,000 graduates are to be employed and trained as teachers, 370,000 non-graduates (artisans, technicians) to be trained and employed, 1 million people (farmers, market women, etc) to be granted loans to set up small businesses.
“Conditional cash transfer to be made to the most vulnerable people (not unemployed graduates), school feeding targeting 4.5 million school children, and bursaries/scholarships for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students,” he said.
In his comment, Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, said Nigeria plans to drop importation of fuel by 60% in 2018 and begin exportation of petroleum products to other countries by 2019.

He said the country intended to build four more refineries located in addition to the existing ones to improve the country’s capacity production, reduce and eventually stop importation of fuel, while moving to exportation of petroleum product by 2019.
He said with two refineries currently working despite the activities of vandals, his target is to ensure the production of 2.3 million barrels.
He said: “Let me start by apologising for the difficulties you have been experiencing in terms of getting fuel, although the situation is improving, I felt sad still that some areas around the metropolis are not getting the product, especially that you have a refinery.
“But the realities about the situation are that wherever I turned when I was appointed, I found problems and if I turned to what the future was to Nigeria, I saw the solution rather than hope. So, I took over the mantle under these circumstances but I was not discouraged because the President is committed to surmounting the problems.

“This is the first time we have two refineries working simultaneously in the last eight years. For the first time in 20 years, we are working to restructure the NNPC. The reality is that as long as these refineries don’t work in absolutely top capacity, as long as we don’t have the foreign exchange to bring in the products, as long as the price of crude continue to slide, we will have problems with fuel. So, we have to apply brain work to it.”
Continuing, he said: “There is a lot of improvement, but there is a lot of work required. And in the next three months, I assure you will see great improvement in terms of fuel supply. Most importantly, we need to begin to develop massive infrastructural support in this country. The pipelines must get to work, got to get investors to invest in them because we do not have the money to build them up.

“More refineries have to be built and the target is to build three more refineries to be located in Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Warri taking advantage of the sheer facilities. If we do this, by 2018 if all our refineries are working, we will drop importation by 60 percent, and by 2019, if the four located refineries begin to work and I am sure they will, we will actually begin to export petroleum product for the first time in this country.
“For the upstream sector where production has been climbing down, our target is to move production up to 2.3 million barrels, but I am personally committed to 2.5 million barrels. The blowing of pipelines cannot drive us back, we are committed. The days of hopelessness have passed, the days of careless expenditure are passed, the days of corruption are going, and we are heading to the future where we can deliver a country we can all be proud of.”

On the fuel situation in Kaduna, Kachikwu said: “In the last four days I have assigned about 80 trucks load into Kaduna, and Kaduna normal fuel consumption as a state is about 60 trucks, so where are the trucks? They are not serving Kaduna; they are going out of Kaduna. So, these things would stop.
“To improve our marketing outlets, we are building about 700 marketing outlets all over the country, one per local government. And we are asking the state governments to give us land to do this. We are building multi big stations with shopping malls, which will beef up activities in the local government areas.
“We have the plan for injection that is providing solar power to every house. We have the concept of providing free gas cylinders to every Nigerian which will be rolled out next year so that we can pull Nigerians away from the use of Kerosene to cleaner fuel.”