Establishment Of Mining Corporation Will Attract Investment – Alake

Minister of Solid Minerals, Dr. Oladele Alake says the establishment of a Mining Corporation will attract local and foreign investment to reposition the sector for rapid development.

This is contained in a statement signed by the Deputy Director of Information in the ministry, Mr. Alaba Balogun in Abuja.

The statement explains that the Mining Corporation will be used as a vehicle to engage in meaningful ventures with multinationals.

“The mining corporation will enable the government to harness the mineral resources substantially, unlike the present situation where it is an all-comers game with the government being shortchanged, this time it will be sanitized in line with global best practices”.

“Nigerian Mining Corporation( NMC) will go a long way to entirely regulate and sanitize the sector, and act as a government face with multinationals and engage in a joint venture arrangement so that Nigerians will have a stake in all the ventures that go in that sector” Balogun explains.

“That is the role the corporation is going to play, and it is going to be seriously sanitized with efficient governance structures” he notes.

“So that all past mistakes would be corrected. As we advance with the Nigerian Mining Corporation, it would be like in other developed societies where you have SPVs interfacing on behalf of the government. That is what this NMC is going to do”.

It states that President Bola Tinubu’s policies and plans for the sector will attract local and foreign investors to the sector.

According to the statement, the present administration is shifting attention from hydrocarbon to renewable energy and the solid minerals underground is a perfect alternative.

“Since we have been a mono-cultural economy for several decades, there is the imperative to look for other very viable sources of revenue to increase the GDP of the country, We have to look at the vast untapped and unregulated solid minerals that are available to us”. Mr Balogun adds.

According to the statement, Dr. Alake’s recent advocacy visit to the Perth conference in Australia on mining was to market Nigeria as a destination for mining in Africa and globally.

“I seized the opportunity to assure investors that the Tinubu administration will promote public-private partnerships to finance essential infrastructure and consistent capacity building”.

It stresses that a critical roadmap component is generating adequate geophysical data that will be marketed globally.

”We are coming up with many regulatory reforms, security, artisanal miners structure, look at the role data plays in solid minerals, we intend to go into this very comprehensively, to generate enough geophysical data and all other data that will be marketed to the global market to attract critical investment into Nigeria and shore up the sector and make it contribute significantly to the GDP” he stated.

Georgina Humphrey, Edited By Grace Namiji