Solid minerals: Failure of our federalism

I have just been thinking how on earth a potentially very rich country like Nigeria can be actually very poor in the midst of that wealth. And I ask myself, why is that so? And, I am not able to put my finger on the answer. Many people have put the blame on leadership failure. Yes, that may be a part, not exactly the whole problem, because the leaders though powerful are fewer, much fewer, than the followership who are many millions more in number.

Listen to the way the former Minister of Transportation, Chief Rotimi Amaechi, captured the dilemma in which we are now “Nigerians get what they want, what they deserved. Nigerians at all times have had opportunities to vote. So, whatever you voted for is what you deserved.”

But it is not as clear-cut as Amaechi has put it. Yes, we have voted for politicians since 1999 based on what they said they would do. None of them performed as diligently as they had promised because politics is largely a game of rhetoric, a game of sophistry that can often lead to public deception.

Most politicians, if not all of them, have two faces like Janus. They seem to wear a mask during the campaign and that mask shows that they have a pretty face. After winning the election they remove the mask and we have the chance to see the real face which may look very ugly.

What I have said so far may seem like a generalisation, because all politicians may not be of the same hue. There are obviously some good ones among the lot and the reason we have not seen a lot of good things happening to our dear country is because the good ones are few and far between.

The reason I am saying all these is because of the sorry state of our country today. The prices of food, fuel, drugs and other essential items have gone through the roof. We are told that 133 million Nigerians are comprehensively poor. They are probably even more than that. That is probably the reason for the escalation of the kidnapping menace in various parts of the country. That is probably the reason for the increase in the number of out-of-school children today.

And you wonder how we got here. We have abundant crude oil and gas. We have hectares and hectares of arable land. We also have solid minerals, 44 of them in 500 communities in Nigeria, which are largely harvested by illegal miners. We have a huge population of able bodied and well educated people, men and women, many of them educated in some of the best tertiary institutions in the world.

Since 1958 when our first few barrels of crude oil were exported, we have put all our eggs in the crude oil basket; we go to bed and when we wake up, we find that the dollars from the sale of crude oil is sitting in our treasury. That has made us lazy; so we simply import the bulk of what we want from toothpick to toothbrush, from biscuits to ball pen. We simply became lazy; we simply lost our focus; we failed to identify our priorities; we ignored other assets such as solid minerals which have been sitting idle under our feet for many years.

In this country, we have gold in abundance in 12 states and Abuja. It is found in Abia, Bauchi, Cross River, Edo, Osun Niger, Sokoto, Kebbi, Oyo, Kogi, Zamfara and Kaduna. This abundant resource is largely feasted upon by illegal miners in several states while our women who want to deck out in gold ornaments travel to Dubai, Saudi Arabia and wherever else gold is sold in search of the gleaming ornament.

And the crisis of insecurity in some of the states such as Zamfara, Niger and Kaduna, is traceable to the presence of gold and the greed of illegal miners to capture it. But gold is not the only solid mineral that is found in commercial quantity in Nigeria. There are other minerals in that big league. They include manganese, bitumen, iron ore, lead, lithium, zinc, limestone, uranium, gemstone, coal, topaz and copper.

These premium products and many others can be found in 500 locations in the 774 local government areas of the country. In other words, there is no state and no local government area in Nigeria in which there are no solid minerals. None. I repeat, none. And we are also lucky to have under our feet at least seven of the solid minerals with very high demand. These are gold, lithium, cobalt, barite, bitumen and coal. These assets are also located expectedly in some of the states where we now have serious cases of illegal mining. Those states include Zamfara, Kebbi, Ondo, Oyo, Ekiti, Kogi, Akwa Ibom and Kaduna to mention but a few.

Crude oil made us lazy, so we have ignored a vital, priceless asset such as solid minerals for several decades now. At present, the sector contributes less than one percent to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). According to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics in 2019 it contributed a meagre 0.26 per cent to the GDP; in 2020 the figure rose slightly to 0.45per cent while in 2021 it was 0.65per cent.

These are all miserable figures when you look at the volume of what we have under our feet. We have, for instance about three billion metric tons deposit of iron ore, which is worth at least $1 billion; 27 million metric tons of coal which can fetch us at least $1 billion; 2.23 trillion metric tons of limestone and gypsum worth over $1.25 billion. We can go on and on but that will bring tears to our eyes because we truly have no reason to be where we are now, crawling all over the place with a begging bowl asking for loans.

Many governments, over the years, have not bothered to give any serious attention to the problems associated with mining in Nigeria. Such problems include the lack of proper guidelines, infrastructure, low financing, lack of precise information on land, poor laboratories and lack of easy access to solid mineral sites as well as the limitations inherent in the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act of 2007.

That Act needs to be reviewed so as to attract genuine investors into that sector. It appears that the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, is showing a lot of seriousness about reforming the sector and making it to make a substantial contribution to the GDP. I hope that the National Assembly and the President will give him the backing he needs to give the sector a new lease of life. But that new lease of life cannot happen except certain things change.

In 2019, the National Economic Council had suggested that states should be allowed to exploit mineral deposits in their states eventhough mineral exploitation is in the Exclusive List in the 1999 Constitution. This is part of the wacky federalism that Nigeria is operating today.

We have solid minerals in all the 774 local governments and yet we want its exploitation to be the sole responsibility of the Federal Government based in Abuja.

How can the Federal Government execute this responsibility without the involvement of the states and local governments? That is part of why the illegal miners are succeeding because they operate mainly in remote areas where the Federal Government has no access. That is what happens in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where poverty is widespread and where there is a lack of opportunity for alternative income generation.

Our problem in this sector derives from the failure of our leaders to accept that it is impossible to exploit solid minerals in all the 774 LGAs in the country without the involvement of the states and local governments.

Our leaders at the centre believe that the hegemonism created by the 1999 Constitution is good for them as it puts excessive powers in their hands. But the truth is that it has created an unworkable scenario for the country. The centralization of virtually everything has turned the country into an unworkable unitary system of government.

If the states and local governments are not allowed to participate in the exploitation of our solid minerals, we cannot make much progress. Their participation means that the 1999 Constitution must be reviewed by the National Assembly. This is not simply a matter of true federalism. It is more a matter of benefiting from our God-given asset by taking a practical action to harvest it.

If President Bola Tinubu is committed to making substantial income from solid minerals, I expect him to seek to review the Constitution to accommodate the states and LGAs in the matter. I see no benefit in the Constitution assigning these assets solely to the Federal Government and yet it is not able to benefit fully from it because of the limitations involved in the implementation of the constitutional provision.

The involvement of the states and the LGAs will also help in checking illegal mining since they will understand that it is their own money that the illegal miners are carting away. To achieve this, I suggest that the President should call a conference of relevant stakeholders such as governors, LGA chairmen, leaders of the National Assembly and State Houses of Assembly as well as members of the National Economic Council. Once a gathering like that has received the nod of the stakeholders it will become easy to amend the Constitution speedily and reset the sector for the achievement of the goals of the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development.

Once we have achieved that, we can feel satisfied that there is going to be a boom in that sector, the type that we have not seen since independence. What will be left for us to do then will be to significantly improve security at the various operational sites.

In 2017 Ghana launched a security outfit called Operation Vanguard to curb illegal artisanal mining in Ghana. Since then a lot of the problem has been curbed. In Nigeria securing the mines can be part of the expected improvement in the country generally.

Once we have secured the sites wherever we are exploiting the assets, we can then hope to expand our export market beyond the five countries, China, Poland, India, Vietnam and Germany that are our major export partners today. If Tinubu achieves this feat, we will be happy to clap for him.