The $700bn Question: Will Nigeria Own The Value Of Its Minerals?

The $700bn Question: Will Nigeria Own The Value Of Its Minerals?

By Olamide Martins Ogunlade

Nigeria may have an estimated $700 billion in mineral wealth beneath its soil, but the bigger question is what Nigerians will own when that wealth is extracted.

The mineral-investment framework recently signed with the United States could bring investment, technology and infrastructure into Nigeria’s mining sector.

Signed in New York on September 24 by Minister of Solid Minerals Development Dele Alake and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, the framework covers geological data, exploration, mineral development, processing, infrastructure and technical capacity.

That sounds promising. But it also demands scrutiny.

Will Nigeria become an industrial beneficiary of its mineral wealth, or simply a supplier of critical minerals to another country’s industrial strategy?

Nigeria’s history makes the question unavoidable.

Under British colonial rule, mineral resources were developed largely for extraction and export.

Today, political sovereignty is firmly Nigerian, but economic sovereignty is measured differently: who owns the mines, controls the technology, processes the minerals, captures the value and bears the environmental cost?

If foreign investors control capital, technology and markets while Nigerian companies remain contractors and mining communities absorb the risks, then the country may be exporting more than minerals. It may be exporting value.

That is why the government’s promises of local processing, Nigerian participation, skills development and job creation must be judged by outcomes.

If Nigeria exports raw ore and imports batteries, components and finished products made from those same minerals, the country remains at the bottom of the value chain.

Nigeria needs value-chain sovereignty, not simply resource sovereignty.

There is an equally serious environmental question.

The global race for critical minerals is being driven partly by the transition to cleaner technologies.

Yet extracting those minerals can leave polluted water, degraded farmland and damaged communities. Nigeria has already seen the consequences.

Gold mining in Zamfara, for instance, has been linked to severe lead contamination, with U.S. health authorities documenting dangerous exposure among children.

So, who pays when mining contaminates farmland or water? Who restores abandoned sites? What happens when investors leave? What rights do host communities have, and how much of the wealth remains where the minerals are extracted?

These are not side issues. A mine cannot be called a success if profits are privatised while environmental and social costs are left to the public.

Nigeria must also recognise that international partnerships are ultimately built around national interests.

Declassified U.S. government records from the 1950s explicitly identified access to Africa’s strategic raw materials as an American interest.

One 1954 National Security Council document referred to securing adequate access to Africa’s critical strategic raw materials as a U.S. interest. U.S. National Security Council document

That history does not make today’s partnership illegitimate. It does, however, underline the need for Nigeria to negotiate from a position of informed self-interest.

The opportunity before Nigeria is therefore bigger than extracting more minerals. It is to build the research, processing and technical capacity needed to determine their value and retain more of it; strengthen environmental safeguards; protect mining communities; secure mine corridors; and ensure transparent contracts, fair taxation and enforceable mine-closure obligations.

Otherwise, the vocabulary may change while the relationship remains familiar: strategic commodities become critical minerals, concessions become investment frameworks, and resource dependence is repackaged as green development.

The $700 billion estimate should therefore not be viewed simply as buried treasure waiting to be unlocked.

It is a test of Nigeria’s economic sovereignty.

The real question is not whether Nigeria should develop its minerals. It is whether that development will happen for Nigerians, on terms Nigerians can defend, with benefits Nigerians can retain.

Ogunlade is Associate Director and Head of Climate and Extractives Campaigns at Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA).

He writes from Lagos, Nigeria.