BY Aderonke Oni
Dele Alake, minister of solid minerals development, has expressed his commitment to ensuring the solid minerals sector contributes more to Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP) than the oil sector.
Alake spoke on June 2 during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
He said President Bola Tinubu’s administration is implementing policies and initiatives to diversify the economy and generate more revenue than oil in the near future.
The minister said this initiative is essential, particularly due to the global shift towards energy transition, which would decrease the demand for oil.
“We have been totally dependent on oil for decades, everyone has been dependent on the free flow of petrol dollars on the economy,” Alake said.
“The critical sector of the economy such as agriculture and solid minerals was neglected.
“Our objective is to make the solid minerals contribution to the GDP to surpass oil.
“By the time all our policy initiatives goes through the gestation period and begins to manifest results, the revenue that will be accruing to Nigeria from this sector would be enormous.”
He said Nigeria has commercial quantities of critical minerals needed for energy transition across its states, and the ministry is actively promoting these resources to attract major investors to the sector.
“We embarked on an aggressive marketing to unlocking the richness of the potential, making sure we push out information on the number of minerals that we have, the type and their demand nationally and internationally,” the minister said.
Alake said negotiations are underway with an auditing firm to audit the sector, with the goal of cleaning it up to ensure proper revenue accruals and boost the country’s GDP.
“As we speak, we are far in our negotiations with an auditing firm to come and audit the entire sector, because we have lost a lot of money in the past,” he said.
“We know that operators will under declare what they are carting away, even the payment of royalties, they underpay and they evade taxes.
“So we are in the process of engaging an internationally recognised auditing firm that has done the same thing in other parts of the world, in more than 20 countries.
“So that they will come and help us recover lost revenue and put some measures in place going forward so that we will no longer lose revenue.”
Alake said the ministry aims to recover trillions for the Nigerian government’s coffers, thereby benefiting the entire population.
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