The issue of lack of data generation in the Nigerian Mining sector will become a thing of a past as Federal government has embarked on a project to boost its geological data generation and analysis to woo investors into the solid mineral sector in Nigeria.
The Director General Nigerian Geological Survey Agency Dr Abdurazak Garba Stated this in an interview with Voice of Nigeria’s Mines and Steel Development Correspondent Abubakar Hassan in Abuja, the Nigeria’s capital.
He explained that mining is capital intensive and the investors will like to have prior information on what type of mineral they wan to invest on thus providing adequate data for the them is one of the priority of the agency.
“The project itself is aimed at generating Geo-scince information to attract investors into some commodities that we have identified in the Nigerian Geological Survey and the project also involve capacity building for the staff of the Agency, the Ministry and some stakeholders to understand how exploration is done in line with the international best practices”
The Dierctor General also explained that the project is designed to be driven by competent person who has the skills to provide geo-science data that investors will have confidence in and by attaching the staff to learn from them to know how they carry out data and analysing the data for the best interest of the country.
He explained how robust the agency received the feedback of the data generation in the mining sector,“ so far so good a I will say investors have shown keen interest. Myself, the Honourable Miniter and some key stakeholders of the sector have been going round the world to market some of the information we generated for the mining sector to the prospective investors and the feed back we received on the project website is quiet impressive.”
On the issue of Memorandum Of Understanding between the agency and other foreign Geological agencies, the Director General said the the agenct has entered into several MOU with China.
“We started operationalisation of MOU with the Gelogical Survey Agency of China and they are to come on the geo-chemical mapping of Nigerian land space. We also have MOU with British Geological Survey, Cotin University in Australia, Council for Geological survey in South Africa and the agency has research group on different mineral commodities and they serve as problem solving group in the exploration of various minerals in the country”
He also pointed some of the initiatives he brought to the agency as Director General,“they are quiet a lot of things since I came on board as Director General in the last one year. We have established a very good museum, created a control Center for Earth Tremor monitoring and we have expanded the scoop of the monitoring centers across the country so that we can capture all the information from the ground and as event comes ,we can carry out some predictive analysis and inform all the necessary government agencies for proactive measures”
Dr Garba explained that the key challenge now in every sector is finance and mining being a capital intensive venture and the government need to carry out investigation to de-risk the sector for economic development to strive in the Nigerian mining sector.
Source: VON
