Should the Federal Government (FG) consider exporting raw gold like crude oil, it will be another crude oil mistake. This is Olamilekun Adegbite, the Minister of Mines and Steel Development.
Adegbite made this submission during an interview held in Abuja, on Sunday, November 27, 2022.
According to the minister, the ‘Down Stream Mineral Policy’, which was introduced recently by the Federal Government, will enable a thriving industrial refining sector in Africa’s largest economy.
“If you mine and you cannot process it yourself, you can sell it off to processors in Nigeria. These processors would either buy it off you totally or process and resell or they can process and return it to you. So, that is the policy in Nigeria now because we do not want to lose jobs or wealth to other countries.
“You know what we do in the oil and gas sector. We export crude oil and import petroleum into the country by that we export all our jobs out. So, I said we cannot make the same mistake with mining so I started very early in 2019 to develop a policy called Down Stream Mineral Policy,” Adegbite explained.
How the mining sector is performing
Nigeria’s mining sector suffered a decline in economic productivity, causing a -21.31% growth decline in the third quarter of 2022.
The contribution of the mining and quarrying sector to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) dropped to 5.90% in the period under review. This is lower by 10.75% points and 10.21% points, respectively, compared to the figures for the corresponding period of last year (2021) and the second quarter of 2022.
