A collaborative technical working group is being established by the Federal Government (FG) and the United Kingdom (UK) to facilitate the development of important mineral resources inside the nation.
The collaboration was announced on Wednesday in Abuja by Dr. Dele Alake, Minister of Solid Minerals Development, in a statement sent by Segun Tomori, his Special Assistant on Media.
The relationship resulted from a meeting that took place in December 2023 in London on the fringes of the Mines and Money conference between Alake and Oliver Dowden, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
To finalize the specifics of the partnership, a group from the British High Commission, headed by Deputy High Commissioner Johnny Baxter, also visited the Minister of Solid Minerals Development on Tuesday.
Alake said that the partnership aims to culminate investments in the mining sector value chain. The minister said that President Bola Tinubu’s administration was determined to improve the ease of doing business in the mining sector.
This he said would be done through the establishment of new security architecture for natural resources. He said that the administration was also establishing an efficient governance structure by creating a Nigerian Mining Corporation led by the private sector.
The minister restated the commitment of the government to sanitise and reposition the mining sector, aimed at boosting its capacity to contribute substantially to the nation’s revenue.
He said the move would reduce the over-dependence on the oil sector, and make mining compete favourably with the sector in contributing to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product.
