How cabal holds solid minerals sector hostage

In from Ali Smart….

An industrial group has raised the alarm that Nigeria’s solid minerals sector is being held hostage and prevented from contributing meaningfully to the economy.

The President of the Progressive Miners’ Empowerments Association, Mr. Sunny Ekozin at a press conference, in Abuja, stated that “one of the major challenges of the sector has been that a cabal has taken that industry hostage and has disallowed it to develop enough to make the appropriate contributions to the economy of the nation.

According to Ekozin, “this cabal has been responsible for deceiving successive governments in the past and has pocketed various funds provided by the federal government and development partners, including the World Bank. Rather than developing the sector, those involved have only enriched themselves at the detriment of the miners and the solid minerals sector.”

Many members of the cabal he said occupy various government offices with the mandate to develop the sector in the interests of the Nigerian economy, and given their proximity to government, Ekozin said they have used their position to “allocate to themselves, as many as, 100 to 200 mining licences which they then hawk through cronies, while denying genuine miners access to the fields.”

The activities of the cabal Ekozin said, has resulted in Nigeria realizing only N1.7 billion from mining royalties in the last 20 years far less than could have accrued to the nation’s coffers and inspite of the fact that “several hundreds of billions of Naira had been released by both federal government and development partners.”

The current situation in the solid minerals sector Ekozin said “requires emergency actions on the part of President Muhammadu Buhari, if he is to realize the change he promised Nigerians in his campaign.”

To make things better, the Progressive Miners’ Empowerment Association boss said that the sector has “provided low-hanging fruits from where the new administration could realise N1 trillion, annually, if President Buhari pays it the deserved attention.

According to him, “not only can the nation earn huge revenue from the sector, it would also provide as much as 2 million jobs in the next four years within which many of the youths in the country would be gainfully employed.

“This is the sector that President Buhari should focus on. The solid minerals sector has been identified as an agent of wealth and change,” he said.

With regards to the moribund Ajaokuta Steel Complex in Kogi State, Ekosin said “those telling Nigerians that it was no longer viable were insincere, as, “Ajaokuta is still very viable.”

He lamented that after the federal government had invested about $7.2 billion in the complex, it was disheartening that past administrations made it impossible for the complex to become operational, in spite of massive raw materials availability, as well as, a large market for steel in Nigeria and the West African sub-region.

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