Abuja FileCover StoryEconomyNews

Gov. Abdulrazaq Presents Workable Plan to Harness Natural Resources in Kwara

By
3 Mins read
0
Share

 

    • As Kwara Hosts National Council on Mining

From Kehind Akinpelu, Ilorin

Kwara State Government has recently registered five (5) Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) as part of its measures to acquire viable mining sites and make the state a major producer of solid minerals in Nigeria, Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq said on Wednesday.

He said each of the 16 local government areas of the state is blessed with abundant viable mineral resources and in commercial quantities, inviting investors to tap into the natural endowments.

The Governor was speaking in Ilorin at the 5th Annual Conference of the National Council on Mining and Mineral Resources Development (NCMMRD), which draws delegates from across the 36 states of the Federation.

The Conference commenced on Monday and ended on Wednesday, with the theme: “Minerals and Metal: A Panacea for Economic Growth and Diversification”.

“We plan to establish a standard mineral market in the state, where all minerals mined from our State will first be registered here before they are transported to other places,” he said.

The Governor commended the choice of Kwara to host the council, hoping that resolutions reached at the end of the meeting will rev up development in the sector.

He thanked President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for the bold investments to diversify the economy.

“The need to diversify the economy and harness potentials in the solid mineral and other sectors cannot be overemphasized. The excessive reliance on oil has proven to be unhelpful for our country, and I’m glad we appear to have learnt our lessons,” he added.

“I appeal to the Honourable Ministers present, the DG MCO, DG NGSA to give us all necessary assistance to actualise our dream of becoming a major solid mineral producing state in the country.”

The event attracted participants from all walks of life, including the Minister of State for Mines and Steels Development, Alhaji Uba Maigari; federal parliamentarians; members of the Kwara State Executive Council; and professionals in the mining sector.

Minister of State for Mines ans Steels Development Uba Maigari said steel is the backbone of modern infrastructure and the foundation upon which other sectors thrive, adding that the industry is key for job creation, community empowerment, and diversification of the economy.

Despite the fact that the sector is facing hurdles ranging from aging infrastructure to an uncertain global market, the challenges are an invitation to innovate, collaborate, and think beyond the ordinary, Maigari said.

“That is why I am here today to call on all of you — miners, manufacturers, investors, policy makers, researchers, citizens and businessmen alike — to join hands in a national mission to revitalize our steel industry,” Maigari added.

“Let us use this gathering to not just share ideas but to commit to concrete actions and measurable outcomes. Let us leave Ilorin with the roadmap for Nigeria’s Steel industry that is the envy of Africa and a powerhouse for our nation’s economic transformation.”

He called on miners to always prioritise partnership with local communities and ensure that they benefit from resource extraction, saying the success of the sector intertwines with the well-being of the communities where mining takes place.

He thanked the Governor and the government for the logistics support and for their warm reception throughout their stay in the capital city.

State Commissioner for Solid Mineral Development Abdulqowiyu Olododo, for his part, said the state government is collaborating with security agencies to ensure the safety of investors within the Kwara borders.

“I use this opportunity to convey to our esteemed guests that we are wholeheartedly committed to the advancement of solid minerals, thereby harnessing the economic potentials of valuable minerals such as gold, tantalite, and lithium, which are abundant in our state,” he said, adding that a framework is in place to facilitate works in the state without encroaching upon the existing Federal Mining Act.

Alhaji Teslim Jimoh, a representative of Dangote Group, in his goodwill message, said security is key in the mining sector and charged the Federal government to improve on the safety of miners, thirty percent of whom, he noted, are foreigners.

   

0
Share

About author
Time Nigeria is a modern and general interest Magazine with its Headquarters in Abuja. The Magazine has a remarkable difference in editorial philosophy and goals, it adheres strictly to the ethics of Journalism by using the finest ethos of the profession to promote peace among citizens; identifying and harnessing the nation’s vast resources; celebrating achievements of government agencies, individuals, groups and corporate organizations and above all, repositioning Nigeria for the needed growth and development. Time Nigeria gives emphasis to places and issues that have not been given adequate attention by others. The Magazine is national in outlook and is currently being read and patronized both in print and on our vibrant and active online platform (www.timenigeria.com).
Articles
Related posts
All The NewsCover StoryNewsPolitics

Musa Tsoken Congratulates Kalu on Daily Times’ Lawmaker of the Year Award

By
1 Mins read
The National Coordinator of the Asiwaju Again Renewed Hope Support Initiative 2027 and National President of the APC Initiative for Good Governance…
Abuja FileDevelopmentEconomyEnergyFinanceInside LagosOpinionPerspective

The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

By
6 Mins read
  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
Cover StoryNewsSports

Union Bank, AIICO Multishield, Checkers Custard, Others Back 5th Cycling Lagos

By
2 Mins read
Union Bank of Nigeria Plc, AIICO Multishield, Checkers Custard and other corporate organisations have thrown their weight behind the 5th Cycling Lagos,…
Stay on the loop!

Subscribe to our latest news.

Leave a Reply

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com