By Ernest Nzor, Abuja
Director-General of Nigeria Geological Survey Agency (NGSA), Dr Abdulrazaq Garba, said that Nigeria has high-grade lithium minerals to attract more foreign investors to boost the country’s economy.
Garba, who stated this in Abuja, during a press briefing, said that the agency has embarked on several projects targeted at generating data, especially on critical minerals that will attract investors’ interest and spur the much-needed investment in the mining sector.
He noted that the agency is making efforts to have a monitoring station in all zones across Nigeria for effective monitoring of seismic events, adding that the seismograms are available for academic research and earthquake monitoring.
Garba said: “Currently NGSA is working on developing such a database for other mineral commodities, the agency has earthquake monitoring stations in Abuja, Nasarawa, Kaduna and Kwara States.
“What we want to do is we are projecting to concession the areas that are free through the Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office (NMCO) so that interested investors can get licence and data and take it to the next level.
“These are the things we are looking at and working on to ensure that the data we generate is useful to investors.
“Nigeria has high-grade lithium minerals that would attract more foreign investors to boost the country’s economy.
“Nigeria’s lithium is a hot cake now. The mineral was discovered in several parts of the country in the course of the National Integrated Mineral Exploration Project (NIMEP) exploration and we did an investigation and came up with an analysis and discovered that Nigeria’s lithium is of high grade.
“High grade in the sense that the standard worldwide for even exploration and mining starts from 0.4 per cent lithium oxide but when we started exploration and mining, we saw one per cent up to 13 per cent lithium oxide content.
“Another advantage of Nigeria lithium is hard rock lithium found and that is what investors are looking out for worldwide. We even had a discussion with some private companies with mining licences in Nigeria and they conducted tests on lithium and we also collaborated with Canada on that too,” he said.
He assured that the agency will continue to generate geoscience data that would attract the right type of investment into Nigeria’s mining sector.
