First half of the article

IN Part I of this series, published on February 9, 2026, I posed a simple but uncomfortable question: what would a regionally coordinated mineral value-chain system actually look like under Nigeria’s existing constitutional order? Since then, developments within Nigeria’s solid minerals sector have reinforced those concerns.

At the Africa Commodities Conference and Exhibition held in Abuja on April 29, 2026, the Federal Government intensified its push away from the traditional “pit-to-port” model in which raw minerals are exported with minimal domestic value addition. The Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, highlighted lithium-processing investments, local beneficiation policies, and a proposed iron ore-to-steel project as evidence that Nigeria is attempting to reposition itself within higher levels of the global mineral value chain. At the same time, insecurity across major mining corridors continues to deepen. Illegal mining remains tied to criminal financing, arms proliferation, and informal economies beyond effective state oversight. Meanwhile, the controversy over the Lagos gold refinery, which intensified in January 2026 following reactions from the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), exposed persistent anxieties about exclusion, uneven development, and weak economic coordination.

These are not separate problems. They are symptoms of the same structural reality: Nigeria still approaches development largely through isolated projects rather than integrated systems.

Projects versus systems

Nigeria has a long history of mistaking projects for systems. A project may be commercially viable and strategically important while still exposing deeper systemic weaknesses. Systems differ from projects because they coordinate institutions, infrastructure, logistics, energy, security, finance, and value distribution across space. The Lagos refinery controversy illustrates this distinction clearly. From an investor’s perspective, Lagos remains economically rational. It offers ports, freight systems, banking, insurance, export logistics, certification services, and international commercial connectivity. Global mineral trading hubs reward aggregation, certification, and logistics efficiency more than proximity to extraction sites.

But commercially rational outcomes can still appear politically exclusionary when there is no visible national development architecture explaining how value is distributed across regions. The issue is not that Lagos hosts a refinery, but that Nigeria still lacks a coherent mineral-development framework showing how extraction, beneficiation, processing, refining, and regional participation should be structured across the value chain. In the absence of such a visible system, every investment becomes politically symbolic.

Mining suspension as a symptom of structural failure

This same systems failure explains the earlier calls for mining suspensions across parts of northern Nigeria. On December 2, 2025, northern governors and traditional rulers jointly called for a six-month suspension of mining activities across the North, arguing that illegal mining had become a major driver of banditry and terrorism financing. Many interpreted the move as a security issue. But the deeper problem is institutional breakdown. Illegal mining thrives where licences are weakly enforced, value chains are informal, communities see little lawful benefit, and state presence is episodic rather than developmental. In such environments, the state faces a crude choice: tolerate criminal economies or shut mining down. Suspension becomes the emergency brake when steering mechanisms are absent.

The irony, however, is revealing. The same absence of structure that allows illegal mining to finance insecurity is also what makes legitimate downstream investments appear politically exclusionary when located outside insecure regions. Investors naturally migrate toward areas where infrastructure, logistics, regulation, and security are more predictable. The resulting geography of investment is then interpreted as marginalisation rather than risk management. You cannot sustainably police what you have not structurally organised. Nor can you distribute value equitably when upstream activity has collapsed into informality. Fragmentation and informality often sustain entrenched political and economic interests that benefit from opaque systems. As I argued in this column on December 5, 2025, while discussing regional policing anchored on regional development, insecurity increasingly reflects failures of coordinated economic governance operating at the wrong scale.

Political regions to economic systems

Nigeria’s long-running North–South tensions often emerge from a deeper structural problem: the country still thinks about regions primarily as political blocs rather than…

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