Economists, geologists and surveyors have long agreed that under the Nigerian soil are wealth and riches untold. But majority of Nigerians are wallowing in poverty. The Nigerian Extractive Industries and Transparency Initiative, NEITI report suggests that there are about 40 different kinds of solid minerals and precious metals buried in Nigerian soil waiting to be exploited. The commercial value of Nigeria’s solid minerals has been estimated to run into hundreds of trillions of dollars, with 70 per cent of these buried in the bowels of Northern Nigeria.
Solid minerals
President of Miners’ Empowerment Association of Nigeria, Mr. Sunny Ekosin, reveals that Nigeria loses a whopping N8trillion annually in unexploited gold alone. He also says that Ajaokuta remains the key to Nigeria’s industrialisation and that getting it back to work is a matter of patriotism for President Buhari and his team.

Ekosin in an interview with F. said: “If Nigerians were taking data seriously, we would have built a database, where we have authentic information. In 2012, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Mines and Steel, came before the nation and said, that from our precious metals alone, specifically from gold exploitation alone, Nigeria is losing N8 trillion ($50 billion) annually.”
The failure of Nigeria, since independence in 1960, to put in place a structure that will make the benefits of the exploitation of solid minerals available to all Nigerians has been the bane of the nation. At the moment mining of minerals in Nigeria accounts for only 0.3 per cent of its GDP, due to the influence of oil resources. The domestic mining industry is underdeveloped, leading to Nigeria having to import commodities it could produce domestically, such as salt or iron sheets and billets.
According to NEITI’s audit findings, solid mineral deposits are scattered all over Nigeria, with more deposits in certain areas than others. Over 40 million tonnes of talc deposits have been identified in Niger, Osun, Kogi, Ogun and Kaduna states. There are huge deposits of coal ranging from bituminous to lignite in the Anambra Basin of South-Eastern Nigeria.
There are lead-zinc ores within the Asaba Area of Niger Delta, while tin, niobium, and lead, are to be found around Oyo and Igbeti, with as much as over a billion tonnes of gypsum spread around Sokoto, Niger, Ondo and Ekiti states. Nigeria’s potentially most beneficial solid minerals are spread around the nation but most of them are in the North.
Limestone deposits occur in Cross River, Ogun, Benue, Gombe, Ebonyi, Sokoto, Edo and Kogi states; magnesite in Adamawa and Kebbi states; coal in Enugu, Imo, Kogi, Delta, Plateau, Anambra, Abia, Benue, Edo, Ondo, Bauchi, Adamawa and Kwara states; wolframite in Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi and Niger states; silver is found only in Kano, with kyanite in Kaduna and Niger states; manganese only in the Northern states of Kebbi, Katsina and Zamfara with diatomite found only in Yobe State, while ilmenite-rutile is only in Bauchi, Plateau and Kaduna states.

source:http://www.fkstradingltd.com/2015/06/neglect-of-solid-minerals-why-nigeria.html