…Senate reaffirms legislative support to safeguard foreign investments
The Nigerian Senate has thrown its weight behind El-Tahdam Exploration Limited following its successful facilitation of a $500 million investment deal with a Chinese consortium for solid minerals exploration across Nigeria.
During a high-level interactive session held over the weekend in Abuja, the Senate Committee on Solid Minerals Resources, led by its Acting Chairman, Senator Onawo Mohammed Ogoshi (SDP – Nasarawa South), pledged robust legislative backing to safeguard the investment and promote investor confidence.
“The Nigerian Senate is supposed to give you all the necessary encouragement to come and bring this huge amount of money to our economy.
“Our laws on solid minerals exploration are very robust. We intend to make it more robust by amending some of the laws that are obsolete, outdated and enact laws that will give your companies better protection in doing good business in Nigeria,” Ogoshi said.
While Nigeria already has enabling laws to guide and regulate the mining sector, the Senator assured that further legislative efforts would be made to update and strengthen protections for investors.
In a show of bipartisan support, Senator Adamu Aliero, also a member of the committee, emphasized the significance of this investment in diversifying Nigeria’s economy.
“I join the chairman to commend you for coming to invest in our country. You have come at the right time when the country is venturing into diversifying her economy.
We had a mono-economy before now, where we depended heavily on oil for our foreign exchange earnings but the Federal Government has realized that we had no better choice than to look for other sectors of economy to earn revenue to finance our budget and solid minerals is one area where we have a lot of potentials.
We will do all we can to facilitate your involvement in this sector. We will liaise with the Ministry of Solid Minerals at the national level to secure licenses and to give you permission to go and start mining.
We will also talk to the governors and the traditional institutions to ensure that you have free access to the areas where you are going to do your business and once that is done, I don’t think you will have any problem,” he said.
Representing the Chinese investment delegation, Mr. Chen Twan of TSG Group, disclosed that an initial capital injection of $500 million would be deployed for mining exploration activities in Kaduna, Kebbi, Kwara, Niger and Nasarawa states.
“If we test the waters and see that it is good, we will attract more investors to Nigeria to invest in minerals deposits.
“As an international group, our company specializes in mining and bitumen. In the past few years, we have invested extensively globally and on that strength, we have come to Nigeria to survey the possibility of investing in the mining and industrial park sectors in your country for the coming year.
We also have another investment in Nigeria and we will make that known in the course of our stay in country.”
Also speaking at the session, Mr. Adamu Tah, Managing Director of El-Tahdam Exploration Limited, provided insight into the partnership’s evolution.
“Over time, we have been engaging them for the past two years. We have gone to their factories in China.
I have personally visited their factories for the past one year, I saw their processes and we know what they do and we trust them and we are a Nigerian based company.
They are not coming to Nigeria on their own, they are coming based on the investigation they have done, our reputation and the licenses and exploration that we have done overtime.
So, they are coming to build on those exploration datas and that is why when they came we had to introduce them to Nigerian Senate so that they will have full confidence of investing in Nigeria knowing that we are a true company doing the right thing and following the laws of the country.”
Mr. Tah further revealed that with the Senate’s assurance and enabling environment, the Chinese partners are considering scaling their investment to $1 billion in a subsequent phase.
“With Senate’s support, they still want to invest more money into this venture and if that is good, they intend to invest another $1billion into the solid minerals sector when this first phase of the investment scales through,” he said.
The Senate’s engagement marks a significant milestone in Nigeria’s pursuit of foreign direct investment in the mining sector, signaling confidence in the country’s policy environment and the increasing strategic importance of the solid minerals industry in Nigeria’s economic diversification agenda.
