By Adesuwa Dan-Princewill
As a mother and a Nigerian, a heavy cloud has finally lifted from my heart. It is simply beautiful to welcome good news for a change, and my home, like many across the nation, is filled with profound relief and joy.
First came the answer to our prayers with the release of our eight Scripture Union national leaders, safely freed after a harrowing three-week ordeal. Then, the ultimate triumph of resilience: the successful rescue of our precious school pupils and teachers from Oriire, Oyo State, who were brought home alive by our security forces after an agonizing 56 days in captivity.
Knowing these families are reunited brings an overwhelming sense of peace. It is only now that I can truly exhale and find joy in the progress around us, allowing my attention as a legal practitioner to be drawn to another breakthrough in the news, one that fundamentally answers how we secure our long-term economic peace.
Two major developments in our mining world caught my eye: the upgrade of the Federal Polytechnic, Nasarawa into a specialized Federal University of Mining, Engineering and Technology, and the Solid Minerals Development Fund’s (SMDF) brilliant partnership blueprint with the University of Lagos (UNILAG).
I couldn’t help but feel a secondary wave of relief. Finally, we are realizing that the absolute way to go is to bridge the gap between our classrooms and our boardrooms.
Breaking the Colonial Hangover and the Institutional Deficit
Our foundational mining laws were originally engineered to serve colonial appetites and designed to evacuate raw wealth to foreign shores while leaving nothing behind.
As detailed in my inaugural article for The Miner’s Legal (which readers can revisit for a deep dive into our legislative history), early post-independence frameworks merely inherited this extractive blueprint, and even the landmark NMMA 2007 left us trapped in a paradox: we legislated local value addition (“beneficiation”) but forgot to build the domestic human engine required to execute it.
Related article: Conversations on Nigerian Mining Laws
By upgrading Nasarawa to a specialized mining university, we are finally dismantling this multi-generational hangover, legally anchoring our workforce pipeline, and stripping foreign operators of the excuse to import expatriate labor under the guise of “technical scarcity.” This development is most welcome and signals a bold stride toward reclaiming our resource sovereignty through the intentional cultivation of local human capital.
Let’s Analyse the Numbers: The SMDF Trajectory
Credit must go to Hajiya Fatima Shinkafi, the Executive Secretary of the SMDF, and her team for steering the agency toward these essential academic alliances. During her presentation at the UNILAG blueprint launch, she reeled out some eye-opening figures that every reader of this column should pause and analyze.
When you look closely at the data she presented, the trajectory of the sector becomes clear:
Federation Revenue Growth: Solid mineral revenues surged by 337% in just two years—jumping from ₦16 billion in 2023 to ₦38 billion in 2024, and crossing a historic ₦70 billion by 2025.
The GDP Disconnect: Despite a staggering 33.5% real growth rate in 2025—outpacing the overall economy’s 3.9% growth nine times over—the sector historically contributes less than 1% to Nigeria’s GDP.
The Export Reality: With over 44 commercially viable minerals across 500+ locations, solid mineral exports stood at ₦354 billion in 2025. This represents a mere 0.4% of total exports and roughly 3% of non-oil exports.
Capital Inflow: Ongoing reforms in the mining sector have secured $2.6 billion in fresh investment commitments since 2023, anchored by a historic $1.3 billion alumina refinery project.
What do these figures tell us? The mining sector is growing at a breakneck pace, but its contribution to our actual GDP remains unacceptably low because we are still trapped in that colonial reflex of exporting raw wealth.
Out of the 44 commercially viable minerals across 500+ locations, only a handful have started being officially commercially exploited. The law cannot fix this economic leak through penalties alone; it requires the institutional capacity that the SMDF is actively building through these strategic partnerships.
The Fight for Data Sovereignty
The crown jewel of this academic awakening is the SMDF-UNILAG alliance, specifically their EMERGE (Early-Stage Mineral Exploration and Research Grant Endowment) initiative. This is Nigeria’s very first dedicated competitive funding program for university geoscience research, covering up to 100% of exploration and R&D costs.
It was during this official launch that the Vice-Chancellor of UNILAG, Professor Folasade Ogunsola, gave us that brilliant, foundational quote: this is precisely “how knowledge becomes national wealth.”
This brings us to the absolute core of our resource sovereignty: Data Ownership.
For too long, Nigeria’s mining big data has been domiciled, analyzed, and commercialized by outsiders. We have normalized a dangerous dependency where foreign firms tell us what is in our own ground, leaving our regulators blind, reactive, and weak.
Control of our big data is key to our sovereignty. When the state sits down to negotiate concessions or grant mining leases, we must do so from a position of absolute knowledge, not reliance on outsiders to tell us what treasures lie beneath our soil. We need statutory frameworks that legally mandate all state-funded geological research to be securely archived in a centralized national repository. If we do not own the data, we do not own the resource.
Law as Social Control: Beyond Text to True Enforcement
Law is not just decorative text sitting on a shelf; it is the ultimate tool for social control and the very engine of a nation’s development. But we must ask a sobering question: What is the use of a law if there is no enforcement? A law without enforcement is a toothless tiger. In our mining sector, brilliant statutory mandates mean nothing if regulators are blind and weak—forced to rely on foreign operators to interpret the very data we are supposed to police.
By backing academic partnerships like the SMDF-UNILAG initiative, we are funding research and building the indigenous diagnostic machinery that gives our laws eyes, teeth, and real authority. True enforcement only happens when the state gains the intellectual dominance to independently monitor and hold operators accountable.
The Global Blueprint: How It Works Elsewhere
We don’t need to be legal scholars to see how beautifully this works when properly executed. Global mining giants do not treat universities as ivory towers; they treat them as operational engines that give force to their regulatory and commercial laws:
Australia: Partnerships between schools like the Western Australian School of Mines and giants like BHP pioneered autonomous haulage and seismic imaging used worldwide.
Canada: The government co-funds university research chairs directly sponsored by mining firms, turning academic papers into real-world deep-mining safety and clean technologies.
South Africa: The Wits Mining Institute runs digital labs funded entirely by the private sector to solve complex, real-time data analytics and underground communication networks.
The secret ingredient in these nations is co-funding and shared facilities. The private sector actively funds university labs because they know local research directly de-risks their investments and secures their legal compliance.
The Verdict: An Apt Shift for This Season
Ultimately, this institutional pivot offers a profoundly inspiring future for our educational ecosystem. For legal minds, corporate investors, and everyday citizens alike, these moves fundamentally change the risk matrix of doing business in Nigeria while flinging open doors for our youth.
By aligning university curricula with direct industry needs, we are finally empowering our students with highly specialized degrees and cutting-edge skill acquisition in truly relevant areas—from mineral economics and advanced geodata analytics to sustainable processing technologies.
Our students will no longer graduate into structural bystander roles; they are being equipped to aggressively claim their rightful piece of this booming emerging market and its critical value-addition chains.
Concurrently, this framework gives the brilliant minds within our academia a golden opportunity to step out of the theoretical shadows and establish real-world relevance, driving innovation as our nation decisively pivots to gain the competitive advantage of responsibly sourced, traceable minerals. Law, governance, and academia must walk hand-in-hand to secure this new frontier.
*Adesuwa Dan-Princewill is an International attorney, Energy, Environmental Law, and Natural Resources consultant.
