Yesterday, I sat on a panel at The Wheatbaker Hotel in Lagos alongside Nigeria's Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, former Ekiti State Governor Dr. Kayode Fayemi, and a room that included the Lagos State Governor and two other serving ministers. The event, "Nigeria's Moment: A Transatlantic Strategic Partnership Dialogue," was co-hosted by the American Business Council and The Heritage Foundation. My session: Critical Minerals, Building Nigeria's Strategic Value Chains.
I was there as the finance and bankability voice. Not as a policy commentator. Not as an academic. As someone who has investments in mining in Nigeria, has operated a beneficiation plant, has hired geologists, and has sat across the table from development finance institutions trying to get projects funded. That perspective shaped everything I said.
Every Mineral Is Critical
The global conversation around "critical minerals" is a demand-side conversation. It is driven by what advanced economies need. Lithium for electric vehicles. Cobalt for semiconductors. Rare earths for defence systems. By that definition, a mineral is "critical" because Detroit or Stuttgart or Cupertino needs it.
I challenged that framing. To us in Nigeria and across Africa, every mineral is critical if it creates economic empowerment for our people at scale. Tin is critical. Barite is critical. Kaolin is critical, if it builds industries, creates employment clusters, and anchors local value chains that did not exist before.
The conversation becomes productive when we stop asking what America needs from Nigeria's ground and start asking what Nigeria can build with what is in its ground.
A true U.S.-Nigeria partnership has to start by acknowledging that both sides bring a legitimate definition of "critical" to the table. And the partnership only works when American capital and technology are deployed to accelerate what Nigeria chooses to build.
The Bankability Question
Much of the panel discussion centred on a deceptively simple question: what makes a Nigerian mining project bankable?
The answer, from someone who has tried to raise capital for mining projects in this country, is uncomfortable. Most Nigerian projects are not bankable. Not because the minerals are not there, but because the data, the legal certainty, and the commercial arrangements that institutional capital requires are absent.
Geological data in Nigeria is thin and often decades old. Title integrity is complicated by a three-layer consent structure. The federal government owns the minerals. The state governor controls land use under the Land Use Act. And the community and its traditional rulers hold the land itself. A cadastral allocation resolves only the first of these. An investor can hold a valid mining licence and still be unable to break ground.
The Mining Act provides a mechanism for bridging this gap through MIREMCO, the Mineral Resources and Environmental Management Committee, but in most states it remains poorly funded and under-resourced.
Less than two weeks before the panel, Minister Alake and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Landau signed a Critical Minerals Framework in New York, anchored around Nigeria's estimated $700 billion in mineral resources.
Let me be clear about what that framework is.
Nigeria did not sell its minerals to the United States. The $700 billion is an estimate of the value of Nigeria's mineral resources. What was signed was a government-to-government architecture designed to facilitate business-to-business transactions. An important step, but a starting point, not a conclusion.
And $700 billion is what is in the ground. The question the panel needed to answer was what it takes to turn what is in the ground into what is in the economy. Frameworks do not drill boreholes. What converts political intent into capital flows is bankability.
The Geologist Gap
One of the points I made that drew the strongest response was about Nigeria's geologists.
Nigeria does not have a shortage of geological talent. When my company put out a single advertisement for geologists a few years ago, we received over 500 applications in a matter of weeks. The talent is there. What is missing is the institutional framework that gives those geologists international standing.
Today, no Nigerian geologist, however qualified, can sign off on a bankable feasibility study that an international lender or stock exchange will accept.
The reason is structural: Nigeria has no Recognised Professional Organisation under the global reporting system. South Africa solved this years ago with SAMREC.
But here is what is encouraging. The African Union has already built the continental framework. PARC, the Pan-African Resources Reporting Code, was developed by the African Minerals Development Centre and published in 2024. Minister Alake has personally championed its adoption.
The code exists. The training modules exist. What we need now is country-level implementation: trained Competent Persons, recognised professional organisations at the national level, and formal adoption frameworks. Nigeria can lead on this for West Africa. The code is already written. The institutional will to implement it is what is missing.
This is also where the partnership becomes genuinely bilateral. Nigeria brings the geology, the land access, the human capital. America brings exploration technology, drilling equipment (potentially financed through US EXIM), and the institutional expertise to help operationalise PARC. USTDA already organises reverse trade missions that bring African mining operators to the United States to see equipment and best practice. That kind of engagement is exactly what the $700 billion framework should scale.
Who Carries the Risk?
One of the sharpest exchanges on the panel was about development finance institutions and risk-sharing. The current structure does not work. Export credit agencies bank the interest income on mining project finance, but require local bank guarantees, effectively leaving the default risk with Nigerian banks.
That is not partnership. That is risk transfer dressed up as development finance.
If we are serious about a bilateral framework, the downside cannot sit entirely with the developing country. DFIs need more skin in the game.
What I Am Still Thinking About
Not everything I believe made it into the panel discussion, and some of the most important ideas are still forming.
One is about the artisanal miners, the people actually producing material in Nigeria today. They are the existing supply chain. Rather than bypassing them, I believe a serious value chain strategy should develop them into micro and small-scale operators.
What many of them need is remarkably basic. Shovels, pumping machines, everyday equipment that wears out fast. At Goldwater, we explored the idea of an embedded financing model: equipment and working capital provided against the value of the miner's output. The artisanal miner produces more efficiently, the financier recovers through the output, and the processing operator gets a more consistent supply. Small-ticket, high-impact, and directly creating livelihoods at scale.
Government has a role here too, in creating mining and industrial clusters that allow operators to achieve the scale that makes processing economics viable. Shared infrastructure. Shared power. Shared logistics.
Frameworks and Execution
I left The Wheatbaker with a cautious optimism. The $700 billion framework, the calibre of the people in the room, the seriousness of the questions: these are real signals that Nigeria's solid minerals sector is finally getting the political attention it deserves.
But signals are not outcomes. Everyone in that room has seen frameworks before. We have signed MOUs. We have had dialogues. This one is different only if what follows it is different.
What needs to follow:
Geological data investors can trust. Legal title they can enforce. Fiscal predictability over the investment horizon. PARC operationalised at the national level so our own geologists can credential projects. And development finance instruments that bridge the gap between exploration and production.
If we get those right, the American capital this framework is designed to attract will come. Not because of the framework, but because the projects are bankable.
That is what converts $700 billion of potential into economic empowerment at scale. And to us, that is the only definition of "critical" that matters.
David Apaflo
Practitioner. Thinker. African.