The Federal Government, through the ministry of mines and steel development, will soon commit part of its N30 billion Mining Intervention Fund to support local mining operators in the country.
Kayode Fayemi, minister of mines and steel development, stated this Tuesday in Kaduna State, while inspecting quarrying facilities at a mining site belonging to CIBI Nigeria Limited located in Buruku area of the state.
According to a statement issued Wednesday by Olayinka Oyebode, the minister’s special assistant on media, the essence of this latest move by the government is aimed at assisting local miners scale up their operations and bridge importation gap.
Fayemi said part of the fund would be drawn from the World Bank loan and the N30 billion Mining Intervention Fund, which was approved by the Federal Executive Council in 2016, among other funding sources.
He explained that the ministry has already entered into a partnership with the Bank of Industry (BOI) to offer loan facilities from the intervention fund to serious operators who are already producing and who require assistance to increase the scope of their operation.
The minister stated that companies that are currently into production of quality tiles would particularly benefit from the fund in order to position them increase their production, compete favourably and help reduce dependence on imported tiles.
“We are working with the BOI to disburse the loans as soon as the intervention funds are released to serious tile producers across the country,” he said.
Fayemi lamented that the companies like CIBI Nigeria Limited would have been able to produce more than 200,000 square metres it currently produced annually from dimension stones, if adequate resources, including finance, equipment and others were available.
The minister said that Nigeria needs about four million square metres of tiles annually, adding that local tile producers are producing less than a million annually.
He lamented that the bulk of tiles being used in Nigeria were imported from Italy, China and India, stressing further that there was an urgent need to support local operators as captured in Nigeria’s mining road map, which has been drawn up by the ministry.
“We are endowed with lots of mineral resources.We have dimension stones everywhere but not exploited; there is no stone we don’t have in Nigeria,” the minister maintained.
In his response, Nuhu Wya, the chairman of SIBI Nigeria Limited, urged government to support its project, as there were more demands for tiles but it lacked sufficient capital to expand the business.
Wya said the company usually received market orders from its customers two months before production.
“If investment put in oil industry is replicated in solid minerals, Nigeria does not need to depend on oil as its mainstay because we are blessed with mineral stones abundantly,’’ he said.
