The Northern Elders Forum has insisted on its opposition to the siting of a gold refinery in Lagos State.
The forum also warned northern political leaders, governors and elites against remaining silent on what it described as economic marginalisation of the region.
The forum’s renewed stance followed a statement issued earlier in which it warned that locating the refinery outside Northern Nigeria’s major gold-producing areas amounted to economic marginalisation.
This was after the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, rejected claims that the FG violated the federal character principle.
In a statement on Sunday, the Special Assistant on Media to the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Segun Tomori, said the refinery referenced by NEF is not a federal government project.
According to him, the facility is a private initiative by Kian Smith, a mining company wholly owned by private investors
However, in a statement released by its spokesperson on Thursday, Professor Abubakar Jiddere, the Forum said locating the refinery outside major gold-producing areas in Northern Nigeria carries serious economic and security implications.
He argued that the decision was deliberate and not a policy oversight.
Jiddere said, “The decision to locate Nigeria’s gold refinery in Lagos while gold is mined from Northern soil is not a policy error. It is not an oversight. It is a deliberate act of economic dispossession. It strips value addition from Northern communities, exports opportunity to the already privileged center, and condemns the source regions to poverty, unemployment, and perpetual insecurity.
To again remove the locus of value addition from these communities is to perpetuate an extractive model reminiscent of colonial economics, where raw materials are sourced from the periphery, and wealth is accumulated at the center. This is not development. It is internal colonialism.
“This injustice is systemic, not accidental. For decades, Northern Nigeria has been reduced to a triple extraction zone: the supplier of raw minerals, the supplier of agricultural produce, and the supplier of cheap labour, while processing, branding, financing, and industrial infrastructure are consistently sited elsewhere.”
He accused the Federal Government of concentrating industrial benefits in Lagos while extracting raw materials from the North, thereby denying mining communities the benefits of value addition.
According to him, the decision reinforces an extractive economic model in which processing, financing and industrial infrastructure are located far from resource-bearing regions.
“The persistent concentration of strategic economic assets in Lagos has fuelled spatial inequality, weakened trust in the federal system and heightened perceptions of economic marginalisation in the North.
While derivation has often been framed in fiscal terms, its underlying philosophy is unmistakable: resource origin must matter in the distribution of economic benefits. To deny gold-producing regions the industrial and developmental benefits of refining is to hollow out the derivation principle and reduce it to a token accounting exercise, ” he said.
