Dele Sobowale

I HAVE structured the lecture into 12 parts. I begin with a brief introduction to the political economy of mineral resources, followed by a description of the critical importance of minerals in modern civilisation.

I then bring Nigeria’s own huge minerals endowments in focus in order to  underline the several missed opportunities to apply the critical resources for self-reliant industrialisation and in uplifting the standard of living of the Nigerian people.

The three sections that follow deal with the external and internal factors of minerals-related underdevelopment. The next section presents a catalogue of misery, poverty and underdevelopment in Nigeria, a mineral-rich economy.

Against that background, I then unfold, in the last section, a strategic agenda for Nigeria’s economic emancipation and self-reliant development.

II. A Brief Introduction to the Political Economy of Mineral Resources

Since the industrial revolution in the metropolitan countries, and especially since the Second World War, the enormous growth of the economies of the advanced countries and the resulting growth in the demand for minerals has caused the rapid exhaustion of their mineral reserves and left them with only low-grade or difficult-to-extract deposits.

As the raw materials of the industrialised countries become more and more costly to develop, they have increasingly resorted to controlling the minerals of foreign countries, especially those of the Third world, in the periphery of the world-system.

What is new today is that, from the point of view of metropolitan capital, the “importance” of the periphery, as supplier of agricultural raw materials, has been superseded by its “importance” as supplier of industrial raw materials.

In the context of the entity known as the world capitalist system, which is composed of the center and the periphery, the result of this shaping of the periphery to specialise as supplier of vital raw materials to the industries of the center is known as “monoculture”.

Third World countries were originally structured, i.e., underdeveloped, to serve as natural resource suppliers when they were forcefully incorporated, through colonisation, into the world capitalist economy.

In other words, an important precondition for establishing this colonial arrangement was the underdevelopment of productive forces in the colonised areas.

Domestic productive forces

Domestic productive forces having been underdeveloped, the colonised areas became virtual plantations or resource enclaves, economic activity became concentrated on the rapacious exploitation of natural resources for export to metropolitan countries, and the resource enclaves thereby became entirely dependent on the economic and political vagaries in the metropolitan countries, the major consumers of their natural resources. Through neo-colonialism, most of the Third World is still in this situation even today.

III. The Critical Importance of Minerals in Modern Civilisation

Technically, minerals are naturally occurring crystalline solids of inorganic origin, having a more or less fixed chemical composition.

While there are said to be about 2,000 known minerals, only about 100 of them are considered of economic importance. Modern man’s interest in them arises primarily because of their non-renewability and scarcity. They are also referred to as “raw materials” because they contribute the raw, i.e., natural, inputs of modern industrialism.

Minerals have always played an important role in man’s life. History documents that mineral resources can, indeed, facilitate economic development and the eradication of misery and poverty, which abound on this planet.

The development of our civilisation is closely related to our abilities to use minerals and transform them into materials for our needs. That is why we have come to associate the different stages of our civilisation with the discovery of different mineral materials: the Stone Age; Copper Age; Bronze Age; Iron Age; and, even now, the Atomic or Nuclear Age.  Continues next week.

IV.  Overview of Nigeria’s Minerals Endowments

Before the so-called oil boom era in the Nigerian economy, tin mining was the major source of revenue and foreign exchange for the country; and Nigeria was, for a long time, among the top six producers of both tin and columbite in the world. But mostly because of our subsequent over-concentration on oil, the importance of tin and other solid minerals has declined in the Nigerian economy.