Wunti Warns Against Repeating Oil Export Model With Critical Minerals

By Adedapo Adesanya

Nigeria has been urged to move away from exporting unprocessed critical minerals and instead develop domestic processing and manufacturing value chains to avoid repeating the structural weaknesses created by its crude oil export model.

Speaking at the 2026 Concordia Annual Summit in New York, where he participated in a high-level panel on Rare Currency: Critical Minerals in a Shifting Global Economy, the chief executive of the World Energy Council Nigeria, Mr Bala Wunti, said Nigeria’s estimated 44 critical mineral types, including lithium, rare earth elements, nickel and cobalt, should become feedstock for domestic industrialisation rather than being exported in raw form.

Mr Wunti, a former Chief Upstream Investment Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, warned that exporting mineral concentrates and subsequently importing higher-value processed products would replicate the value leakage experienced in the petroleum sector.

“For half a century, Nigeria exported crude oil in its raw form and turned around to import refined petroleum products at astronomical costs. That structural anomaly created poverty, flight of capital, and economic vulnerability instead of wealth.

“We must not repeat that failure with lithium, tantalite, and rare earth elements,” Mr Wunti said.

The intervention comes as critical minerals gain strategic importance globally because of their role in batteries, renewable energy technologies, electric vehicles, advanced manufacturing and other industrial applications.

Mr Wunti identified the absence of standardised and bankable geological data as one of the principal constraints preventing large-scale institutional investment in Nigeria’s mining sector.

“The fundamental problem has been the gap between mineral potential and an investable project. Global investors do not deploy capital into potential; they deploy capital into bankable projects backed by JORC-compliant data.

“We had indications of minerals in the ground, but we lacked the commercial structuring needed to convince international financiers,” he said.

According to him, attracting serious private capital requires more than geological indications. Nigeria must provide reliable geological surveys, predictable regulatory frameworks, security for host communities, adequate power infrastructure and commercially viable routes to domestic and international markets.

Mr Wunti also identified the newly established Nigerian Solid Minerals Company (NSMC) as an important vehicle for addressing the bankability gap in the sector.

He said the company could help convert geological information and mineral discoveries into de-risked, commercially viable investment opportunities capable of attracting private capital.

For Nigeria, the strategic objective, he suggested, should therefore extend beyond increasing mineral production to building the infrastructure, processing capacity and industrial linkages required to capture a greater share of the value generated across the critical minerals supply chain.