{"id":8284,"date":"2026-10-12T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/?p=8284"},"modified":"2026-10-05T17:04:32","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T16:04:32","slug":"from-raw-rock-to-real-money-inside-nigerias-lithium-gamble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/2026\/10\/12\/from-raw-rock-to-real-money-inside-nigerias-lithium-gamble\/","title":{"rendered":"From Raw Rock to Real Money, Inside Nigeria’s Lithium Gamble"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three years ago, Yakubu Danladi harvested cassava on his family’s plot in Endo, a farming town in Nasarawa State. Today he watches gauges in a control room, on a processing line that turns rock into money. “My father dug this same lithium with a shovel and sold it raw,” he said. “I studied what happened to it after that.” The rock under Endo has not changed. What Nigeria does with it has, and officials say that shift is now worth $1.3 billion. What that number actually means, once you look closely at it, is less settled than the figure itself suggests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese companies have invested more than $1.3 billion in Nigeria’s lithium processing sector since September 2023, according to Minister of Solid Minerals Development Dele Alake, who named Canmax Technology, Jiuling Lithium, Avatar New Energy Nigeria Company and Asba as the firms behind the investment, in a disclosure at the 2025 China Mining Conference in Tianjin. That figure has since been repeated, largely unquestioned, across Nigerian and international coverage of the sector. As far as public reporting shows, it has not been independently broken down or audited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What $1.3 billion actually means<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The number Alake cites is a ministerial estimate of cumulative investment activity, not a disclosed, itemised account of money that has definitely changed hands and become working capacity. These are meaningfully different claims, and the distinction matters for anyone trying to answer the question this article is built around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of what sits inside the $1.3 billion figure is unambiguously real and operational; the Endo processing plant, commissioned in July 2026, is a physical facility processing physical ore, at a stated cost of roughly $250 million. But other components Alake has cited alongside it are described, in his own public remarks and in subsequent reporting, in the language of pledges and works-in-progress rather than completed spend: an $800 million processing investment, a $600 million facility also in Nasarawa, and a $200 million plant near Abuja that was, as of this writing, still awaiting commissioning. Separately, a THISDAY report on lithium mining’s effects on Nasarawa communities described Canmax Technologies as having “pledged” more than $200 million for an additional facility in the state, with pledged being the operative word, distinct from disbursed. None of the public statements from the ministry, from the Chinese companies involved, or from Nasarawa State’s own investment agency breaks the $1.3 billion figure down into how much has actually been spent on land, equipment, construction and commissioning, versus how much represents announced intentions still working through financing, permitting or construction. On the available evidence, the honest position is that a meaningful share of the headline figure – Endo and whatever has already been physically built – is verifiable and real, while a further share is committed but not yet converted into operating capacity, and the precise split between the two has not been made public by anyone with the underlying figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That ambiguity is not unique to Nigeria’s lithium sector, and it is not necessarily evidence of exaggeration; large mineral investment programmes everywhere tend to be announced as a cumulative pipeline rather than reported instalment by instalment. But it does mean the $1.3 billion headline number answers a narrower question than it appears to. It tells you how much Chinese capital has been announced for Nigerian lithium processing. It does not, on its own, tell you how much has been built, how much is generating revenue today, or how much of that revenue is reaching the Nigerian state, Nigerian workers or Nigerian businesses, which is the actual question this piece is trying to answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where the money is going<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The clearest, most independently verifiable expression of that figure sits in Endo, in Nasarawa Local Government Area, where President Bola Tinubu, represented by Vice President Kashim Shettima, commissioned what officials call West Africa’s largest lithium processing plant in July 2026. The plant was built and is operated by Diamond New Energy, a Chinese firm, in partnership with the Nasarawa State Government, and in technical collaboration with Jiuling Lithium and Shenzhen-listed Canmax Technologies \u2014 a structure worth stating precisely, because “partnership” and “collaboration” are not interchangeable with joint ownership, and multiple independent reports describe the state government’s role as a formal partner in the project rather than merely a host. The facility costs roughly $250 million, processes 6,000 metric tonnes of ore a day, about three million tonnes a year \u2014 and has generated more than 1,000 direct jobs and over 2,000 indirect ones in the surrounding community, according to figures cited by Nasarawa Governor Abdullahi Sule. Jiuling and Canmax, whose chairman and chief executive is the same individual, Yu Chongqiang, together account for more than a fifth of global lithium processing capacity; Yu has said Nigeria was chosen as the companies’ first project location in Africa specifically because of the country’s security environment and government policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Endo’s July 2026 plant was not, in fact, the area’s first. THISDAY’s reporting on the region identifies an earlier facility, built by Avatar New Energy Materials Company, as Nigeria’s first large-scale lithium processing plant, with a stated capacity of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes a day depending on the account. The Diamond New Energy plant is best understood as the second, larger facility in the same industrial corridor, not the area’s introduction to processing, a distinction the “West Africa’s largest” framing tends to obscure. Nasarawa’s government has continued actively managing the relationship since commissioning: in August 2026, the state signed a supplementary $2 million agreement with Diamond New Energy specifically to secure continued raw-material supply to the refinery and, in Governor Sule’s words, to “protect the state’s interests as a mining licence holder”, one of the more concrete, recent signs of a state government actively negotiating terms with its Chinese partner rather than simply hosting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond Endo, Alake has pointed to further capacity: the $800 million, $600 million and $200 million investments already mentioned, plus a fourth Chinese company, Ganfeng Lithium, building a plant in Nasarawa designed for 18,000 tonnes of ore a day three times Endo’s throughput aimed at eventual battery manufacturing, and a $1 billion iron ore-to-steel project in Kogi State built on the same value-addition logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Danladi’s plant is one node in that map. His shift covers a line that turns raw spodumene ore, the rock Nigeria’s lithium comes locked inside, into a concentrate ready for export or further refining. “Before, trucks just came and carried the rock away,” he said. “Now something happens to it here first. That is the difference.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why lithium, and why now<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Global demand is what turned Nigeria’s rock valuable in the first place. Lithium is the essential ingredient in the rechargeable batteries that run electric vehicles, phones and grid-scale storage, and the world’s appetite for it shows no sign of levelling off. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development projects global lithium demand will grow 353 per cent between 2024 and 2040, as more countries lean into clean energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nigeria’s geology puts it in the path of that demand. Commercially viable lithium deposits have turned up across Kogi, Nasarawa, Kwara, Ekiti, Cross River, Oyo, Plateau and Kaduna states, a spread wide enough that officials now describe the country as sitting on one of Africa’s more significant, if still under-explored, lithium endowments. That geological promise runs into an old habit: for decades, solid minerals’ contribution to Nigeria’s GDP sat below 0.2 per cent, with most of what came out of the ground shipped abroad as raw ore, its real value captured by whoever processed it next. That has begun to shift, at least on the national accounts: the National Bureau of Statistics recorded the sector’s GDP contribution rising to 1.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2025, a 4.61 per cent year-on-year increase, though it remains unclear how much of that improvement is specifically attributable to lithium versus the broader mining reform agenda covering gold, tin, and other minerals simultaneously. The government’s policy response has been blunt: Alake has said any company wanting to invest in Nigerian mining must now add value locally rather than simply export unprocessed rock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Nigeria actually captures and what remains unknown<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is the question the $1.3 billion headline is meant to answer, and it is the one hardest to answer precisely with what is publicly available. A full value-capture breakdown of how much of every dollar of lithium value generated in Nigeria goes to mining costs, processing costs, Nigerian labour, Nigerian suppliers, government royalties and taxes, and foreign shareholders, respectively, has not been published by the ministry, by Nasarawa State, or by any of the Chinese operating companies. No Nigerian regulator currently discloses lithium-specific profit-sharing arrangements, equity splits, or corporate tax filings broken out by mineral. That is a genuine gap in what can be reported, not a detail this article is choosing to omit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One piece of the calculation can be stated with precision, because it is a matter of published regulation rather than corporate disclosure. Nigeria set an approved market value for lithium spodumene ore of \u20a6316,667 per tonne in July 2024, when the ad valorem royalty on that ore sat at 3 per cent, administered by the Ministry of Solid Minerals. That royalty regime has since been overhauled: under the Nigeria Tax Act 2025, which took effect on 1 January 2026, mining royalties are no longer administered by the ministry at all but by the newly created Nigeria Revenue Service, and rates across the sector have risen to a band of 7.5 to 15 per cent depending on the mineral, with any mineral not specifically listed at a different rate, spodumene among them defaulting to a standard 10 per cent. Applied to the \u20a6316,667 approved market value, that puts the current royalty at roughly \u20a631,667 for every tonne of spodumene ore extracted, more than three times what it was under the old regime. In simple terms: of every \u20a6100 of officially valued raw ore, roughly \u20a610 now flows to the Nigerian state as royalty before any other tax applies, whether that ore is exported raw or fed into a plant like Endo\u2019s, a floor, not a ceiling, on Nigeria\u2019s take. It says nothing about corporate income tax paid on processing profits, value-added tax on inputs and outputs, personal income tax on the 1,000-plus direct jobs at Endo, or the multiplier effects of local spending by those workers, none of which are disclosed at a level specific enough to add into a single, reliable percentage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can be said with confidence is directional rather than precise: processing captures more value than raw export because it adds a manufacturing margin, the difference between the price of raw spodumene ore and the price of refined concentrate inside Nigeria’s borders rather than in a foreign refinery, and because a working plant generates payroll, local taxes and ancillary business activity that a truckload of exported rock does not. What cannot currently be stated with confidence is the size of that margin in dollar terms, what share of it Diamond New Energy, Jiuling and Canmax retain as profit repatriated to China, or what share reaches Nigerian workers and the Nigerian state combined. Anyone citing a specific overall percentage for Nigeria’s “value capture” from this sector is, at present, estimating rather than reporting a disclosed figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The jobs and local-business case, and its limits<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The jobs figures at Endo over 1,000 direct, more than 2,000 indirect are among the most concrete numbers in this entire story, and they are worth taking seriously on their own terms. But the brief’s specific question, about local supply chains and opportunities for Nigerian businesses, is harder to answer with named examples than the jobs figures alone suggest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analysts describe processing as generating demand for engineers, equipment suppliers, transport operators, logistics firms and lenders categories that plausibly exist around any facility processing three million tonnes of ore a year, since that ore has to reach the plant somehow, the plant has to be built and maintained by someone, and workers have to eat, commute and bank locally. What is largely absent from public reporting is a named account of which specific Nigerian companies hold which specific contracts at Endo: which firm supplies transport, which local business holds the site’s catering or security contract, which Nigerian geological or engineering services firms, if any, are subcontracted into the operation. Nasarawa’s state investment authority, NASIDA, has publicised its broader ease-of-doing-business reforms and the governor’s direct engagement with Jiuling’s headquarters in China, but has not published a supplier or contractor list for Endo specifically. The clearest documented instance of local economic engagement remains the state government’s own $2 million supplementary agreement with Diamond New Energy in August 2026, a government-to-company arrangement rather than evidence of an independent Nigerian private-sector supply chain forming around the plant. Until operators or the state government publish more granular contracting data, the claim that processing creates broad opportunities for Nigerian businesses remains directionally plausible but not yet demonstrated with named cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Before the plant, if you finished secondary school here, you either farmed or you left for Lafia or Abuja to find work,” Danladi said. “Now some of my classmates are here too. Not all as engineers, some drive trucks, some work the canteen, some do security. It is not everything, but it is something that did not exist before.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What could still go wrong<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nigeria’s lithium ambitions face constraints common to the country’s industrial sector at large, sharpened here by the particular demands of mining. Power comes first: ore processing eats electricity, and an unreliable national grid pushes processors onto captive power, driving operating costs above what competitors on steadier grids pay. Infrastructure piles on top of that, since much of Nigeria’s richest lithium sits in remote pockets of the north-central states, where thin roads and weak logistics add cost and delay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regulation and security stack a second layer of risk. Nigeria has stood up a 2,200-strong corps of “mining marshals” to hunt illegal mining, and the tally of arrests is substantial: in April, the corps seized two truckloads of lithium on the outskirts of Abuja and, weeks later, raided a site in Karu, Nasarawa State, arresting four Chinese nationals. A separate case saw 15 Chinese nationals, nine Nigerians and a mining company arraigned before a federal court over allegedly unlicensed lithium mining in Kokona Local Government Area of Nasarawa State. A market in Kishi, Oyo State, that once traded farm produce became, according to Associated Press reporting, a hub for illicit lithium trade, with community leader Jimoh Bioku describing unease over the insecurity that tends to trail it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Chinese question<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It is worth separating two claims that get blurred together in coverage of this sector: Chinese companies operating extensively in Nigeria’s lithium industry, which is well documented, and China controlling that industry, which is a stronger claim requiring more care. What is documented is this: China holds a commanding share of the world’s lithium processing capacity. Industry estimates put it between 65 and 73 per cent of global lithium chemical refining despite holding well under 10 per cent of the world’s reserves, according to comparative reserve and refining data cited across industry analyses. A broadly similar pattern holds in cobalt refining, where Chinese firms are estimated to control roughly 80 per cent of global capacity while mining relatively little of it domestically. That global pattern explains why Chinese capital, rather than European, American or domestic Nigerian capital, is the money actually building Nigeria’s processing plants: the firms doing the building already run much of the world’s midstream refining and have the technical playbook and balance sheets to expand it into new territory. That is meaningfully different from a claim that Beijing, or Chinese firms collectively, control Nigerian mining licences, Nigerian land, or Nigerian regulatory policy. Nasarawa’s state government, as a formal partner in Endo and the signatory of its own supplementary agreements with Diamond New Energy, retains a documented seat at that table, even if the scale of its leverage relative to its Chinese partners is not something either side has quantified publicly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ownership structure varies plant to plant rather than following one template: Endo runs as a state-government partnership with technical Chinese collaboration, while other Nasarawa facilities are described in more fully Chinese-owned terms. On staffing, the picture is suggestive rather than fully evidenced. No public disclosure gives a precise breakdown of what share of technical and managerial roles at Nigeria’s lithium plants are held by Nigerians versus expatriate Chinese staff. What exists instead is circumstantial: President Tinubu’s own remarks to Chinese investors, encouraging them to take advantage of Nigeria’s “comparatively low-cost labour,” drew what THISDAY described as mixed reactions from policy watchers and civil society actors, a real, on-record signal that the labour-cost dimension of these deals is contested even among Nigerian observers, though it stops short of confirming what specific roles Nigerians do or don’t hold on site. Absent plant-level staffing disclosures, or interviews with Nigerian engineers and Chinese company representatives willing to discuss it on record, the claim that senior technical roles remain predominantly Chinese should be read as a reasonable inference from the broader pattern of how Chinese firms have staffed comparable projects elsewhere in Africa, not as a confirmed fact about Nigeria’s plants specifically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diversification, or the same pattern in a new mineral?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The test Nigeria has set for itself is whether lithium becomes a genuine pillar of economic diversification, or oil’s old story retold in a new mineral. The evidence assembled here supports neither a confident yes nor a confident no. Nigeria has built real, operating processing capacity faster than it managed with most other minerals in decades, backed by a formal policy barring unprocessed exports and a documented, if partial, royalty and jobs record. It has not yet produced the disclosure cost breakdowns, staffing data, named local contractors, audited investment tracking that would let anyone state with precision how much of its lithium wealth stays home rather than leaving with the ore’s refined value. Mining’s overall GDP contribution has moved from a rounding error toward 1.8 per cent, a real if early signal; the deepest, most lucrative stages of the battery supply chain remain outside Nigeria regardless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in Endo, Danladi resists drawing big conclusions from his own job. “I am grateful for the work,” he said. “But one plant does not make an industry. My hope is that by the time my children are looking for work, there will be a company here doing what the Chinese engineers do now, not just running the machines, but designing them.” Whether that hope holds up depends less on how much more money is announced by Beijing and more on whether Nigeria starts publishing the kind of granular numbers on cost, ownership, staffing, and tax that would let anyone outside the government actually check.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three years ago, Yakubu Danladi harvested cassava on his family’s plot in Endo, a farming town in Nasarawa State. Today he watches gauges in a control room, on a processing line that turns rock into money. “My father dug this same lithium with a shovel and sold it raw,” he said. “I studied what happened […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":8353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"saved_in_kubio":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-governance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8284"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8458,"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8284\/revisions\/8458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openafricantribune.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}