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In the last week of September 2026, at the Nigeria Mission House in New York, the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, and the United States Deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, signed a framework agreement covering geological data, exploration, mineral processing, infrastructure and technical capacity.
The Nigerian press reported it within hours as a $700 billion mining deal.
It is not one, and the gap between what was signed and what was reported is the subject of this article.
The $700 billion Dollars is not an investment, a loan, a commitment, or a sum any American has undertaken to spend. It is the Federal Government’s own estimate of what Nigeria’s minerals are worth, while they remain in the ground.
What was signed is a government-to-government endorsement meant to encourage business-to-business transactions. It creates no legal mechanism compelling anybody to do anything and obliges Nigeria to deliver nothing in particular.
The objection is not to framework agreements, which are ordinary diplomatic instruments, but to reporting an instrument that binds nobody as though $700 billion had arrived at the airport. the actual commercial transactions, investments and projects are still to be negotiated and developed.
The figure has a history that undermines it. In October 2023 the Nigeria’s Solid Minerals Development Fund (SMDF) signed a memorandum of understanding with GeoScan GmbH, a German firm travelling with the Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s delegation, to explore Nigerian deposits valued at over $700 billion.
Three years later, a different partner, a different continent, the identical number. One Nigerian newspaper reported the 2023 agreement as concerning $700 million rather than billion, a factor of one thousand nobody corrected. A figure surviving three years, two partners and a thousandfold discrepancy without revision is not an estimate but a marketing asset, attaching to whichever counterparty is at the table.
But the $700 billion valuation itself deserves scrutiny. No publicly published methodology supports the number: no public geological survey from which to reconstruct it, no statement of minerals, grades, tonnages or prices, no indication that extraction costs were netted off, and no discount rate. Harold Hotelling settled the economics in 1931.
An exhaustible mineral deposit’s value is the price of the ore minus the cost of extracting it, discounted across the years extraction takes, and for many Nigerian deposits at current grades and infrastructure, that yields a small number and sometimes a negative net present value. This matters practically, because a country believing it sits on $700 billion negotiates as though it holds a winning hand and reads the absence of investment as a failure of diplomacy rather than a verdict on its terms, security and infrastructure.
Against the claim sits what the sector produces. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) recorded solid mineral exports of ₦249.7 billion in the first half of 2026, led by gold, lead and zinc and increasingly lithium. That is a genuine rise of 83.4% on the first half of 2025 figure of ₦136.17 billion and deserves acknowledgement before it is put in proportion. At roughly ₦1,400/$ Naira, it is about $178 million, some $357 million annualised. At that rate, clearing $700 billion Dollars would take approximately 1,960 years! The republic is sixty-six years old.
That comparison flatters Nigeria, because $357 million is gross export value rather than government revenue. The Ministry of Solid Minerals Development recorded actual collection made up principally of royalties and fees of ₦68.096 billion in 2025, about $46 million, roughly the cost of a mid-sized Lagos property development.
It presents this as a 326% increase on the ₦16 billion of 2023 and offers it as evidence of reform. Some of it is. But the naira lost more than half its value against the dollar over the period, so the 326% nominal increase overstates the underlying gain. Converted at annual average exchange rates of ₦645, ₦1,480 and ₦1,520 to the dollar, the increase is closer to 81%.
A second circulating figure fails on the same grounds. It has been widely reported that mining’s contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 0.5% to 4.61%. It did not. The 4.61% is the sector’s growth rate in the second quarter of 2025; its contribution to output that year was only about 1.8%. The Ministry compounds this by contradicting itself, since the same official communication that puts the contribution at 1.8% also states that the aim is to raise mining’s share from less than 1% to 3% by 2030. Both cannot be true, and nobody has reconciled them.
The number that should have led the coverage did not appear in it. Illegal mining is estimated to cost Nigeria about $9 billion a year: roughly $25 lost through channels the state neither controls nor measures for every dollar of mining output it lawfully exports and can tax. That figure travels with a Naira twin worth inspecting: stakeholders warned in September that Nigeria loses ₦13.7 trillion a year to illicit mining.
This is not corroboration but the same $9 billion converted at an implied rate of about 1,520 Naira, matching neither the official window nor the parallel market near the date of the claim. The problem is no smaller for this, but the most quoted figure in Nigerian mining proves to be an estimate of unknown vintage restated in a second currency at an unstated rate, the same habit that produced the $700 billion.
Read together, these figures change the framework’s character entirely. Nigeria’s mining problem has never been a shortage of foreign interest. Chinese firms already dominate global lithium processing without a memorandum signed at the United Nations, while Nigeria’s Ministry says reforms since 2023 have helped attract more than $2.6 billion in mining-sector FDI, including a $1.3 billion alumina-refinery project.
If true, that argues against the premise of the ceremony rather than for it. The real problem is that Nigeria probably cannot capture the value of what is already leaving its ground.
Enforcement has begun without catching up. A corps of Mining Marshals established under the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps in March 2024 had, by August 2026, identified 374 illegal mining sites across 17 states, cleared 108, arrested 743 suspects and prosecuted 165 cases involving 430 accused persons, securing five convictions. But fewer than a third of identified sites have been cleared, which means the catalogue of known illegal mining is growing faster than the capacity to shut it down.
A procedural objection runs alongside the economic one: nobody outside government has seen the text. Section 12 of the 1999 Constitution provides that no international treaty has the force of law in Nigeria except to the extent enacted into law by the National Assembly. Whether this instrument is such a treaty cannot be determined without reading it, and the executive does not get to make that determination privately and then decline to produce the document.
Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) has argued that celebration should not replace scrutiny; Senator Shehu Sani has criticized the agreement’s lack of transparency; and Atiku Abubakar’s media adviser, has called for its publication.
In October the African regional organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation joined them. Its General Secretary Akhator Joel Odigie warned that Nigeria should not replace dependence on crude oil with dependence on unprocessed lithium and rare earths.
The substantive risk requires no bad faith. The United States pursues critical-minerals partnerships across Africa because Chinese firms dominate much of the processing and downstream supply chains that underpin electric vehicles, grid storage and other strategic technologies, and Washington regards that dependence as a strategic vulnerability.
Nigeria’s interest is different: processing and jobs inside Nigeria rather than raw ore refined elsewhere and returned as finished goods. The two overlap without being identical, and where they diverge it is the text that decides.
Five remedies follow, none is difficult. Publish the methodology behind the $700 billion figure or stop using it. Lay the framework text before the National Assembly and publish it, stating whether Section 12 is considered engaged. Fund the Nigerian Geological Survey Agency to produce bankable data, because capital arrives on verifiable drill results rather than on a government’s estimate of its own endowment.
Date, source and restate the $9 billion leakage figure at a stated exchange rate, then track it annually against a published target. And attach any value-addition commitment to specific licences rather than leaving it an aspiration in a communique, since African mineral agreements have a long history of promises sincere at signature and unenforceable afterwards.
None of this argues against the agreement. Nigeria should be signing minerals frameworks with anybody bringing capital and technology to a sector that grew 33.5% in real terms in 2025 against national growth of 3.87%. The objection is to the manner of the announcement. A number is produced, large and unsourced, describing a stock rather than a flow.
It is attached to an instrument committing nobody to anything. The announcement is made abroad, the text is not published at home, and the legislature learns of it from the newspapers. Nothing said is technically false, and nothing announced is quite what it appeared to be.
Akinola Morakinyo (Ph. D) writes on MINT economies from the Department of Economics, Finance & Quantitative Analysis, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA
