Okonjo-Iweala Urges Nigeria to Stop Exporting Raw Minerals

(Okonjo-Iweala. Photo Credit;THISDAYLIVE)

Nigeria and other African nations have been strongly recommended by Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, to treat essential minerals before exporting them.

At the 7th Africa Emerging Markets Forum in Abuja on Wednesday, she gave a speech at the Fireplace Dialogue on Building Africa's Resilience in a Changing Global Economic Order.

Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, has insisted that Nigeria should take advantage of its critical minerals to produce electric vehicle batteries and similar goods, positioning itself as a major player in the ongoing global green energy revolution.

She attributed much of the terrorism, banditry and corruption in Nigeria and other parts of Africa to the extraction and exportation of critical minerals in their raw form.

She identified critical minerals as a high-potential sector, noting that the green transition was driving demand for lithium, bauxite, cobalt and other elements needed to manufacture EV batteries and other low-carbon goods.

She said Africa held an estimated 30 per cent of the world's mineral reserves, with Latin America holding a similar share.

For Africa in particular, she said, rather than persisting with the extract-and-export model that had been the source of considerable volatility, economic underperformance, corruption, conflict and banditry, the goal should be higher-value, higher-productivity growth driven by the development of sub-regional value chains and integration into potential supply networks.

She stressed that the time to seize this opportunity was now, as shifting geopolitics created demand pressure for diversifying critical mineral supply chains, warning that failure to act now would mean missing a significant opportunity.

She noted that Africa's leaders appeared to be moving in the right direction, citing Morocco's use of its phosphate resources to produce electric vehicle components for international markets, particularly for Chinese automakers, as well as similar moves in Zambia, the DRC, Mozambique, Angola and Nigeria to add value to critical minerals.

However, she said these efforts needed greater systematisation and harmonisation, including consideration of sub-regional approaches, so that countries were not drawn individually into suboptimal bilateral agreements.

She added that the continent could seize green comparative advantages by harnessing its abundant renewable energy potential to power minerals processing.

She also called for the diversification of global trading partners, moving away from the current situation where exports and imports were concentrated among a few countries, narrowing available opportunities.

She explained that a second way to make the trading system more robust and resilient was by ensuring more countries and regions became substantial sources of global supply and demand, linking this to the broader trend of reglobalisation, with more companies and countries pursuing supply diversification to reduce exposure to geopolitical and other risks.

She said regions outside established production networks, particularly in Africa, Latin America and Central Asia, had an opportunity to attract value chain investment.

She said leadership should be centred on the people, adding that the kind of leadership needed to build a developed and economically robust Nigeria must have the nation's interest at heart, listen to the people, and remain accountable to them.

She said Nigeria needed to continue macroeconomic reforms with a careful approach to fiscal issues, debt contraction and debt management, stressing that above all, the country needed to focus on creating jobs and economic opportunities for its young and hungry population.

She said Nigerians must feel the dividends of reform in the real economy, adding that rather than negative feedback loops of uncertainty, fragmentation and slower growth, there was an opportunity to build positive feedback loops of reformed rules, greater certainty and improved economic prospects for people and businesses everywhere.

In his own address, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr Olayemi Cardoso, called for the elimination of trade barriers within the African region.

He said the rules-based international system was being tested, and that for Africa and other emerging markets, the question was no longer whether the global order was changing, but how to turn that change into a source of growth and shared prosperity rather than vulnerability.

He highlighted three major shifts he expects to shape Africa's opportunities in the changing global environment. First, he said trade was fragmenting, as geo-economic considerations pushed countries to look inward and reorganise trade and critical supply chains around trusted partners and neighbouring markets through nearshoring and friend-shoring.

He said this represented both a warning and an opportunity for Africa, noting that with intra-African trade still accounting for only about 16 per cent of the continent's total trade, there was a need to build stronger regional value chains, produce more of what the continent consumes, and trade more among African countries.

He said the African Continental Free Trade Area offered the platform to turn this global shift into an African advantage, but stressed that countries must go beyond agreements and remove practical barriers to trade by improving transport networks, harmonising customs standards, and making cross-border payments faster and more affordable.

Second, he said capital had become selective and impatient, noting that the era of abundant liquidity chasing returns regardless of risk was over.

He said investors now had more choices and less tolerance for uncertainty, with capital increasingly flowing towards environments offering credibility, transparency, quality, consistency and strong institutions.

He said this meant Africa's development ambitions could not depend solely on attracting foreign capital, and that the continent must instead mobilise more of its own resources, including pension and insurance funds, domestic savings and diaspora capital, channelling them into productive domestic investment.

He added that this also placed a premium on the quality of Africa's institutions, since investors needed to trust the continent's policies, understand its rules, and plan beyond the next political or economic cycle, stressing that credibility was not merely a central bank concern but a national economic asset.

Third, he said artificial intelligence was reshaping economic activity, changing how goods are produced, how services are delivered, and the skills required to compete.

He said Africa must move beyond being consumers of technology to becoming creators, developing African solutions to African challenges and building businesses capable of taking those solutions to the world.

He said achieving this would require investment in the foundations of an AI-enabled economy, including reliable electricity, affordable connectivity, digital infrastructure, and a generation of AI-savvy young Africans equipped to build solutions for the continent and compete globally.

He said Nigeria's recent experience demonstrated how an emerging market economy could respond to these shifts through patient capital that creates productive capacity, reiterating the need to mobilise Africa's pensions, insurance assets, domestic savings and diaspora wealth, while also seeking foreign investment that creates jobs, transfers technology, develops local supply chains and strengthens African businesses rather than merely extracting value.

He added that Africa must prepare young people for an AI-enabled economy and unlock the full economic participation of women, stressing that the continent cannot progress with only half its population engaged.

He said Africa must become a place where young entrepreneurs can build, scale and compete without having to leave the continent to realise their potential elsewhere.