Commissioner for Mines and Energy, Hon Donatus Ojiefoh, yesterday said that the future of the state in terms of infrastructural development, cost of governance including manpower development to the solid mineral industry has been secured through the efforts of their Governor, Godwin Obaseki.
Ojiefoh stated this following the ground breaking ceremony of the Edo State Polytechnic of Mining and Management in Igarra, Akoko-Edo Local Government Area of the state.
Speaking to journalists, he said it was the visionary initiative of Obaseki to establish a mining company, secure mining licenses that would now have full control of its solid mineral resources and manage them to the benefit of the people.
According to Ojiefoh, “We did a total mineral intelligence of the state to know where we have minerals and what type of minerals do we have and their quantities, where are their locations and where are the other places that we have minerals and we don’t know yet so that gave rise to a lot of explorations.
“We differentiated the minerals into the industrial minerals which are the ones we use for construction like limestone, dolomite, coal and their likes, the other is precious minerals, which are the gold, beryllium and others then the metallic like the lithium, uranium, and bitumen. We now have a market value for all of them, Edo State has the first Solid Mineral market report in Nigeria. So every month we publish them to say these are the prices of minerals in Edo.
“While these explorations were ongoing we started receiving some investors who were attracted by our mineral intelligence and now we have big companies from Europe doing exploration in lithium, in gold, coal and others,” he said.
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