Lamon Rutten, Chairman of Critical Minerals Financing Corporation Plc, outlined his vision for Africa’s mining sector in a recent media interaction. The former Saudi Mining Exchange CEO highlighted mineral securitisation, economic diversification, and Nigeria’s strategic global role.
JIDE AJIA reports key insights from the session In your opinion, how could CMFC impact Nigeria’s economy, especially amid the government’s diversification drive? Do you believe it can serve as a catalyst for transformative change? There is a large underexploited potential in Nigeria’s mineral economy and even more across Africa.
Today, a great deal of ore is exported without processing, meaning that most of the value added leaves the country. Africa boasts more than 30 per cent of global mineral reserves, but these have remained largely underexplored and undercapitalised. There are no integrated supply chains, and these are the missing links for converting natural resources into national wealth for all.
These are the disconnections between raw materials and a value-driven manufacturing economy. Countries developing critical mineral strategies now see them as the foundation of value chains. Take Saudi Arabia: its electric vehicle strategy is built on critical minerals.
If you want a modern manufacturing industry, you must start at the base. The same shift is happening in Europe and the United States. In the past, the United States saw critical minerals as a storage issue. Now it is asking, ‘How do we go upstream to the mine and build the value chain?’ Critical Minerals Financing Corporation Plc will help develop those value chains, not just extract and export, but use minerals as a foundation for wider development.
Without the base, you cannot build anything. Africa is wealthy in resources but poor in actual money. That gap exists because resources are not being valorised. How do you extract value? By financing development. That is exactly what this company will do, using African money to ‘value-ise’ African resources.
If done properly, this could raise gross domestic product growth by almost two per cent annually on a sustained basis, not as a one-off. The multiplier effects are significant. Starting from Nigeria and building up, CMFC would have remarkable multiplier effects on Africa’s global positioning by domesticating values from the continent’s natural resources within the countries through full optimisation of the minerals’ value chain.
Our strategy is to gradually scale up our businesses by exploring immediate deals within the Nigerian minerals sector and then using the Nigerian experience as a showcase of competence and potential to convince other African economies. CMFC would invest in portfolio companies across the entire mineral value chain.
In the upstream segment, we will be active in exploration funding, pre-feasibility studies, feasibility studies, mine development and expansion, mechanisation and fleet financing. In the midstream, CMFC will connect funding to refining and smelting businesses, beneficiation plants, processing infrastructure, concentrate and intermediate product manufacturing.
At the end, we will complete the cycle with bespoke financing solutions for downstream operators such as commodity trading, long-term offtake partnerships, metal storage and logistics and resource-backed financing instruments. So, you have a whole gamut of valorisation of the minerals sector, with profound multiplier effects across the country.