The road map recommended the creation of National Geodata Infrastructure, which included the National Geodata Centre Developed to Store and Archive Geosciences Data. Three such infrastructures were developed in NGSA HQ in Abuja, hosting the main servers while the other two smaller servers are hosted in NGRL and NSRMEA in Kaduna.
All these were developed under the MinDiver project and were acknowledged as commissioned under the previous administration.
The National Geodata Center is an infrastructure designed and developed to host over 100 year geoscience information generated by NGSA to date and other institutions under the then Ministry of Mines and Steel Development.
The NIMEP project is a program designed to generate exploration dataset in brownfield and greenfield environment in identified metallogenic provinces using integrated approaches. This project focused on five areas namely:
Gold, Platinum group elements (PGM) and vein Lead- Silver Gold Occurrences.
Pegmatite belt of Nigeria containing rocks hosting Tin, Tantalum, Niobium and Lithium minerals.
Lead, Silver, Zinc in the Benue Trough Baryte Mineralization in Benue Trough.
Iron ore occurrences comprising banded and sedimentary types.
The NIMEP phase I project was designed not as an end on its own but a means to an end.
The project was hugely successful and was able to achieve the following results:
* Exploration targeting methodologies for different mineral commodities considered
* Tracts of mineralization on three of the major commodities
* Identification of possible targets with good drill intersection on Gold, lithium and PGM
* Analytical data of thousands of soils and drill cuts samples in areas investigated for investors and researchers and other stakeholders.
These datasets are unprecedented in the history of the country.
The dataset generated formed the basis for the development of the first metallogenic map and litho structural map of Nigeria which was launched at the AFNIS conference by the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, President Bola Ahmed Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR.
The identification of hard rock lithium in part of the states investigated namely Kwara, Ekiti and Nasarawa which attracted a lot of investors into that commodity.
The Gold evaluated in Tsauni and parts of Osun has continued to form the basis of interests to investors at both local and international for a Consequent on the unprecedented successes achieved in the above the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is considering leveraging on the successes achieved on the last NIMEP I project to consolidate and kickstart NIMEP phase II to generate more geosciences data to populate the NGDC. This is very imperative because mining is driven by data and Nigeria is beginning to have coherent datasets that can be leveraged upon to develop mining projects and mines. The last NIMEP project was only able to cover less than 5% of the country’s landmass. When we position this with countries like the following:
Burkina Faso expends $30 million dollars to carry out exploration annually.
South Africa spent 500,000,000 million rands equivalent of $27 million to carry out exploratory drilling on different commodities by their national geological survey between 2019 and 2020.
All the advanced countries are still carrying out geological mapping and exploratory campaigns to support their exploration and mining efforts.
The National Geodata Centre is meant to take custody of all geoscience data generated in the country. The need for aggressive generation of geoscience dataset either NIMEP II, Big Data is a terminology used to depict gathering of large varied data such as geophysical, geochemical, exploration, hydrological etc. These are expected to add up as “Big Data” required to develop the industry.
Dr. Abdulrazak Garba is a former Director-General of the Nigerian Geological Survey Agency.
Source: ALAKE ON RESCUE MISSION, a publication of the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development, MoSMD.
