The Northern Elders Forum (NEF) yesterday accused the federal government of locating “the National Gold Refinery” in Lagos State.
But the federal government said it was unfortunate that the NEF was framing a private sector–driven initiative in the mining sector as a regional agenda.
Grow your business with us
The NEF, in an open letter signed by its spokesperson, Professor Abubakar Jika Jiddere and addressed to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and members of the Federal Executive Council, alleged that the location of the gold refinery struck at the heart of Nigeria’s constitutional commitment to equity, federal balance and inclusive economic development.
The letter, dated 18th January 2026, was titled ‘Open Letter to the Federal Government of Nigeria on the Location of the National Gold Refinery, Federal Character, Derivation and the Deepening Crisis of Structural Inequality”.
The Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, had, on Tuesday during a meeting with the Saudi Arabian Minister of Industry and Mineral Resources, Ibrahim Al-Khorayef, held ahead of the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, announced the commencement of operations at a high-purity gold refining plant in Lagos.
The minister, in a statement by his media aide, Segun Tomori, had also said three additional gold refineries that were at different stages of development across the country, and that a $600 million lithium processing plant located in Nasarawa State was ready for commissioning.
The NEF, in its letter, said the decision to locate the gold refinery in Lagos must be interrogated beyond administrative convenience.
The letter read, “Your Excellencies, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) issues this open letter not as a rhetorical protest, but as a constitutional, economic, and political intervention necessitated by the Federal Government’s decision to locate Nigeria’s gold refinery in Lagos State, notwithstanding the well-established fact that Nigeria’s commercially viable gold deposits are overwhelmingly located in Northern Nigeria. This decision must be interrogated beyond administrative convenience.
Section 14(3) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended), enshrines the federal character principle, mandating that the composition and conduct of government affairs must reflect Nigeria’s diversity and prevent the dominance or exclusion of any group or region. While often narrowly applied to appointments, the spirit of Section 14(3) is broader: it is intended to prevent structural concentration of national advantages in ways that marginalized sections of the federation. Strategic economic infrastructure is as consequential to federal balance as political office.
Furthermore, Section 16(1)(b) obliges the State to control the national economy in such a manner as to secure ‘the maximum welfare, freedom and happiness of every citizen on the basis of social justice and equality of status and opportunity.’”
The forum said a policy that extracts mineral wealth from one region while systematically locating value addition, industrial jobs, and capital accumulation elsewhere fundamentally contradicts this directive.
It said most critically, Section 162(2) of the Constitution recognises the principle of derivation, affirming that resource-bearing areas are entitled to a fair share of the benefits arising from the resources extracted from their land.
While derivation has often been framed in fiscal terms, its underlying philosophy is unmistakable: resource origin must matter in the distribution of economic benefits,” the letter added.
The forum stressed that to deny gold-producing regions the industrial and developmental benefits of refining is to hollow out the derivation principle and reduce it to a token accounting exercise.