How Nigeria’s Mineral Wealth Is Being Handed to China

Nigeria’s Minister for Mines, Dele Henry Alake, prides himself on his re-election as Chairman of the newly formed Africa Minerals Strategy Group. He congratulates himself on the cover of magazines. As a former journalist Minister Alake is good with scripting media stories. He doesn’t have any background in mining or related industries. During President Tinubu’s two terms as Governor of Lagos State it was Alake who managed the Governor’s media as the Commissioner for Information and Strategy.

Since bagging the Ministry for Sold Minerals Development Minister Alake’s primary focus has been on securing large-scale investments and fostering partnerships for local mineral processing. This has led to the development of several lithium processing plants in Nigeria, primarily backed by Chinese investment.

Minister Alake’s emphasis on moving beyond raw material extraction to local processing is a good decision that will support Nigeria’s industrialization and economic diversification. However, favouring Chinese companies and punishing local Nigerian miners is a cruel blow to Nigerians and a step too far in surrendering Nigeria’s natural assets to a foreign power.

Under Minister Alake’s tenure, major Chinese companies such as Canmax Technology, Jiuling Lithium, Avatar New Energy, and Asba have pledged lithium processing facilities in Nigeria.

Since late 2025, Canmax has aggressively secured raw spodumene (lithium ore) to feed its expanding processing faciliies. Canmax Technologies is primarily owned and controlled by its founder and chairman, Mr Pei Zhenhua, alongside his wife, Rong Jianfen. Alake claims Canmax is investing US$200M to develop lithium mining operations in Nigeria, in line with Chinese aggressive moves to control African mineral resources and infrastructure such as ports and railways necessary to exploit the mineral reserves.

In late 2025, Chinese megafirm CATL announced plans to increase its stake in Canmax’s lithium subsidiaries. CATL holds approximately 40 percent of the global EV battery market and almost 70 percent of the NCM (Nickel-Cobalt-Manganese) battery market in China. China as a whole processes approximately 65 percent to 80 percent of the world’s lithium. As the dominant player in China, CATL effectively directs a majority of the lithium hydroxide refined within the country toward its own Gigafactories.

While UK company Jupiter Lithium Ltd’s massive lithium project in Kaduna State reels under the onslaught from armed illegal miners, Alake’s ministry deployed a specialized security unit known as Mining Marshals to safeguard nearby Canmax and Avatar sites from illegal mining activities. No amount of requests from Jupiter for assistance from Minister Alake elicited any support. Rather, Minister Alake revoked key lithium deposits discovered by Jupiter and allowed Chinese mining companies, escorted by Federal Government security, to enter Jupiter’s leases and commence mining and removing the ore mined and stockpiled by Jupiter.

Minister Alake has prioritised diplomatic engagement with Chinese officials to discuss strengthening bilateral relations and find ways to diminish the public attention to China’s involvement in illegal mining in Nigeria.

The mines minister has become a strong and frequent advocate for China’s involvement in Nigeria’s minerals and infrastructure development which has been a hallmark of his many trips to China.

Nigeria has fallen into line with China’s strategy for accessing and controlling Africa’s minerals resources and delivering more markets for Chinese technology and products.

China’s first stage of embedding itself in another nation is the offer to develop a country’s infrastructure; ports, roads, airports and railways. This essential infrastructure often facilitates the development of mineral projects China has chosen.

The second stage is introducing Chinese technology through the project development, especially surveillance technology. China replaces the US-based Global Positioning System (GPS) with China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system and blocks access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite. In so doing China is able to offer its support for the national government while penetrating Nigeria’s national security. Chinese technology can deliver facial recognition throughout entire cities, even at night.

In Iran several of China’s communications companies including Huawei, facial recognition and ethnicity tracking company Tiandy Technologies and ZTE, often operating through Iranian front companies, have worked with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to provide 360 degrees 24/7 surveillance of Iran’s population. Iran and China have signed a 25-year co-operation agreement that will facilitate the transfer of a range of surveillance and monitoring technologies under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Surveillance of a nation’s populations is now an integral part of China’s program of building a nation’s infrastructure through roads, airports and mines. This provides an unprecedented tool for national governments to retain power and be manipulated by China.

…Steven Kefas is a conflict reporter with keen interest in mining and solid minerals.

Blood on the Hills: Thirty Silenced at Naridon While Nigeria’s Army Watched From Three Kilometres Away

By Steven Kefas

(Kaduna), Terrorists killed thirty people, eleven of them children, during a three-hour rampage in Naridon, Kaduna State, on Monday morning, just kilometers from an army base that never responded.

A Village Wakes to Gunfire

Naridon, a Christian farming settlement tucked into the hills of Kamaru Ward in Kaduna State’s Kauru Local Government Area, had gone to sleep like any other Sunday night. By the time dawn broke on Monday, 27 July 2026, thirty of its people lay dead. Eleven were children. The youngest, Geoffrey Monday, was three years old. The oldest, Kaka Umaru, had lived eighty-seven years before gunmen cut his life short in the compound where he had likely been born.

For close to three hours, armed men locals described as Fulani militants moved through Naridon unchallenged, according to Rev Fr Mark Bissan, the Catholic priest of Kamaru Chawai who compiled the parish’s account of the dead, injured and destroyed. They shot residents in their homes and in the open, torched shops and houses, and desecrated musical instruments inside the community church. Seven more people were wounded, among them a five-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy. Whole family lines were nearly wiped out in a single night: the Emmanuel household alone lost five children, from five-year-old Irimiya to thirteen-year-old Deborah.

A young child killed during the attack. Credit: Fr Bissan

A Response That Never Came

What makes Naridon’s grief sharper is geography. A Nigerian Army forward operating base sits barely three kilometres from the village, close enough that soldiers there could plausibly have heard the gunfire. No help arrived while the attack was underway, and none had arrived when Middle Belt Times visited the community on Wednesday, forty-eight hours after the killing began. There was not a single security operative on the ground, even as residents relayed threats from the attackers themselves that they intended to return and, in their words, to finish what they started. Neighbouring communities say they have received similar warnings.

Thirty bodies were taken to an embalming facility in Zangon Kataf, where grieving relatives now wait to bury their dead. The Kaduna State government has yet to deliver relief materials to a community that has lost its breadwinners, its children and its sense of safety in one night. This is despite the state government mandating the state emergency management agency to deliver relief 72 hours ago.

President Bola Tinubu has, as he has done after previous massacres, ordered that those responsible be identified and prosecuted. Survivors of Naridon have reason to doubt that order will be carried out. This is not the first attack their area has suffered, and it will not be remembered as an isolated tragedy. On 16 June 2026, nine people were killed in nearby Ungwan Magaji by attackers survivors identified as Fulani ethnic militia. Less than a year earlier, on 25 August 2025, eight people were killed in Ungwan Rimi, in the same local government area, reportedly by the same attackers. Disturbingly, some of those arrested in connection with the 2025 attack were reportedly released without ever facing prosecution, and survivors of the June 2026 killing say they recognised those same men among their attackers. Naridon is now the deadliest single attack recorded in Kaduna state since the current federal and state administrations took office on 29 May 2023.

A Pattern the World Keeps Missing

Naridon did not happen in a vacuum, and neither did the silence around it. A six-year study released on 30 June 2026 by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA), titled Four Times Boko Haram? How the World Misreads Nigeria’s Violence, documented 79,323 people killed across the country between 2020 and 2025, more than 42,000 of them civilians. The study found that Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province, the two groups most associated with Nigerian terrorism in Western reporting, together accounted for just twelve percent of civilian deaths. Armed groups the report classifies as Fulani Terror Groups were responsible for forty-four percent, roughly four times the combined toll of Boko Haram and ISWAP.

That imbalance has not been matched by attention from Washington. American policy and media coverage of Nigeria’s violence has overwhelmingly tracked the North-East insurgency, the theatre where Boko Haram and ISWAP operate, while the killing fields of Kaduna, Plateau, Taraba, Niger, Kwara and Benue states draw comparatively little notice. When American forces did act, striking suspected terrorist positions in Sokoto’s Bauni Forest on Christmas Day, the operation targeted the North-West’s militant enclaves rather than the networks terrorising Middle Belt farming communities. The strikes have had no discernible effect on the violence closer to Naridon. If anything, attacks on Christian farming communities in Kaduna, Benue, Taraba and Plateau intensified in the months that followed.

A destroyed building in Naridon. Credit: Fr Bissan

Plateau and Benue Bleed in Parallel

Naridon’s grief is being lived out simultaneously elsewhere in the Middle Belt. In Benue State’s Otukpo Local Government Area, gunmen have carried out a string of attacks through July, culminating in a raid on Efeyi-Ugboju community that has left at least fourteen people dead this week alone, part of a wave of Otukpo violence that has killed dozens of farmers and villagers since early July. In Plateau State, the killing has followed a near-identical script: armed Fulani militia have shot Christian vigilantes standing unarmed watch in Barkin Ladi, wiped out a family of nine in Kum village, and killed community leaders who had publicly appealed for peace. Survivors and rights monitors describe the same features again and again, attacks late at night, army positions nearby that do not respond in time, and communities left to bury their own dead without government support.

A Government More Focused on Washington Than on Kauru

While villages like Naridon wait for security and relief, Nigeria’s federal government has directed considerable resources toward its image in the United States. Abuja signed a six-month, nine-million-dollar contract with the Washington lobbying firm DCI Group, brokered through Kaduna-based Aster Legal on behalf of the National Security Adviser, to persuade American policymakers that Nigeria is not turning a blind eye to the killing of Christians and to preserve Washington’s redesignation of Nigeria as a security partner rather than a Country of Particular Concern. Critics in the US Congress have called the spending a culture of denial, more concerned with managing perception abroad than protecting the villages where the killing is actually happening.

For the people of Naridon, none of that diplomacy has translated into a soldier at their gate. Thirty coffins are being prepared in Kafanchan. Children who survived the attack are sleeping without their siblings. And a community that buried its dead from June 2026, and August 2025 before that, is now bracing for a third round, because the men who threatened to come back have given no one reason to believe they were bluffing.

…Steven Kefas is a conflict reporter with over a decade experience covering the crisis in the Middle Belt