Gold Refinery: NEF Warns Northern Leaders Against Silence, Accuses FG of Dispossession

• Says it’s not asking for favour but constitutional fairness

Folalumi Alaran in Abuja

The Northern Elders Forum (NEF), has warned Northern political leaders and elites against remaining silent over federal government’s decision to site Nigeria’s national gold refinery in Lagos State, describing the move as a deliberate act of economic dispossession and a deepening of structural inequality.

In a strongly worded message addressed to Northern elites, political leaders and stakeholders, the forum said the location of the refinery outside the country’s major gold-producing regions in Northern Nigeria was neither an oversight nor a policy error, but a decision with far-reaching economic and security implications.

Signed by its spokesperson, Professor Abubakar Jika Jiddere, NEF accused the federal government of stripping value addition from Northern communities while concentrating industrial benefits in Lagos and its environs.

According to the Forum, the decision perpetuated an extractive economic model in which raw materials were sourced from the North while processing, branding, financing and industrial infrastructure were located elsewhere.

NEF said Section 14(3), which enshrined the federal character principle, was designed to prevent the concentration of national advantages in ways that marginalise any region, while Section 16 mandated the state to manage the economy on the basis of social justice and equality of opportunity.

“The decision to locate Nigeria’s gold refinery in Lagos while gold is mined from Northern soil is not a policy error. It is not an oversight. It is a deliberate act of economic dispossession.

“It strips value addition from Northern communities, exports opportunity to the already privileged center, and condemns the source regions to poverty, unemployment, and perpetual insecurity.

“To again remove the locus of value addition from these communities is to perpetuate an extractive model reminiscent of colonial economics where raw materials are sourced from the periphery and wealth is accumulated at the center. This is not development. It is internal colonialism.

“This injustice is systemic, not accidental. For decades, Northern Nigeria has been reduced to a triple extraction zone: the supplier of raw minerals, the supplier of agricultural produce, and the supplier of cheap labour, while processing, branding, financing, and industrial infrastructure are consistently sited elsewhere.

“Northern farmers produce the bulk of the nation’s food, yet agro-processing plants, commodity exchanges, logistics hubs, and export value chains are concentrated outside the region. Grains, livestock, tomatoes, cotton, hides and skins leave the North in raw form, only to return as finished goods priced beyond the reach of the very communities that produced them. This is not inefficiency; it is designed under development.

“Every refinery sited away from the resource zone deepens youth despair. Every agro-processing plant denied to the North accelerates rural collapse. Every lost industrial anchor strengthens the conditions that breed banditry, kidnapping, and mass poverty.

“These outcomes are not mysterious. They are predictable consequences of structural exclusion. What makes this moment unforgivable is not only federal insensitivity but elite cowardice.

“Where are the Northern governors who invoke unity while accepting economic strangulation? Where are the senators, ministers, party chieftains, and traditional power brokers who enjoy proximity to power but cannot defend the economic dignity of their people?

“If Northern elites cannot speak when their region is systematically excluded from mineral and agricultural value chains, history will record that today’s leadership traded regional dignity for access to political favour and power.

“No rhetoric about national cohesion can survive sustained economic humiliation. The North is not asking for favour. It is demanding constitutional fairness.

“If derivation justifies benefits for oil-producing regions, it must apply to gold and solid minerals. If federal character restrains political appointments, it must restrain economic concentration, industrial siting, and agro-industrial monopolisation. Anything else is hypocrisy masquerading as policy,” Jiddere said.