Why Investors are Targeting African Lithium Deposits
The phone calls have changed. For most of my twenty-five years on the Jos Plateau, the people who rang me wanted tin, columbite or tantalite. These days, more and more of the voices on the line — some from Lagos, many from Shanghai, a growing number from London and Toronto — ask about one thing:…
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Battery Minerals and the Clean Energy Transition
A few years ago, the young men who used to bring me cassiterite and columbite from the pegmatites around the Plateau started showing up with a different rock. Pale, glassy, sometimes faintly pinkish or lilac — spodumene and lepidolite. They did not always know what they had. I did. The same lithium-cesium-tantalum pegmatites that have…
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Mineral Recovery Techniques in Heavy Mineral Sands
The first time I really understood heavy mineral sands, I was crouched beside a stream on the Jos Plateau watching an old tin miner swirl a calabash of black sand. He wasn’t a metallurgist. He had never read a flowsheet in his life. But as he tilted and washed, the heavier grains — the cassiterite,…
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Future Demand for Strategic Minerals
There was a time when every buyer who reached out to me asked the same question: what do you have available right now? The mineral business was a business of the present tense. You had a parcel of columbite or tin sitting at a buying station, a buyer wanted it, and the deal lived and…
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The New Global Competition for Strategic Minerals
For most of my 24 years in this trade, the producer sat at the bottom of the table. The big buyers held the cards, set the prices, and we who dug the minerals out of the Jos Plateau took what we were offered and were told to be grateful for it. That arrangement felt permanent.…
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Industrial Minerals Driving the Future Economy
For most of my 24 years in this business, the spotlight has always fallen on the glamorous minerals. On the Jos Plateau, where I learned the trade, everyone wanted to talk about tin, columbite, tantalite — and lately about lithium and rare earths. The materials with the dramatic headlines. But standing on those minesites year…
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Critical Minerals and Global Geopolitics
Years ago, when I walked the tin and columbite fields of the Jos Plateau, the minerals coming out of that red soil were treated as simple commodities. You dug them, you bagged them, you sold them at whatever price a distant buyer felt like paying. Nobody in those days spoke about columbite or tantalite as…
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Mining Investment Opportunities in Nigeria
I still remember my first walk across a working minesite on the Jos Plateau, more than two decades ago. The red earth, the hand-dug pits, the artisanal miners panning cassiterite the same way their grandfathers had panned tin a century before. Back then, if you told anyone in a Lagos boardroom that solid minerals would…
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Conflict-Free Mineral Supply Chains in Africa
Africa is one of the most mineral-rich continents in the world. From lithium, cobalt, copper, and manganese to tin, tantalum, tungsten, zircon, monazite, and rare earth elements, the continent possesses vast mineral resources that are critical to modern industries and the global energy transition. As demand for critical minerals continues to rise, international buyers, manufacturers,…
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Tin Ore Supply and Export from Nigeria
By Kolawole King, Chief Executive Officer, Augustina Impex Limited I have spent my entire working life with tin ore running through my hands. On the Jos Plateau, where I built Augustina Impex, cassiterite is not an abstract commodity — it is the rock that shaped this region, the metal that built our city, and the…
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