*The Ocular Confusion of a Dishonest Hack*
By Kehinde Bamigbetan
Despite his pernicious campaign of calumny, Biliyaminu Suraj’s discovery that his hands cannot cover the current effervescence of Nigeria’s miraculous bounce back into the limelight of the global mining industry has inflicted ocular confusion and resulted in selective hyperthropia. How could the spider’s web of innuendoes, falsehoods and deliberate misinformation spawned by this discredited malcontent disturb the humongous march of the elephantine achievements of the Minister of Solid Minerals Development from London to Cape Town, Washington DC to Riyadh and Tokyo to Perth?
In the last year, home and abroad, it has been a bountiful harvest of the seeds of the Seven Point Agenda. Sown in September 2023, as the vision inspired by the Renewed Hope Manifesto of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, it has achieved unprecedented milestones, pioneering initiatives, groundbreaking projects, and miraculous breakthroughs.
In the most recent act of economic sabotage and reckless espionage, titled “Faking Finance: Alake’s Minerals Mirage” published in the National Accord newspaper of February 22, 2026, Suraj plays the puppet of his imperialist paymasters who failed to use the Ministry to fight proxy wars against their Chinese competitors, stop the Ministry from revoking their titles for non-payment of annual service fees and frustrate the introduction of new policies which are entrenching the rule of law and international best practices in the Nigerian solid minerals sector.
The author is unable to counter the concrete statistics and the factual declarations of the Honourable Minister on the increase in revenue from N6 billion in 2023 to N38 billion in 2024 and over N70 billion in 2025. This 79 per cent year-on-year growth occurred as a result of the minister’s reforms, focused on the stringent application of the rule of law, transparency, and investor confidence.
It also led to the performance of the Mining Cadastral Office, which recorded N6.9 billion, and the Directorate of Mines Inspectorate, which also recorded N7 billion in the first quarter of 2025. The author did not provide any data to counter the minister’s assertion that the Mining Marshals arrested 300 illegal miners, prosecuted 150 and secured nine convictions as of 2025.
In fact, in several instances, Suraj could not refute the policies of the Seven Point Agenda, such as Value Addition to promote domestic beneficiation, acquisition of geological data to promote investor confidence, introduction of Mining Marshals to combat illegal mining and the formalisation of artisanal miners through co-operatives. In his own words, value addition is “a fine ideal”; the minister is “right about” the acquisition of geological data, and he concedes that “interest has been expressed” by investors, indicating the minister’s marketing strategy is working.
Everything works well until Suraj decides to hire the eyes of his paymasters to analyse the unassailable facts of the reforms in the sector to achieve three things: defend his Western imperialist employers against Chinese rivals, discredit the policies of the minister on licence administration and security, which penalised his paymasters and engage in scaremongering to exaggerate the challenges of the solid minerals sector.
Take the anti-Chinese propaganda. On value addition, Suraj does not offer any contrary facts, yet misinforms his readers that “the value of China’s downstream processing efforts in Nigeria’s lithium sector is highly exaggerated by the Minister and very inefficient. To date, no major Western mining company has invested in Nigeria’s mining sector.” While it is totally false that Western mining companies are not investing in Nigeria’s solid minerals sector, when did it become a criterion for determining investor confidence?
At the last count, over 303 European firms are holding active licences. And he needs to know that his perception of this administration’s bias is ignorant and mischievous. Where was he when the Minister arrested and ensured that a Chinese firm paid over N2.8 billion to the Federal government for illegally extracted minerals?
Suraj carries his ocular confusion to the history and trajectory of the Africa Minerals Strategy Group, AMSG, set up in January 2024 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, by ministers of mining of African countries, with Dr Dele Alake as the pioneer chairman and re-elected in January this year for another two-year term.
Read his Master’s narrative: “This is China’s Trojan Horse to have access to Africa’s mineral wealth in terms favourable to China and the African elite who control and facilitate that access.” This blatant falsehood is the mirage Suraj deliberately conjured to disinform his readers, as there is no iota of fact linking AMSG, a pan-African industrialisation pressure group, to any continental power outside the African region.
Since 2024, the AMSG has opened its doors to all partners worldwide and has held events on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, United States. It has no formal relations with China at this time.
Suraj has a job to discredit the Minister’s reforms in licence administration because his sponsors are still nursing a bloody nose from the beating they took when they tried to play fast and loose by violating the Minerals and Mining Law.
They owed annual service fees running into billions of naira, and when their licences were revoked under the law, they failed to use their high-level network of who’s who to reverse the penalty. They are still debtors, and legal procedures to compel them to pay are still in process. A thousand Surajs writing millions of tomes of propaganda against the Minister will not stop their arraignment in the courts, much sooner than they imagine.
Thus, when he concedes that “interest has been expressed by investors” but blunts it by alleging that “the elephant in the room is the lack of security of title, the dysfunctional MCO cadastre, the continuous illegal grant of licenses, the lack of access to tenements due to armed illegal miners in occupation”, we in the Ministry, understand that the weeping is the result of our whipping!
And finally, the Goebbelian strategy of scaremongering. The aim of Suraj and his sponsors is to scare investors, reverse the minister’s reforms, and plunge the sector into the kind of chaos that enabled them to cheat the Nigerian people of the dividends from their mineral resources. That, stated, is sabotage. Celebrating the insurrectional and terrorist activities of bandits in mineral-rich areas to portray them as succeeding against the Nigerian State is espionage. To suggest that a civil unit, such as the Mining Marshals or officers of the MCO, should go into the war zones where soldiers are repelling terrorists is collaborating with the enemy.
These nationalistic and state security concerns don’t concern Suraj and his gang of saboteurs, as long as they can bring down the Minister of Solid Minerals and take over control of the sector.
This will never happen under the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. What is likely to happen is that Suraj and his co-conspirators will face the wrath of the law and smell the coffee much sooner than they expect.
_*Bamigbetan* is the Special Adviser to the Minister of Solid Minerals Development_
