Solid Minerals Minister says Tinubu took the hard decisions past leaders avoided, warns years of reckless importation and borrowing pushed Nigeria to the edge…..
Nigeria’s Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, has defended President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms, declaring that the country would have slipped into a full-blown economic collapse if the fuel subsidy had not been removed in 2023.
Speaking during the 2026 NRS-MSMD Joint Stakeholder Sensitization programme for the North Central zone in Abuja, Alake said the current administration inherited an economy already on life support, weakened by years of excessive borrowing, overdependence on imports, and poor economic planning.
According to the minister, previous administrations failed to take bold steps to reverse the country’s declining fortunes, leaving Nigeria trapped in a cycle of debt and unsustainable spending.
“The economy would have crashed completely,” Alake said while explaining the rationale behind the controversial subsidy removal policy introduced shortly after Tinubu assumed office.
He claimed that before the current administration came in, Nigeria had reached a point where borrowed funds were being used to pay salaries and cover routine government expenses rather than invest in development projects.
“When a nation begins to borrow money just to pay salaries, it signals danger,” he stated. “There can be no meaningful development under such conditions.”
Alake also revealed that Nigeria’s worsening financial situation made international lenders skeptical about extending further credit facilities to the country, forcing authorities to resort to printing trillions of naira locally to keep the system running.
Tracing the roots of Nigeria’s economic struggles, the minister blamed decades of dependence on imported goods for weakening local industries and damaging the value of the naira.
He recalled a period in the early 1980s when the naira was one of Africa’s strongest currencies, revealing that one US dollar exchanged for less than one naira at the time.
“I witnessed the era when the naira was truly strong. At a point, one dollar exchanged for about 80 kobo in the black market, while the official rate was even lower,” he said.
According to him, Nigeria gradually abandoned local production and embraced a consumption-driven economy where even basic items that could easily be manufactured locally were imported from abroad.
“We imported virtually everything, including products we were capable of producing ourselves,” he said. “That mentality destroyed factories, reduced jobs, and weakened our currency.”
The minister further criticized what he described as the lack of courage by past leaders to confront the country’s structural economic problems.
He argued that the Tinubu administration decided to take painful but necessary decisions to prevent Nigeria from sinking deeper into economic crisis.
Alake compared the reforms to rescuing a country trapped in a deep hole, insisting that the government first had to stop the decline before rebuilding the economy.
The event, themed “From Resource to Revenue: Aligning Solid Minerals Operations with the 2025 Tax Reform Act,” also focused on improving transparency and revenue generation within Nigeria’s mining sector.
Also speaking at the programme, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development, Engr. Faruk Yusuf Yabo, stressed the importance of strengthening compliance and royalty collection in the solid minerals industry.
He said proper implementation of the new tax and royalty framework would help Nigeria maximize revenue from its mineral resources while supporting economic diversification and job creation.
