BAGEGA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Like almost everything else in Nigeria's economy, mining of metals and other solid minerals fell by the wayside when the West African nation discovered oil.
In the two decades to 1954, foreign companies produced around 360,000 ounces of gold in total, according to government statistics - tiny by today's standards, but not insignificant for a country approaching independence with high hopes.
By 1964 - post-independence and less than a decade after oil was found in the creeks of the southern Niger Delta - gold production had largely ground to a halt.
Now much of the digging up of Nigeria's minerals is done by artisanal miners in the largely Muslim north, bereft of the high-tech machinery that makes it safe and brings economies of scale.
"The sector was left in the hands ... of untrained and ill-equipped artisans ... making negligible contributions to GDP," was how a government policy brief summed it up last year.
Nigeria's solid minerals remain untapped and largely unmapped, an anomaly in a region that is a growing source of materials such as iron ore, gold, diamonds, uranium and bauxite.
The government wants to change that. Mines Minister Musa Sada aims to revive mining's contribution to the economy to 5 percent from its current 1 percent by 2015.
He is wooing investors with a simplified code of rules relating to the mining industry, tax holidays and waivers on duties for imported machinery.
Yet for all that, interest remains confined to small development firms such as Australia's Kogi Iron for iron ore and Australian Mines and Savannah Gold in gold.
