Amaka Obiefuna.

The Minister of Mines and Steel, Kayode Fayemi, has disclosed that the ministry is in partnership with the Bank of Industry (BOI) to offer loan facility from the intervention funds to support tile producers in the country.

Dr Fayemi said this during a tour to CIBI Nigeria Limited quarry in Buruku, Kaduna State.

The ministry’s roadmap to contribute to the nation’s GDP is to reduce importation of tiles and concentrate on local production.

Fayemi said part of the fund would be drawn from the World Bank single digit loan and the N30 billion Mining Intervention Fund approved by the Federal Government last year, among others.

“We are working with the BOI to disburse the loans as soon as the intervention funds are released to serious tile producers across the country,” he said.

He said the CIBI would have been able to produce more than 200,000 square meters being made annually from dimension stones, if adequate resources, including finance, equipment and others were in its reach.

Fayemi said that Nigeria needed four million square meters of tiles annually; adding that all the local tile producers could only produce less than a million annually.

“The bulk of tiles we use in Nigeria are imported from Italy, China and India, among others; we need to support them because we envisaged this in our roadmap.

We are endowed with lots of mineral resources; we have dimension stones everywhere but not exploited; there is no stone we don’t have in Nigeria,” he said.

Alhaji Nuhu Wya, Chairman of CIBI, urged government to support its project, as there were more demands for tiles but it lacked sufficient capital to expand the business.

Wya said the company usually received market orders from its customers two months before production.

”Our company needs long-term loans to run the business to increase tiles production that could reduce importation gap.

If investment put in oil industry is replicated in solid minerals, Nigeria does not need to depend on oil as its mainstay because we are blessed with mineral stones abundantly,’’ he said.