The President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, on Tuesday announced that the Senate will pass the 30% Minimum Value-Addition Bill within the week, marking a significant step toward industrialising Nigeria’s raw materials sector.
There has been controversy surrounding the bill, which is sponsored by the council, particularly from the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise. The Centre claims the bill could create significant adverse and unintended consequences for Nigerian exporters and manufacturers if it is passed into law.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the inaugural Africa Raw Materials Summit by the Raw Materials Research and Development Council in Abuja, Akpabio, represented by Senator Aminu Abbas (Adamawa Central), described the bill as “roundbreaking,” adding that it has the potential to ignite domestic enterprise, create jobs, and build resilient industrial value chains.
He also criticised the legacy of exporting raw materials while importing finished goods, calling for a paradigm shift where Africa moves from being a resource supplier to a value creator.
Akpabio said, “We extract, yet others manufacture. We export in raw form yet import with added value. This extractive model—fuelled by colonial legacies and sustained by global asymmetries—must now give way to a new paradigm rooted in local processing, regional integration, and sovereign economic vision.“In the Nigerian Senate, we have resolved to be proactive in addressing this structural imbalance. It is in this spirit that I reaffirm our full legislative backing for the 30% Minimum Value-Addition Bill, currently under consideration. This groundbreaking bill mandates that no raw material of Nigerian origin shall be exported without undergoing a minimum of 30% local value addition, whether through processing, refining, packaging, or industrial transformation.
“The 30 percent value addition bill will be passed by Senate this week God willing. ”