There is a particular authority in being asked to lecture the institution you once led. On 10 February 2026, at the Raw Materials Research and Development Council’s 38th anniversary in Maitama, Abuja, Engr. Prof. Peter Azikiwe Onwualu — the council’s former Director-General and now AUST President and Favtoma founder — used that platform to press a case he has spent a career making: Nigeria must stop exporting its raw wealth and start adding value at home.
His charge to industry, government agencies, entrepreneurs and innovators was to “inculcate a stronger local value addition” into how they source and use raw materials — not as an abstraction, but as a route to broaden the country’s financial base and create jobs.
The intermediates gap
Onwualu framed a persistent gap between Nigeria’s abundance of raw commodities and the “industry-ready intermediates” its factories actually need. He pointed to everyday examples — fruit juice concentrate, battery materials — where the country exports the raw input and imports back the processed good. The fix, he argued, runs across three tiers: primary, secondary (intermediate) and advanced raw materials.
The ambition is to transition Nigeria from exporting raw commodities to capturing value through domestic processing — supported by stronger policy enforcement and deeper industry-academia collaboration.
Backing the mandate
Most pointedly, Onwualu endorsed a proposed amendment to mandate a minimum of 30% local value addition before any export leaves the country. He also flagged the research frontiers that will decide who captures tomorrow’s value — nanotechnology, battery technology and lithium-based materials — and recalled RMRDC’s own pioneering pilot plants for cassava processing, shea butter extraction, mineral beneficiation and chalk production.
For Favtoma, beneficiation is not a slogan but a thesis. A nation that processes what it grows and mines keeps the margin, the jobs and the know-how at home. The 30% question Onwualu put to RMRDC is the same one the house keeps asking of every value chain it touches: how much more of this can we make here?