On 9 February 2026, Senator Tijjani Yahaya Kaura, MFR, was inaugurated as Chairman of the Governing Board of the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority, the federal agency responsible for regulating and promoting Nigeria’s free trade zones.

The appointment extends a career spent almost entirely inside the machinery that Nigeria uses to attract and manage investment, from local government to the Senate to two federal agencies now sitting either side of the same policy area: free zones and the industries that operate inside them.

A role built on the one before it

Kaura’s chairmanship at NEPZA follows directly from his tenure as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Oil and Gas Free Zones Authority, a position he held from July 2022 to October 2023. Where OGFZA regulates zones built around oil and gas, NEPZA regulates the wider category of export processing zones across every sector. Few people arrive at the NEPZA board having already run the sister agency on the oil and gas side.

At OGFZA, Kaura set out an agenda built around corporate governance, transparency and accountability, and spent much of his tenure engaging host communities directly, arguing that investor retention in the zones depended on the security and cooperation those communities provided. That same instinct, that a project only holds if the people around it are part of it, is the operating principle behind how Inland Drills approaches every site it works.

Why this matters for Inland Drills

A company founded by someone who now chairs the federal authority governing Nigeria’s export processing zones operates with an unusually direct line of sight into how the compliance, licensing and export environment for solid minerals is actually run. Inland Drills was built, from the outset, to meet that standard rather than to work around it.