The Nigerian government released a list of 3,032 defaulters in the mining industry and revoked 3,402 titles.
This was disclosed by the Director General of Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office (NMCO), Mr Obadiah Nkom, during a State House briefing organised by the Presidential Communications Team on Thursday in Abuja.
He explained that the NMCO revoked the mining rights of companies that were not using their licences.
He also disclosed that the office generated over N3.7 billion in 2022 alone.
Transparent process: Nkom revealed FG ran a transparent mining rights process, with the usage of a Certified True Copy of any document. He said:
- “And, we are very transparent; if you need the Certified True Copy of any document, an application belonging to anybody or any licence or whatever, the law permits us to give it to you.
- “Because anything we are doing can be a subject to litigation; like we said, in terms of revoked titles, recently, we published a list of defaulters numbering 3,032 and we have revoked titles of 3,402.
- “And, we equally have people that have grants; they have been communicated, but when you cancel it, you see lawyers writing us about following the provisions.
Uncollected licenses: he noted that there were also people who were issued licences but refused to collect them, citing that such defaulters be gazetted before action would be taken.
- “You send letters to the applicants’ address; and if after 30 days, he does not remedy the defect, you revoke your gazette. As much as we appreciate the communication, some people will look for windows for excuses to give at the court, but once it is on the gazette, we ensure we put it on our website so that you don’t have any excuses.
- “The gazette is final; we now have those ones to arm ourselves so that at the end of the day, we know what it is to lose a case,’’ he said.
What you should know: Nigeria’s mining sector suffered a decline in economic productivity, causing a -21.31% growth decline as of Q3 2022.
- This was disclosed in the Q3 GDP report released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
- The contribution of the mining and quarrying sector to the GDP dropped to 5.90% in Q3 2022. This is lower by 10.75% points and 10.21% points, respectively, compared to the figures for Q3 2021 and Q2 2022.