The Federal Government has released a list of 3,032 defaulters in the mining industry which also reflected that 3,402 titles were revoked.
The Director General of Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office (NMCO), Engr. Obadiah Nkom, made this disclosure during a State House briefing organised by the Presidential Communications Team on Thursday in Abuja.
According to him, the Office revoked the mining rights of companies that were not using their licences.
Nkom, who disclosed that the NMCO generated over N3.7 billion revenue in 2022, also explained that mining rights process remained very transparent with the usage of a Certified True Copy of any document.
He said: “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.
“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”, Nkom added.
The NMCO boss also disclosed that there were also people who were issued licences but refused to collect them, adding that such defaulters will be gazetted before action would be taken on their matter.
Speaking on the process of dealing with such defaulter, he clarified: “You send letters to the applicants’ address; and if after 30 days, he does not remedy the defect, you revoke and you 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”, Nkom added.
The latest statistical data of Nigeria’s Q3, 2022 GDP report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on the performance of the mining sector in the quarter showed that the sector declined -21.31% growth in the quarter.
According to the Bureau, the mining and quarrying sector’s contribution to the GDP dropped to 5.90% in Q3 2022, lower by 10.75% points and 10.21% points, respectively, compared to the sector’s percentage contributions for Q3 2021 and Q2 2022
