The Director-General of Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office Mr Obadiah Nkom said Thursday that the agency has generated over N3.7 billion from issuance of licenses.
Nkom said this at the weekly briefing organised by the Presidential Communication Team at the State House in Abuja.
He said the agency, established in 2007, generated the funds through its major mandate of issuing licenses to miners.
“My mandate is simply administration of mineral titles in line with the provisions of the Act establishing the agency. The agency came into being in 2007 with the re-enactment of the Act. So, the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act established the Nigerian Mining Cadastre Office in 2007 with clear mandates as to administration and management of minerals titles and maintenance of the Cadastre register. The essence of that is to ensure that is to ensure that minerals titles are administered and manage in the most transparent manner.
“Revenue Generation is key because we have had to be able to ensure that we improve on it. We had an 86 percent increase in revenue from 2001. But I can tell you that with the new system, without mincing words that subsequently we are going to have a steady increase.
“In our revenue generation, it is nothing but application fees, processing fees and the annual service fee. We are not in charge of other activities like payment of royalties and so on. So, even with these little aspects of revenue components we still want to ensure that at the end of the day our revenue increase and we are able to add to the development of Nigeria and increase the wellbeing of citizens particularly the key components of job creation and revenue, based on our vision for the country,” he said.
He said the agency had witnessed an increase in the number of applications for mining permits due to the transparent nature of the process.
“Among our key accomplishments, is the more you are transparent the more you will be able to see people coming in to submit application. So we have quite an increase in that regard and the increase is not just nationally you have foreign investors getting attracted by way of our transparency, our policies and the way things are being done.
“We have also opened zonal offices, which has taken it closer to the people and the intent of the agency Is to be able to ensure that we reduce the number of illegal or informal miners so that at the end of the day we make licencing easier for them.” he said.
Hr said the agency collaborates closely with state governments to advise the Minister of Mines and Steel Development on mining matters.
He said the agency is also looking at the coal sector to power projects to increase energy alternatives for the citizens.
He said over 3,000 license holders that defaulted have lost their permits.
“In terms of revoked titles, recently we have gazetted ones; we have 3,432 defaulters that we have published and we have revoked 3402 revoked permits. So valid ones are now over 6,000,” he said.
