THE strident alarm raised by residents of Dangbala community in the Akoko-Edo Local Government Area of Edo State over the return of illegal gold miners demands swift response from the federal and state governments. Their plea to all stakeholders and the state government to take proactive action to prevent the situation from degenerating into the fiasco that mining has turned Zamfara State into should not be ignored.
This has once again brought to the fore the unorganised state of mineral resources mining in the country and the attendant problems associated with it. As the Zamfara nightmare has shown, illegal mining inevitably conflates with violent crimes such as banditry and terrorism. Stamping it out before it engulfs Edo and other southern states is therefore imperative.
Nigeria’s mining sector is underdeveloped, contributing only 0.3 per cent to Gross Domestic Product. This forces the country to import many minerals that it could produce domestically. The National Bureau of Statistics says mining’s contribution to GDP increased to N1.38 billion in the third quarter of 2021, from N1.23 billion in Q2. Conversely, in Australia, despite the overall economy contracting, the mining industry’s GDP increased by 4.9 per cent in 2019-20 and totalled $202 billion.
The mining industry also throws up the inherent contradictions in Nigeria’s pseudo-federalism. While the constitution vests ownership of all mineral resources in the Federal Government to the exclusion of state governments, the same basic law vests custody of land in the state governors. The absurdity inhibits fiscal federalism and impoverishes the sub-national governments.
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