A documentary and diagnostics report released by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and the Ford Foundation,say the country’s mining sector is not appealing and currently in unsatisfactory state.
A statement from NESG said sector contributes meagerly to the nation’s overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP), at 0.5 per cent (2018), performing unsatisfactorily compared to some of its solid mineral resource-rich African counterparts.
Its employment-generation potential,it lamented, is also far from being realised, given its contribution of 0.3 per cent to national employment and 0.2 per cent to total export.
It identified several factors responsible for the poor and grim performance of the mining sector,such as widespread illegal mining due to a weak regulatory environment at the federal and state governments as well as infrastructural challenges, insufficient funding, high risk associated with mining, health and environmental hazard, inadequate geological data, ill-equipped laboratory and policy inconsistency.
The group added that for a country like Nigeria, sector governance issues such as lack of clarity and weak intergovernmental framework for addressing minerals ownership and control issues – contribute to the sector’s woes.
It noted that addressing these issues is essential to move the sector’s contribution to Gross Domestic Product(GDP) towards the 5% target of the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development in the short term.
It said:”Although there are several strategies to contain these issues, the need for actors to co-create adaptive and pragmatic solutions that deliver Nigeria’s development ambitions, leveraging the sector’s potentials, has become an urgent imperative. It is on this premise that the NESG and the Ford Foundation worked on a diagnostics report and documentary on Nigeria’s mining governance, landscape and prospects to help resolve the sector’s governance and regulatory bottlenecks, focusing on specific areas such as minerals control and ownership, institutional strengthening, investment environments and minerals codes and standardisation.
“The report analyses the domestication of the African Mining Vision (AMV); a further review of the legal and institutional framework that allows for a more productive intergovernmental coordination framework for the sector and engender sector competitiveness; small scale and artisanal mining; improved system for data collection and aggregation to help support trade and investment facilitation in the mining sector.
“Furthermore, the diagnostic report takes a look at the issues related to unlocking the potentials of development minerals and identifies strategies for focusing the Nigerian Solid Minerals sector on driving the country’s energy transition programme in response to global warming.
“Exploring these two dimensions in the solid minerals optimisation discourse is essential because they directly connect to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The expanded focus on development minerals and energy transition provides a clear pathway to achieving a more economically secure Nigeria,” the statement explained.