Dr Kayode Fayemi

What is your ministry doing to secure mining sites?

We are working with the security institutions – Ministry Of Interior, Directorate Of State Services, National Security Advisers Office, The Police, Civil Defence in what we call a mines surveillance task force which helps to monitor these illegal mining operations across the board.

Still on illegal miners. In your analysis, you talked about your attempt and the attempt of your ministry to fully integrate them. Have you worked out any compensation method for them?

With regard to compensation method, we cannot compensate criminality!

No, I mean after their integration, the technical know how?

Once you register in your state that you are a miner, we capture you as a miner, we know what you are doing, the areas that you are in and we try and encourage all of you who are in that area. If you are mining kaolin in Nassarawa or Ekiti but you are not likely to be the only person, you have about 30 of you using your rudimentary tools to do this, the idea we have pursued which is on-going is that the state government, the department responsible for mining and mineral resources development in the state helps to formalize them into a cooperative (like an agric cooperative). We come in with assistance. What are your greatest challenges? We don’t want to impose it from above, we sit with you as a kaolin mining cooperative in Nassarawa or Zamfara, what are you going through, what are the challenges, how can we assist and work with you? One of our ideas which we are currently discussing with the Bank of Industry is to put some of the resources from our intervention fund there for the disbursement to be managed by BoI.

One other way we want to help them is also to assign to them legitimate tenement or legally free land, so they will not be mining illegally. They will have a license, whether it is a small scale licence or an artisanal license, that will enable undertake their operations without let or hindrance. And then we provide them with tools that are better than the shovels and diggers that they are using, so I have told you three things now, access to finance, tools or technical skills support and then legalization.

What comes to them at the end of the day and what goes to the government?

Once you are formalized, that means your operations are now open, we can legitimately capture the activities and ask you for returns at the end of the year, our mines officers who have been helping you, who know you have been making money, will come. You can make more legitimate money than the pittance the middle men will come and give you, you cannot compare it because if they hear you are doing it, they may take you to the police or to harass you, you know, you make even more money from your legitimate activities but government will make money from it.

Talking about the new road map, synergy between the federal and state governments, there is this idea of an independent regulatory body. What will that do?

The independent regulatory is a very simple thing. Government wants to get out of regulation. We have the directorate of environmental compliance inside my ministry, artisan and small scale mining also inside my ministry. So the idea is that all these are regulatory arms, the mining cadastral office that gives the license, the mines inspectorate directorate that monitors the activities of quarries, and mining companies to ensure that they are in compliance with the law. There is the artisanal and small scale miners department, the mining inspectorate department. The idea is that all of these regulatory arms are under one roof, an independent autonomous roof. Yes, we will still supervise as a Ministry but the independent body will regulate. The independent regulatory body will be similar to what we have for electricity which is called NERC or for telecoms NCC.

You will notice that those bodies have been pulled out of of their parent ministries, they arenow autonomous and independent, they are agencies backed by law and their activities are also revenue generating. They don’t depend on government for funding. That is the idea behind the regulatory agency and it is not unique to us. I noticed that the ministry of petroleum resources is also doing that now, they want to pull equalization fund together with PPRA together with DPR into one big regulatory institution.

Dr Fayemi (right) during a tour of marble quarrying field in Ugya, Nasarawa State recently

We want you to also talk on the agreement your ministry signed with South Africa

We have signed agreement with a number of countries, South Africa being one of them, China and Morocco. Concerning the one specifically with South Africa, we really want to take advantage of the experience South Africa has as a foremost mining jurisdiction in Africa. South Africa on this continent has the upper hand when it comes to mining, they have the most extensive knowledge and experience of what it takes to mine. So we have a lot to learn from them, they have a lot to learn from us on the petroleum side and that agreement also speaks to that. So they are engaging our petroleum ministry in some capacity building but specifically on mining, we want to learn from them. What they are doing is helping us capacitate and strengthen our geological surveillance, they have what they call Council of Geosciences which has extensive knowledge of mineral mapping and geological prospectivity and of utilizing a lot of resources.

These may be of assistance so we will be sending our geologists to them for training and they would be sending their geologists here for mapping, for testing some of the minerals and they would be working with us by the time we bring our geological laboratory fully into operations. This is because right now we have entered into another partnership with SGS Inspection services to help us manage our geological laboratory in Kaduna which for the first time investors can now test the minerals right here on the ground in Nigeria rather than sending every mineral samples to Australia, South Africa or Ghana for testing. So, that’s the first thing.

The second is that South Africa has what they call MINTEK. It is a technical institution responsible for mining services, skills development and training. It is a global leader in mineral and mettalurgical innovation. So, if you want to build skills in mining, mid level labour skills, MINTEK is the institution that they use in South Africa to do that and we have a lot of institutions that are not really quite up to what we want them to be. We have the National Metallurgical Development Centre (NMDC) in Jos; we have the Nigerian Institute of Mining and Geo Sciences also in Jos; we have the Raw Materials Exploration Agency in Kaduna and these institutions will benefit from exchange of ideas, experiences and technical cooperation with these South African institutions. And then technical capacity building in South Africa is first class. In my view, when it comes to that middle level non graduate training, non-university training, the real practical stuff is what mining is all about- how do you build a mining production level, how do you develop entire value chain in mining. We really are not there yet, we are not a mining nation yet and mining is big business, really big business in countries that do mining.

We believe strongly that we will benefit from the experience gained from a country like South Africa that has been mining for centuries. This is what they have done all their lives, this is the highest revenue generator in South Africa. Mining in South Africa is what oil and gas means to Nigeria. They have more experience. I just came back from South Africa and we further strengthened the knots and bolts of that agreement and by May we are sending the first set of our own officials to South Africa to benefit from that training.

What are you doing to ease the transportation system from the major mining sites?

Well I am not responsible for Ministry of Transportation, I can say that my colleagues in the Ministries of transportation and Works have been very cooperative. They both understand the necessity for getting mining infrastructure right and they know that you cannot talk of minerals movement without having good roads or robust rail systems. If you look at the 2016 budget of the Ministry of Transportation you will find that they paid quite some attention to mining zones, the Ajaokuta, Itakpe. Warri line is in the budget and they have commenced reconstruction on that line, the Port Harcourt -Maiduguri rail refurbishment is also being pursued diligently by the Ministry. I am also aware that an MOU wax signed between our Ministry of Transportation and China Railway Corporation to extend the Ajaokuta line up to Abuja – an area that represents a significant mining and agriculture corridor in our country.

Equally, I have agreed with the Minister of Works to submit a list of critical arteries to mineral resources that will require linkage to main roads and we are working on that for submission. When the rails are working, they will help reduce tension on the roads. The heavy duty vehicles that you see all over the place really cause tremendous havoc, damage the road and also leave all manners of avoidable tragedies that people suffer from. I think the ministry of transportation is working in partnership with us and also doing this in the inland water ways.

We are also collaborating with the National Inland Waterways (NIWA) to really streamline the difficulties we have had in the past between the two ministries as to who owns what. This is because sometimes NIWA wants to charge for sand, sand is a mineral and not the business of NIWA. However access to the waterways where sand is dredged is the business of NIWA because they own the waterways so they need to be able to give approval for those who want to mine sands to gain access to it.

We are also talking to the ports authority because mining is a serious business at that level. We are engaging customs, ports authority for mineral assessment on the ports because these things go through the ports and sometimes we do not do enough due diligence in mineral exportation. These are areas we are working on with the ministry of transportation, and its agencies as well as the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing.

When people talk about bitumen in Agbabu, Ondo State, coal in Enugu, people in those area romanticize the deposits. What is the ministry doing about, lets just say three of them, bitumen, tin and coal?

Let me say that this is the year of Bitumen. 2017 is the year of Bitumen, and we are very clear that we will kickstart the process for that very soon. We are almost finalizing the bidding process that we want to put in place for the bitumen and we expect that companies that are really up and doing would start production in the shortest possible time. In the first instance, this will be in terms of bitumen for asphalt, that bitumen for road construction, not bitumen for oil production. Bitumen for oil production can come later but the processes are more cumbersome and more complex. What we are going for in the first instance is bitumen for road and asphalt production and there are also several other by products including lubricants that you use for your engine oil and other associated products. I am aware that we have given mining leases to at least three companies that are interested in starting production but we are also opening it up to others who might be interested. But in addition to that, we are working in partnership with Ondo and Ogun states that have expressed interest in exploiting the bitumen resources in their domain. I don’t want to talk much on this until we get something for people out there to chew on but I am aware of the romanticism that accompany these talks. I think it is best not to over promise and under deliver, let me just say things will happen in that sector and it will begin to happen in 2017.

Coal is another product that people are interested in, although as a government we are more interested in coal for power generation given the existential need of Nigeria as far as that is concerned. The Ministry of Power along with ourselves have mapped out how to ensure that coal becomes critical to the energy mix that the Ministry of Power is developing and ours is to provide where the deposits are so that the power generation company can be sited as close as possible to the coal deposits. And this is something that will see quite some acceleration in 2017. If in 2016 we developed our roadmap and generated funds that we need for the processes, 2017 is going to be the year of implementation in that sector, and onwards.