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Reps committee demands more funding for mining cadastral office

In view of the increase in revenue generation by the Nigeria Mining Cadastral Office (NMCO) in the recent times, the House of Representatives Committee on Solid Minerals said the time has come for the agency to be well funded in order to assume its constitutional roles in the nation’s mining sector.

This was part of the committee’s submission on Tuesday when the House committee chairman, Hon Gaza Jonathan, led other committee members on oversight visit to the Nigeria Mining Cadastral Office (NMCO) in Abuja.

Speaking in response to the submission by the director general of NMCO, Obadaiah Simon Nkom said the agency has increased its revenue generation since its activities were fully computerised in 2001.

Hon Gaza urged the management and the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development to ensure that staff of the agency are well motivated to enable them carry out their duties without any compromise.

“Since you have been able to improve on your revenue, you deserve better funding and we as a committee would ensure that the minister and ministry do the right thing by incentivising the agency and the staff to ensure you succeed. There should be at least two desk officers in each state to ensure that the issue of consent before mining holds is taken care of so that NMCO can become a strong and formidable institution,” he said.

Earlier, the DG, Obadiah Nkom reeled out the mandates of the agency to include managing mining titles in Nigeria, provision of mining licences, recognizance and exploration permits, among others.

“We ensure that we get revenues by giving priority to security of tenures and others needed to run the mining cadastral. Recently, we had a review of fees as approved by the ministry and so far, we have 1000 active mines in the country,” he said.

Speaking on the system upgrade in the agency, he said there was a need to allow the system to grow, saying that with the 2001 regulation, “We are told what to do interns of computerisation by migrating the system to online. As it is, you don’t have to travel all the way to the office here to access our what we do, whether you are in Canada, Australia or any part of the world, you can view our site.”

To ensure transparency in its operation, he said NMCO is working in collaboration with agencies like NEITI, EFCC for monitoring and background checks.





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