The Acting Director of Mines Environmental Compliance Department in the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development, Salim Adegbayega, said the Federal Government had sanctioned 14 mining companies for violating various environmental laws.
Adegboyega told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday in Abuja that the companies were sanctioned in Ogun, FCT, Nasarawa, Lagos, Kogi, Ondo and Edo.
Adegbayega said the ministry enforced the sanctions by giving stop work order to some of them; others were refused renewal of their licences as well as refusal to transfer mineral titles.
He said sections 116 and 119 of the law stipulated that before any company commenced mining, it had to submit statutory environmental documents mandatory for the operation.
He said the documents were Environmental Impact Assessment, Environmental Processing and Rehabilitation Programme as well as the Community Development Agreement.
The acting director said it was mandatory for any mining company in Nigeria to submit these documents to the ministry before it commenced mining but all the companies sanctioned had failed to do so.
Adegboyega said the companies involved both local and foreign ones and were mostly into mining of granites and other minerals while more would soon be sanctions.
He said the ministry had developed new strategies to monitor the approval of the renewal of licences.
“If an operator is known to have defaulted in environmental obligations, the ministry will refuse to renew the lincences; we have more than 10 cases recently which has been effected.
“There are some who transferred their lincences from one company to the other because they have secured partners; they are also sanctioned by refusing the transfer to happen.
“We have many cases like that close to 10 also. We have 14 companies which had suffered one sanction or the other by denying them certain requirements or outright stop work order.
“We operators working out this document, we see it as violation of the law and that is when we normally come in, to ensure compliance by way of writing them,” he said.
The acting director said once they failed to comply with the laws, it would attract sanction after serving them with series of letters.
He advised mining companies to observe all the environmental obligations by working in line with the law, adding that the law was very clear as to what the obligations were.
Adegboyega said that the Federal Government had earlier published the names of the companies involved this year, to create public awareness on environmental regulations among the miners.
He said that the ministry would soon put in place mechanisms to sensitise the general public to how to produce those environmental documents.
He appealed to the government to continue to support the solid mineral sector as the government had already made a policy statement to develop the sector in a way to support oil revenues.
Adegboyega advised the government to provide all the necessary logistics to the sector, to enable it to achieve the set goals
Adegboyega said recently there was protest by a community in Ogun State against a mining company for alleged vibration, cracks on the walls of their buildings, noise, distributing and flying chips all over.
The acting director said that these had constituted environmental hazard to the residents in the area.
He said the ministry had issued stop work order to the company because of environmental issues which had generated community protests and had commenced investigation into the matter to know the reality.
The acting director said the company in Ogun was into mining of granite, thereby recording cases of dust and the use of explosives.
“Most of the activities that have come to our knowledge on environmental issues, apart from the one from Bauchi which involved tantalite, the remaining are mostly granites.’’
NAN recalled that early this year, the government had planned to sanction 101 mining companies for not complying with environmental laws. NAN
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