The Mining Marshals of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) are to intensify operations to dismantle illegal mining cartels and disrupt illicit financial flows sustaining banditry, kidnapping and terrorism.
The Commander, Mining Marshals, Mr John Onoja, made this known in Abuja on Thursday when members of the Defence Correspondents Association of Nigeria (DECAN), led by its President, Mr Odita Sunday, paid him a courtesy visit.
Onoja said the Mining Marshals remain uncompromising in enforcing mining laws and restoring sanity to a sector whose activities had increasingly assumed security dimensions.
He said illegal mining was not only an economic and environmental threat but could also provide funding for criminal and terrorist groups.
“It is not necessarily about picking up weapons and fighting bandits or kidnappers. We must ask: how do the people in those forests feed? How do they get money?” he said.
The commander said disrupting illicit financial flows to criminal groups would weaken their operational capacity and make banditry and terrorism less attractive.
“We want to make criminality less lucrative. You can only make it less lucrative if the illicit flow of finances to terrorist groups is disrupted,” Onoja said.
He said the Mining Marshals had adopted intelligence-led operations involving identification, arrest, investigation and prosecution of offenders to ensure perpetrators faced justice.
Onoja said the operation would maintain its presence across mining communities as part of its deterrence strategy, despite manpower and logistics challenges.
He urged the media, particularly defence correspondents, to support the campaign through accurate, responsible and sustained reporting on illegal mining and its security implications.
“I do not take your role for granted. The sanitised mining sector of our dream will be achieved through collaboration, and the major stakeholder in that collaboration is the media,” he said.
The commander also urged journalists to assess the performance of the Mining Marshals against available logistics, saying inadequate resources remained a major constraint.
He identified alleged collusion between compromised officials and illegal miners as another major challenge undermining efforts to sanitise the sector.
“The major bottleneck we face today is not necessarily the number of illegal miners out there, but the number of compromised officials of institutions and agencies that are supposed to be partners in the fight against illegal mining,” he said.
Onoja alleged that some compromised officials had resorted to blackmail and petitions against the Mining Marshals to frustrate their operations.
“That is corruption fighting back,” he said, stressing that the campaign against illegal mining must be genuine, deliberate and enforced without bias.
Earlier, Odita said DECAN recognised the critical security and economic implications of illegal mining and commended the Federal Government and NSCDC for establishing the Mining Marshals.
He said illegal mining threatened the environment, national revenue and increasingly national security, making stronger collaboration among security agencies, the media and other stakeholders imperative.
Odita assured the Mining Marshals that DECAN would give appropriate attention to their activities while ensuring that reports did not compromise operational security or personnel safety.
He called for stronger professional engagement between DECAN and the Mining Marshals through regular briefings, field visits and other activities to improve mutual understanding.
The DECAN president said timely access to verified information was critical to countering misinformation and helping Nigerians understand the dangers posed by illegal mining.
He stressed that the fight against illegal mining was a collective responsibility involving security agencies, government institutions, the media, traditional authorities, mining communities and other stakeholders.
