The challenge of funding in the mineral and mining sector continues to be a clog in the wheels of the sectors progress. While many blame the government for lacking the will to fund the sector, many others are of the view that proper taxation of minerals could be a solution to some of the funding challenges, RUTH TENE NATSA writes.The development of the mining and mineral sector was almost comatose due to the many challenges of the sector which include illegal mining, poor legislation (compounded by poor funding), a poor revenue base as well as the poor taxation of the sector which leaves miners in several cases paying nothing to government, especially in the cases of illegal/informal miners.Stakeholders had earlier justified the poor funding of the sector as a result of the poor revenue or income the sector is said to receive. This is even as the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI)s reports in the past had revealed that the entire sector contributes as low as 0.4 per cent of the entire gross domestic product (GDP), adding that the report had stated that the solid minerals sector between 2007- 2010 had shown a loss of over N4 billion on granite, sand and laterite.But that was before the recent report which revealed that the sector had in 201 alone earned the sum of N26.9 billion from solid minerals, while at the same time showing no record of royalty payments or taxes on gold and barite. This, unfortunately, has been blamed on the absence of the Metallurgical Bill to guide activities in the sector.According to the national president, Progressive Miners Empowerment Association (PMEA), Mr Sunday Ekozin, this happens because the internal structures to monitor mining does not exists and as such the operators can get away with anything. The capacity to generate data is not there and the only functional office of the sector is the ministrys headquarters in Abuja, while almost all the state offices are comatose.He noted thatoperators can sneak out all kinds of mineral products by labeling them as agricultural products or scrap. Nobody can monitor the sector efficiently as there are no scientific basis for data collection and no efficient monitoring system. This will continue to be so until the right thing is done.Also speaking, the country director, Global Rights Nigeria, Abiodun Baiyewu, said that illegal mining continues to persist in Nigeria because we have failed to regulate effectively and to invest in regulating. It takes copious capital to regulate that sector; it will also take technology manpower, and networking agencies to effectively regulate that it. But we have not shown the political will to regulate the sector by investing and creating a strong interagency collaboration to regulate.Speaking on what the economy is losing as a result, she said, We need to do a research on it, but I do know that we lose about N500 million dollars a year to unregulated gold mining in Nigeria.Meanwhile the minister of solid minerals development, Dr Kayode Fayemi, has said that the countrys solid minerals sector is currently being repositioned to meet the federal governments plan to diversify the economy and create jobs through the sector. Fayemi said that the major focus of the ministry is to ensure that the solid minerals sector improves its contribution to the GDP from 0.3 per cent to at least 10 per cent in the near future, stating that a lot of innovations are being put in place to overcome all the encumbrances that could hinder the attainment of the goal.
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