Dear Readers,
Nigeria’s solid minerals sector has in the last few years bolstered its efforts to establish itself as more than a footnote to oil. Last month, those efforts collided with a tragedy that has little to do with investment decks or licensing rounds. Thirty-seven detainees arrested in an anti-illegal mining raid reportedly died in the custody of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (“NSCDC“) in Minna, Niger State. The incident comes against the backdrop of an increasingly assertive campaign to curb illegal mining, including the deployment of Mining Marshals to reclaim mining sites, arrest suspected illegal miners and protect legitimate mining operations. The deaths triggered protests, a curfew, a state-wide suspension of mining, and a critical jurisprudence question: how effectively does Nigeria’s statutory framework accommodate the socio-economic reality of artisanal miners?
It is important to acknowledge that none of the abovementioned occurred in a legal vacuum. Under Section 44(3) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) and Section 1(1) of the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act (NMMA) 2007, the entire property in, and control of, all minerals in Nigeria is vested in the Federal Government. The NMMA 2007 sets out the licences, permits, and royalty obligations that govern who may explore, extract, process, or trade in minerals, while the Nigeria Tax Act and Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025, updated royalty rates and shifted collection to the Nigeria Revenue Service. Artisanal mining is not inherently illegal, as Section 90 of the NMMA 2007 explicitly provides for the grant of Small-Scale Mining Licenses (SSML), supported by the statutory mandate of the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM) Department to facilitate the formalization of artisanal operators into legal cooperatives. In practice, it is a pathway few local artisanal miners ever utilize, whether because of cost, bureaucratic centralisation at the Mining Cadastre Office (MCO), or simple ignorance. The NSCDC’s Mining Marshals unit, created to police that gap, is now the very institution under scrutiny for how it treated the individuals it arrested for falling on the wrong side of it.
The legal case for closing that gap is, first, a financial one. Illegal mining is estimated to cost Nigeria about US$9 billion annually, a figure that dwarfs what the formal sector currently remits. Reports indicate that solid minerals revenue rose from ₦38 billion in 2024 to approximately ₦70 billion in 2025, with the Federation Account receiving a further ₦15.62 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Growth on that scale is genuine progress, but it remains a fraction of what Nigeria bleeds every year from minerals mined, and often smuggled outside any licence, royalty, or tax net. Every unlicensed operation is also, quietly, a break in the chain of mandatory Environmental Protection and Rehabilitation Programs (EPRP), safety obligations, and Community Development Agreements (CDA) required under the NMMA, 2007.
It is tempting to read illegal mining purely as a revenue problem, but the deeper cost of exclusion is not only fiscal, but also human. As much as 80% of mining activity in Nigeria’s North-West is carried out illegally, on an artisanal basis, by local populations. For many of these artisanal miners, illegality is not defiance of the law so much as exclusion from it, a function of licensing costs, distance from regulators, and political patronage networks that shields the financiers of illegal operations while the labourers absorb the legal and physical risks. The Minna deaths sit squarely inside that pattern: young men and displaced persons, drawn to mining sites by economic necessity, caught in an enforcement action, and then failed by custodial duties of care and constitutional safeguards, specifically the Right to Life and Dignity of Human Person under the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999) (as amended) alongside the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015 and Administration of Criminal Justice Law (ACJL) of Niger state 2023. That is the real price of leaving artisanal mining outside the law: it does not just cost the nation in unpaid royalties, it costs lives, because people operating with no licence, no safety net, and no legal recognition are also the people with the least protection.
Enforcement can only address part of the problem. 2026 has seen the commissioning of a lithium processing plant in Nasarawa State and the commissioning of a gold refinery in Lagos, both aimed at pulling more of the value chain into the formal economy. The proposed Nigeria Mines Rangers Service Bill also aims to professionalise mining-site security in a way the current NSCDC model has not managed. What remains missing is a credible, economically viable and sufficiently accessible route in practice for artisanal miners to be brought within the law. Formalisation must go beyond the mere issue of licences. The Ministry of Solid Minerals Development must operationalize accessible ASM schemes that integrate micro-finance, technical safety standards, mandatory ESG compliance, and traceable supply-chain mechanisms. It should connect miners to finance, technical assistance, safer mining practices, legitimate buyers and transparent supply chains. The tragedy is a reminder that Nigeria’s mineral renaissance must be measured not only by the number of arrests made or mining sites recovered or inactive licenses revoked, but also by the effectiveness of the legal system in protecting people, communities, investors and public revenue.
