The initiative is part of an incentive package that is expected to support the small-scale miners in order to enhance and improve upon their businesses.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Chamber, Mr Sulemanu Koney, who disclosed this in an interview with the Graphic Business, said the move was also targeted at illegal miners.

The expectation is that the measure will help attract the illegal miners to also formalise their operations to be able to benefit from it, he said.

That, he noted, would help save the environment from further destruction.

“We believe that if you have an understanding or knowledge of their scale of operations, then it gives you more validation to get funding from financial institutions, and we need to help these miners not only to operate legally but also to deeply understand the mining business and its technologies,” he stated.

He said the Chamber would also encourage these miners to visit large-scale mines and observe proper procedures on the extent of mineralisation, rehabilitation, safety and environmental practices to operate better.

“There is the need to make miners understand the extent of the mineralisation before giving licences, otherwise people will be digging everywhere and before we realise, we will still be facing the same problem,” he noted.

“Once this knowledge is opened to them, it reduces the risks,” he added.

GCM’s role

According to the CEO, a study was undertaken to understand illegal mining and its related issues.

The study engaged state institutions and various ministries to understand the motivation for illegal mining and came out with certain recommendations.

Aside from the study, Mr Koney said, the Chamber organised yearly seminars on the security of mines and how to adjudicate it.

Through the study, he said, GCM had been able to positively affect legislation to combat illegal mining, which is the largest security threat “we have with our mines”.

Government’s role

The CEO believes successive governments failed to enforce the law concerning illegal mining some years ago when it started, and did not put monitoring mechanisms in place to thoroughly check the core of the problem.

The monitoring mechanisms, according to him, comprised constant field visits and making small-scale miners report on a regular basis, as well as audits.

He said licenses should also be given to these miners only if they could be monitored.

“If we know we can’t monitor them, don’t give them the license,” he said.

He stated that the existing policies were enough to curb ‘galamsey’ but the challenge had been compliance and enforcement.