By EricJames Ochigbo
Some environmental experts have urged the National Assembly to speed up the passage of the Environmental, Social and Health Impact Assessment (ESHIA) bill to nip unethical mining in the bud in the country.
The experts, who made the call at a roundtable table in Abuja on Friday, urged the assembly to expedite actions on the bill, as it would spell out rights of host communities and protect them against hazards of unethical mining activities.
The Project Lead at Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF,) Mr Shehu Akowe, said that the roundtable was to draw government’s attention to the impact of expansion of extractive activities across the country.
Akowe recalled that as at 2024, there were 7,182 mining sites in Nigeria, comprising artisanal and small scale mining across 500 communities, of which a single unethical mining site could displace between 10 and 20 communities.
He said that the impact of ongoing extractive activities in Mpape, Takushara and Mbuko communities in the FCT could not be ignored, as extractive sites are too close to residential areas, thus posing serious threat to residents.
Akpwe said that given the volume of extractive activities in the communities, an environmental disaster, difficult to handle by government and stakeholders, could occur within a matter of time.
“So we are here to say that government needs to enforce the regulations that guide mining activities and ensure the community rights to decide what happened around them.
“We are calling on the government to ensure the passage of the ESHIA bill currently in the National Assembly, which has passed the first reading.
“The national assembly should accelerate activities on that bill, as it will help host communities.
“The bill, when passed, will project the voice of community better and not just on paper.
“The community must be informed; they must be part of the process; they must be part of every decision that will lead to mining in their domain.
“We are saying that the Federal Government should consider legislative backing to ensure communities only give informed consent and they should retain the right to take it back in the face of dangerous impact of mining,” he said.
Also speaking, the Executive Director of Urban-Rural Environmental Advocacy (UREA), Mr Godspower Martins, called for domestication of UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights (2007), a principle that insists on free, prior and informed community consent.
According to him, the principle states that communities must agree to projects before they start and that communities will not just be consulted but be active partners in every stage of a mining project, from initial exploration to closure.
He said that the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), a legal tool in Nigeria’s EIA Act, (1992), was designed to predict projects’ risks and ensure that development does not harm the environment or humans irreparably.
Martins said that host communities must stop seeing themselves as ignorant, helpless, passive and captured entities but as a statutory important part of the mining value chain that must not be ignored.
In his remarks, Mr Edosa Oviawe, an environmental expert, described mining as not something bad, as it leads to modern development.
Oviawe, however, said that unethical mining could spell doom for the society.
He alleged that a lot of illegal mining was ongoing in the country by licensed miners, stressing that many of them usually go beyond the scope of their certification.
The expert listed the implications of unethical mining to include loss of farm lands, water pollution, dust for blasts, sexual exploitation, school dropout, child mortality, accidents from open pits, infrastructure decay and respiration diseases, among others.
All these, he said, could only be seen after a long time and when the damage might have been done.
Oviawe noted that there were lots of ambiguities in the current law which needed to be updated with proper oversight to ensure that only ethical and developmental mining were carried out in the country.
Also speaking, the Executive Director of Ubuntu Environmental Development Foundation (UEDF), Mr Daramfon Bassey, urged miners not to put profits ahead of humanity.
According to Bassey, unethical mining leads to cancer, fertility deficiencies among other health and environmental issues which are prominent in mining communities in Enugu, Plateau and Nasarawa, among other states.
“Even if you make all the profit, you will still need the environment to live in; there is need for government to take urgent steps.
“When lands are taken from communities, it is not just the land but their culture, herbs, ancestral history are also being taken,” he said.
Some residents of Ruga community in Mpape area of the FCT said that they were traumatised by the activities of extractive companies in the area.
One of the residents, Ms Prudence Donald, explained that before the quarry company blasts rocks with dynamites, they blare sirens to alert residents to move out of their homes to prevent loss of life in the event of house collapse.
She said that blasts often shake the entire community and that many house now have cracks on their walls as a result of frequent quakes.
She said that the community does not have a voice, as many of its leaders do not have formal education and cannot properly engage from informed position.
Another resident, Mr Yusuf Aliyu, said that efforts to engage the company had not yielded result, as it usually evades any attempt to account for its actions.
Aliyu explained that on one occasion, they were told by the company management that they were not answerable to Ruga but to Kaidi, a neighbouring community which did not feel impact as much.
He recalled that during one of the blasts, a piece of rock broke the head of a young girl who was going about her activities in the community.
Aliyu also said that many roofs had been damaged by the rock particles flying from blast sites into the community. (NAN)(www.nannews.ng)