The Mining Marshals of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps are to intensify operations to dismantle illegal mining cartels and disrupt illicit financial flows sustaining banditry, kidnapping and terrorism.

The commander of the mining marshals, John Onoja, stated this in Abuja on Thursday when members of the Defence Correspondents Association of Nigeria paid him a courtesy visit.

Mr Onoja said the marshals remain uncompromising in enforcing mining laws and restoring sanity to a sector whose activities have increasingly taken on 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,” Mr Onoja said.

He said the marshals adopted intelligence-led operations involving identification, arrest, investigation and prosecution of offenders to ensure perpetrators faced justice.

Mr Onoja said the operation would maintain its presence across mining communities as part of its deterrence strategy, despite workforce 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.

Mr Onoja also urged journalists to assess the performance of the Mining Marshals against available logistics, saying inadequate resources remain 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.

(NAN)