From left: Principal Secretary State Department for Mining Elijah Mwangi, Cabinet Secretary Ministry of Mining, Blue Economy and Maritime Affairs Salim Mvurya and State Department for Blue Economy and Fisheries Principal Secretary Betsy Muthoni Njagi addressing journalists during a press conference on the lifting of the Moratorium on Mining Licenses at his office in Works Building, Nairobi
By Business Daily Africa
Kenya has formed a special police unit to fight illegal mining activities after lifting a four-year ban on exploration and prospecting of minerals.
Mining Cabinet Secretary Salim Mvurya said the unit will be tasked with pursuing mining firms operating without proper documentation, including those dealing in smuggling of minerals.
The ministry disclosed it has flagged about 3,000 illegal operations.
The illegal miners and mineral dealers have been directed to close operations, the minister said, without disclosing the timelines.
“To enhance compliance, a special police unit shall be seconded to the State Department for Mining by the National Police Service,” Mr Mvurya said in a press statement Wednesday.
“Enforcement has been beefed up through the regional mining offices. The ministry is setting up an enforcement team in collaboration with other government agencies in fighting the vice.”
He said that some 1,546 licences have been revoked following a comprehensive audit of all mineral rights holders. The William Ruto administration on Tuesday lifted the December 2019 moratorium that had stopped issuing of prospecting licences to allow fresh mapping of mineral resources.
The phased unfreezing of the ban has opened the door for investors to prospect for construction and industrial minerals such as limestone, gypsum and diatomite.
Prospecting and exploration for strategic minerals such as uranium and cobalt will, however, be approved on a case-by-case basis guided by Mining (Strategic Minerals) Regulations, 2017.
The previous administration of Uhuru Kenyatta had stopped issuing exploration licences to allow fresh mapping of mineral resources through an airborne survey and the building of a digital database for the sector.
The Ministry of Mining has also not renewed licences for companies in the sector since 2015, forcing most of the firms to operate under gazette notice.
Mr Mvurya said the ministry has “substantially” completed the National Wide Airborne Geophysical Survey (NAGS), which has preliminarily identified 970 mineral occurrences in the country.
“We are currently conducting ground truthing and confirmatory field work on the identified mineral deposit occurrences to confirm their existence, quality and quantity in 16 counties,” he said. “For transparency in issuance of mineral rights, state department has taken measures to ensure that the online mining cadastre (OMC) is operational.”
This enhances accountability and openness in the process of awarding licenses and permits.”
Kenya’s largely untapped mining sector is estimated to have the potential to earn the country $6.6 billion (about Sh977 billion), or 10 percent of GDP.
The country has been unable to attract new investments due to the moratorium, with some firms redirecting their investments to neighbouring countries.
For years, the sector’s contribution to GDP — a measure of national economic output — has stagnated, hovering between 0.7 and 2.1 percent in five years through 2022.
Though mining activity has been present in the country for over 50 years, productivity has remained low, with a scale of operations limited to soda ash, mineral sands and from 2013 Titanium ores in Kwale.
The country is also believed to hold significant deposits of copper, niobium, manganese and rare earth minerals which largely remain under-exploited, dwarfing the mining sector’s contribution to the national economic output.