Linus Aleke in Abuja
The Commander of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) Mining Marshals, John Attah Onoja, has said the government and other critical stakeholders in the fight against violent extremism must prioritise efforts to cut off sources of funding to terrorists and deny them the essential oxygen they need to continue terrorising innocent Nigerians.
He also vowed to sustain efforts to dismantle illegal mining cartels and disrupt illicit financing linked to banditry, kidnapping and terrorism.
Onoja made the commitment when members of the Defence Correspondents Association of Nigeria (DECAN) paid him a courtesy visit at his office in Abuja over the weekend.
He said the Mining Marshals would remain uncompromising in enforcing mining laws and restoring sanity to a sector whose activities have increasingly assumed security dimensions.
According to him, illegal mining was not only an economic and environmental threat but also a potential source of 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.
Onoja said disrupting the illicit flow of funds 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,” he said.
He said the Mining Marshals had adopted intelligence-led operations involving the identification, arrest, investigation and prosecution of offenders to ensure that perpetrators were brought to justice.
Onoja said the operation would continue to maintain a presence across mining communities under its deterrence strategy, despite limitations in manpower and logistics.
“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.