The Law Beneath Our Feet
Nigeria is endowed with mineral wealth but impoverished in the lawyers equipped to govern it. The time has come for our universities to accord Mining Law its rightful place in the curriculum, as a core course wherever the curriculum permits, and, at the very least, as an elective.
We believe that a nation’s wisdom is measured by the knowledge it chooses to pass on to its young. That belief has led us to a conviction we hold firmly and without apology ; Mining Law ought to be taught in Nigerian universities, as a core course wherever the curriculum permits, and, at the very least, as an elective in every Faculty of Law.
Nigeria is commonly described as home to more than 44 commercially viable minerals, distributed across hundreds of locations in nearly every state of the Federation. Gold, lithium, tin, columbite, barite, limestone, lead, zinc and gemstones lie beneath communities from Kano to Nasarawa, from Zamfara to Ogun. For decades, successive administrations have proclaimed solid minerals the key to diversifying an economy long overreliant on hydrocarbons. Yet the sector’s contribution to national output remains, obstinately, marginal. The story is not Nigeria’s alone. Across the ECOWAS sub-region and the wider continent, Africa is estimated to hold some thirty per cent of the world’s mineral reserves, including lithium, cobalt, manganese and rare earths, resources that the global energy transition now makes urgent, not merely abundant.
This, we submit, is no accident of geology. It is, in substantial part, a deficit of knowledge. Our law faculties produce fine and able lawyers versed in commerce, criminal justice, land, constitutional law and, increasingly, oil and gas. Solid minerals, however , sit at the margins of legal education, addressed in passing, if at all, within property law or natural resources modules. The result is a sector of national significance served by too few practitioners who genuinely comprehend the rules that govern it. South Africa already shows what is possible: the Universities of Pretoria, Cape Town and the Witwatersrand each run dedicated programmes in mineral and extractive industries law, producing precisely the specialists our own graduates are so rarely given the chance to become.
No mining economy can be built on the shoulders of lawyers who were never taught mining law.
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By mining law, we do not mean a narrow catalogue of licensing rules. It begins with the Constitution, which vests ownership and control of minerals in the Federal Government and consigns mines and minerals to the Exclusive Legislative List. It runs through the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act 2007 and its subsidiary Regulations, which govern exploration licences, mining leases, small-scale operations, royalties and the work of the Mining Cadastre Office. It extends into environmental law, through obligations on impact assessment, rehabilitation and mine closure, and into tax law, labour law, security and international trade, the more so as global demand for critical minerals reconfigures supply chains. Within West Africa, this architecture increasingly answers to a regional layer too, chief among these, the ECOWAS Directive on the Harmonisation of Guiding Principles and Policies in the Mining Sector, to which Nigeria’s own regime must, in time, give full effect and conform.
Above all, it touches people, and it is this that moves us most. The Act obliges mineral title holders to enter into Community Development Agreements with their host communities, setting out binding commitments on education, health, infrastructure and livelihoods. A great deal turns on the calibre of legal counsel on both sides of that table. A community poorly represented may sign away its future. A company poorly advised may forfeit its social licence to operate. Either way, the cost is borne by ordinary Nigerians who never chose to be on the losing side of an instrument they could not fully construe.
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Imagine, then, a law graduate who leaves university with a working command of mineral rights and title, the licensing regime, regulatory compliance, environmental and social obligations, dispute resolution, fiscal terms and the entitlements of host communities. Imagine that graduate conversant with continental frameworks such as the African Mining Vision, and with the transparency standards championed by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
Such a graduate stands ready for careers in regulation, in-house counsel, community advocacy, arbitration, policy and public service. That graduate’s competence need not stop at Nigeria’s borders: the same grounding travels across the ECOWAS sub region and the continent beyond it, wherever mineral wealth and legal capacity must meet.
That graduate also carries something less tangible, yet no less valuable: the understanding that the law studied in the classroom is tethered to the ground beneath one’s feet. A young lawyer from a mining community, equipped to read and negotiate a Community Development Agreement, becomes a formidable guardian of that community’s interests. We struggle to conceive of a finer return on a single course.
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The dividends extend well beyond the students themselves. Government gains, for a regulator is only as formidable as the lawyers who draft its instruments, enforce its rules and defend its decisions. Investors gain, for predictable and competent legal practice lowers risk and attracts patient, long-term capital. Host communities gain advocates equal to the fine print. The courts gain counsel and, in due course, judges versed in the sector’s peculiar admixture of property, regulation and community rights. Even the struggle against illegal mining, which drains revenue, despoils land and fuels insecurity across parts of the country, is, in no small part, a question of legal capacity. Ghana reached the same conclusion confronting its own illegal small-scale mining crisis, galamsey: in 2014, the University of Ghana’s Faculty of Law began teaching mining law and policy expressly to meet it. Strengthen the profession, and enforcement strengthens with it.
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We are not unmindful of the objections. Some will protest that the law curriculum is already overcrowded. That is fair, and it is precisely why the elective route recommends itself as a first step. An elective permits a faculty to begin modestly, pilot its content, build teaching capacity and gauge demand without displacing existing courses. As the sector matures and the evidence accumulates, Mining Law may, in time, graduate into a core course, particularly within universities situated in the nation’s mineral belt.
Others will ask who is to teach it. Here, industry, regulators and practitioners alike must step forward, with guest lectures, case materials, site visits, moot problems and research partnerships. Students respond readily when the classroom and the field converge, and there is no shortage of professionals willing to impart what they know.
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Nigeria’s legal education framework already permits faculties to introduce specialised courses responsive to national needs. Few needs are as pressing as cultivating the human capital to husband our mineral wealth responsibly. Our universities, particularly those in the mineral-rich North and Middle Belt, are well placed to lead, and the rest of the country would do well to follow. Nigeria, for its part, has every reason to lead the ECOWAS sub region on this question, as it has in other fields of legal practice. The continent already has a pipeline for that ambition: the African Mining Legislation Atlas, a decade old partnership of the World Bank, the African Legal Support Facility and African law faculties, has trained over 280 African law students in mining legislation, Nigerian students and Nigerian law faculties conspicuously rare among them.
We write from conviction, not convenience. The minerals have lain beneath our feet for millions of years. The communities who dwell above them have waited decades for their fair return. Our students ought not wait a day longer for the knowledge that will let them shape this sector with competence and conscience. Let us teach mining law, and let us begin now.
*Halima Imam is Community Development Manager and Corporate Communications at Steron Group, Abuja. Fatima Amira Adamu is a law graduate at Steron Group, Abuja.
