The Federal Government seeks to deploy Nigeria’s digital identity infrastructure to track mining operators, strengthen regulation, and curb illegal mining nationwide.

The Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, disclosed that when he received the Director-General of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Abisoye Coker-Odusote, and her management team during a courtesy visit to the ministry in Abuja.

The meeting explored areas for collaboration between the ministry and NIMC to integrate digital identity into the solid minerals sector, improving governance, regulatory compliance, and monitoring of mining operations.

A statement issued on Sunday by the minister’s Special Assistant on Media, Lara Owoeye-Wise, said that both institutions are working to leverage technology and credible identity systems to support ongoing reforms in the sector.

Mr Alake described NIMC as a critical institution in Nigeria’s governance architecture, noting that effective regulation and national planning increasingly depend on reliable identity management and accurate data.

“NIMC occupies a critical position in translating policy into reality. It is pivotal to the development of any nation because governance today is driven by data, technology, and credible identity systems,” the minister said.

Tracking mining operators

Mr Alake said integrating digital identity into the mining sector would enable government agencies to properly identify operators, monitor mining activities, and distinguish legitimate licence holders from illegal miners.

According to him, effective identity management is essential to strengthening enforcement and tackling insecurity associated with illegal mining.

“Without identification, we cannot trace; we cannot track, and insecurity will flourish. In the solid minerals sector, we need effective tracking of both legal and illegal operations,” he said.

He added, “A credible identity ecosystem will strengthen regulation, improve enforcement, and support our efforts to sanitise the sector.”

He said technology, digital identity, data gathering, and statistics have become indispensable tools for evidence-based policymaking, efficient licensing, investment promotion, and improved oversight of mining operations.

The minister also noted that access to credible and verifiable data would enable government institutions to understand activities across the mining value chain better and formulate policies that support the sector’s sustainable development.

NIMC proposes deeper collaboration

Speaking during the meeting, Ms Coker-Odusote said the recently enacted NIMC Act 2026 has strengthened the legal framework for Nigeria’s digital identity ecosystem and created new opportunities for collaboration with government institutions.

She said integrating NIMC’s digital identity infrastructure into the mining sector would improve interagency data integration, strengthen regulatory compliance, and enhance security.

According to her, the collaboration would also improve monitoring of mining operators, support law enforcement, and facilitate the implementation of Community Development Agreements between mining companies and host communities.

She added that a robust digital identity system would improve transparency, strengthen service delivery, and enable more efficient data sharing across government agencies.

“The commission’s infrastructure can support the creation of a more reliable identity ecosystem for the mining sector, helping regulators verify operators and improve monitoring across the country,” she said.

Reforms target illegal mining

The initiative forms part of the Federal Government’s broader reforms aimed at sanitising Nigeria’s solid minerals sector, which continues to face challenges, including illegal mining, insecurity, environmental degradation, and weak regulatory oversight.

READ ALSO: Nigeria will be big player in global supply of critical minerals – Dele Alake

Authorities have repeatedly identified illegal mining as one of the biggest obstacles to unlocking the sector’s economic potential, with criminal networks and unlicensed operators exploiting mineral resources while depriving the government of revenue.

PREMIUM TIMES recently reported that the Federal Government arrested two suspected illegal miners and shut down an illegal site in Osun State as part of an intensified nationwide enforcement campaign. During the operation, Mining Marshals confiscated equipment and sealed the site, while the suspects assisted investigators in identifying financiers of the illegal activities.

The minister had said that the Mining Marshals arrested more than 300 suspected illegal miners nationwide, with over 150 suspects, including foreign nationals, currently facing prosecution. Several illegal mining sites have also been closed as part of efforts to restore order to the sector.

The Tinubu administration has also introduced reforms to attract responsible investment into mining, improve transparency, strengthen licensing procedures, and ensure Nigeria derives greater economic benefits from its vast mineral resources.

Apple recently filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI company of a pattern of misconduct aimed at getting current and former Apple employees to share confidential information. (In response, OpenAI said it is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.”)

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I debated whether this lawsuit will cast a shadow over OpenAI’s much-discussed plans to get into the hardware business (starting with a mobile smart speaker) and go public.

“Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that sort of situation where it’s going to cause some delays in what OpenAI is working on,” Sean suggested. “Which I’m sure was probably part of the reasoning behind Apple doing this. They don’t do this stuff willy nilly.”

With all those plans on the line, will OpenAI try to settle this as quickly as possible, or did it learn from its recent courtroom victory against Elon Musk that it can endure the cost and embarrassment of a trial? Kirsten, at least, predicts the latter.

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Kirsten Korosec: Sean, how do you feel about Sam Altman listening to you with a little device maybe in your pocket?

Sean O’Kane: I’m good. Maybe that’s predictable, but I’m good. No thanks.

We’ll get into it, I’m sure, but this is allegedly the first product that OpenAI has been working on in its hardware division with Jony Ive and company. They’ve been really coy ever since that weird video they put out last year of them sitting at that coffee shop or bar in San Francisco and sort of talking very vaguely about hardware and legacy devices, meaning laptops and phones. And so if this is the direction they’re headed in, all power to people who want to have somebody like that always listening to them. This is not going to be for me.

Anthony Ha: Part of what we have to remember about those kinds of devices is also that, depending on how mobile it is, it’s not just listening to you, it’s listening to the people around you. I might be fine with it — I’m not fine with it, but let’s say I was — but then if we met up in-person at Disrupt, then suddenly it might be listening to all of us. 

There’s all kinds of social norms that are going to have to be renegotiated if these things become widespread. I think we should make fun of and criticize people who record other people without consent.

Kirsten: Well, I bring up the device that has been speculated about for a really long time, and we’ll see what it really ends up being once it’s officially introduced, but it’s important in the context of this lawsuit that Apple filed last Friday. 

It was the biggest news of the week, certainly, and this is a trade secret lawsuit. It has some pretty wild allegations and we should very much emphasize these are allegations that have been filed in a complaint by Apple. But what it is accusing OpenAI of is a pattern of misconduct at the highest levels, specifically directed towards OpenAI employees who used to work at Apple. And in fact they’ve named the chief hardware officer Tang Tan in this lawsuit.

This is all important because Apple is accusing OpenAI of essentially stealing their trade secrets, but in the context of that, this could be then used for a competing hardware product. I’m wondering if maybe we don’t get into whether this lawsuit has merits, because we haven’t gone through full discovery, but what are your initial impressions of the lawsuit aside from the fact that wow, this is going to be entertaining?

Sean: Two things. One, this is a pretty big risk potentially to whatever it is OpenAI is working on. Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that sort of situation where it’s going to cause some delays in what OpenAI is working on, which I’m sure was probably part of the reasoning behind Apple doing this. They don’t do this stuff willy nilly.

The other is that we think that OpenAI is — we know that they’ve filed confidentially for an IPO. We think it might happen as early as the end of this year, or early next year, if you believe Sam Altman’s cautious language around the IPO. And this just raises a whole bunch of questions around that because, on the one hand, we think their business right now is probably overwhelmingly the software; they’re not really factoring in any hardware business into that picture at the moment.

They’re about to go to the markets and they’re going to be pitching bankers and investors on where they think their addressable market should be, and if they have a big amount of that pegged to a potential hardware division and hardware products, this could be a huge risk to that and changes a lot of the calculus of sort of how the IPO gets priced. So that’s where my head’s at.

Anthony: One [allegation] that I assume that Apple must have pretty solid like numbers on is, they said more than 400 Apple employees now work at OpenAI. Granted, both of them are very large companies with many thousands or tens of thousands of employees. So as a percentage, it’s not necessarily huge. But that seems like a lot of people and a pretty serious talent drain. 

And the other thing I’m wondering is related to Sean’s point. With the context of the potential IPO, how much damage did OpenAI ultimately take from a marketing and brand perspective from the trial it already went through? That it seemed to basically win, but there was a lot of not-terrible-but-kind-of-embarrassing dirty laundry that came out in the testimony. To what extent are they just like, “We do not want to go through that again”? Or did they take the lesson of, “Hey, we went through it and we survived and we’ll be okay if we have to do another trial with Apple”?

Kirsten: I fully predict the latter, by the way.