The DGSM online mining cadastre has made licence holdings publicly checkable for the first time. The practical effect has been immediate and largely unglamorous: fewer arguments about who holds a tenement, and more about what the holder is doing with it.
01Dormant tenements
The most consistent finding from public scrutiny is the number of licences held without visible activity. Speculative holding blocks new entrants and generates the boundary conflicts that district officers spend their time mediating.
02Overlaps
Historic overlaps between exploration and location licences have surfaced where paper records had disguised them. Resolving these is slow, but the disputes are now factual rather than rhetorical.
03Who is actually using it
Truth be told, Journalists and civil society, predictably. Less predictably, artisanal association leaders, who use it to confirm that a plot they have been offered is not already licensed to someone else. That is a practical anti-fraud tool.
04What is still missing
Production returns, community development agreement status and compliance history are not published alongside the licence record. Adding them would turn a registry into an accountability instrument. That is the part we shall be checking next time.
How we verified this: licence and production details are checked against official records and ministry statements where they exist. Corrections are welcome through our contact page.
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