Nigerian gold sits in narrow Proterozoic schist belts, most of it in the northwest and southwest, and most of it already worked by artisanal diggers. This article walks through the belts, the licence system run by the Mining Cadastre Office, the fees that actually apply, and what satellite and airborne data can tell you before a field crew drives out.
Regulator Mining Cadastre Office
Key belts Maru, Zuru, Kushaka, Ilesha
Audience Licence holders, explorers, investors
Fee figures Dated, with sources
Anyone planning gold exploration in Nigeria faces two separate questions. The first is legal: is the ground free, and what does a title cost to hold? The second is geological: does the block sit on a structure worth drilling, or only on a pile of quartz that looks good on a licence map? Nigeria has a clear online cadastre for the first question, a decent public airborne dataset for the second, and satellites can sit in between as a cheap early filter.
Try it: Nigerian exploration licence cost by cadastre units →
“One Nigerian cadastre unit is about 20.25 hectares, so a 100-unit exploration licence covers roughly 2,025 hectares.”
Nigerian fees are written per cadastre unit, not per hectare. Every 20 hectares you add to a block adds a unit, and a unit carries both an application cost and an annual service fee. Trimming a block by a fifth is a bigger saving than most people expect, which is why the screening step matters before you apply.
Gold exploration in Nigeria: the schist belts that carry the gold
The geology behind gold exploration in Nigeria is the Pan-African basement. Nigeria’s basement is part of the Pan-African mobile belt. Within it, long north-south trending slivers of schist, quartzite, amphibolite and banded iron formation host most of the primary gold. The Nigerian Geological Survey Agency (NGSA) describes the gold as occurring in alluvial and eluvial deposits and in primary veins inside schist belts in the northwest and southwest, in basement rocks of Archean to lower Paleozoic age. In a document summarised by Blueprint newspaper, the agency also said that no one can authoritatively estimate the total volume of gold, because new occurrences keep turning up in places with no prior record.
History explains the map. According to that NGSA summary, exploration started in 1913 and output peaked between 1933 and 1943 at roughly 1.4 tonnes of gold, then collapsed once the largely colonial operators left. What followed was mostly artisanal work on the same exposed veins, which is why many modern licence applications overlap old pits.
| Belt or district | State | What NGSA and published studies report |
|---|---|---|
| Maru schist belt | Zamfara | Zamfara leads the country in occurrences. Maru holds the historic Duki and Mararaba mines. Malele, found in 1934, has a main vein 1.5 m thick and 370 m long grading about 30 ppm gold. |
| Zuru belt (Bin Yauri) | Kebbi | Mineralisation over a 1.5 km strike length, uncovered by miners between the 1920s and 1940s. |
| Kushaka belt | Kaduna and Niger | Tsohon Birnin Gwari produced over 600 ounces in the 1930s. Gurmana lies in the southern part of the belt. |
| Egbe-Isanlu belt | Kogi | Okolom Dogondaji, mined extensively in the 1930s to 1950s. |
| Ilesha schist belt | Osun | Eluvial gold mined from residual soils around Osu, Amuta and Itagunmodi; hydrothermal mineralisation in quartz-biotite and talc-chlorite schists. |
| Federal Capital Territory | FCT | Ibbaban Tsauni returned 7 ppm gold in rock samples and 27 ppm in pebbly soils. |
Zamfara and the Maru belt: gold exploration in Nigeria at its most structural
Maru is the textbook case for structural control. A published Maru study by Osumeje, Oniku and Meludu extracted lineaments from a digital elevation model and aeromagnetic data and found trends running north-south, northwest-southeast and east-northeast to west-southwest, with very few east-west trends. Areas where lineaments cluster and intersect covered 153.6 km², about 16.1% of their study area, and the authors note that artisanal miners were already working those same zones. A separate reading of the same belt describes the Duki deposit as a shear zone cutting a quartzite and schist sequence, with quartz-gold-sulfide veins that NGSA drilling has followed below the old workings.
The takeaway for a licence holder: about one-sixth of the area that study covered carries the strongest structural intersections, so a licence that spans the whole thing carries a lot of ground you probably do not need.
That bias toward the northwest is worth saying plainly to anyone starting gold exploration in Nigeria for the first time: the best-documented districts are also the most crowded, so the interesting decisions are often in the quieter belts, where an airborne magnetic grid and a satellite screen are the only inexpensive evidence you can get.
Kebbi, Kaduna, Niger and Kogi
Bin Yauri in Kebbi is a smaller system with a 1.5 km mineralised strike length and a mining history reaching back about a century. Further south and east, the Kushaka and Egbe-Isanlu belts continue the same pattern: old colonial workings, recent artisanal rushes (Kwaga in Kaduna was found by artisanal miners), and little modern systematic exploration published in the public record. For those districts the NGSA airborne magnetic grids are often the best starting dataset, because they show the shear zones that surface geology hides.
Osun and the Ilesha belt: gold exploration in Nigeria under cover
The southwest behaves differently. A 2020 study in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences by Olajide-Kayode and colleagues sampled 50 rocks and 48 soils in the Osu, Amuta and Itagunmodi areas of the Ilesha belt. Gold is mined artisanally from eluvial deposits there, and the authors found higher gold in soil profiles than in the working pits, which points to mineralisation beyond the current diggings. In their rock samples, quartz-biotite schist averaged about 3.95 ppb gold, talc-chlorite schist 2.18 ppb, amphibolite 1.56 ppb and quartzite 0.63 ppb. Those are background-scale numbers, which is a useful reminder: the interesting signal in a deeply weathered belt is often in the soil, not the rock.
A figure like “one million ounces at Iperindo” appears in the press, but it is one geologist’s statement and not an NGSA resource estimate. Treat any gold deposit in Nigeria described without a named qualified person, a drill dataset and a reporting standard as an exploration idea. This is general information, not investment advice.
Licensing gold exploration in Nigeria: the Cadastre Office, titles and timelines
Mineral titles for gold exploration in Nigeria are governed by the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act, 2007, and administered by the Mining Cadastre Office (NMCO) under the federal solid minerals ministry. The online system is eMC+, with a public map where you can measure areas and enter coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds, and a registration step for more detailed licence data. Applications start from the “Apply Here” link or the eMC+ portal, and the fee is paid through Remita, which sends a payment reference code by email.
NMCO’s own FAQ sets the maximum area of each title in cadastre units. The chart below turns those limits into one picture. A small-scale mining lease tops out at 15 units, roughly 304 hectares, while a mining lease can reach 250 units and an exploration licence 930.
Most explorers who ask about gold prospecting in Nigeria are really asking which of these titles fits their stage. A reconnaissance permit is the lightest instrument, an exploration licence is the working title for a belt-scale programme, and the leases are for ground where a deposit is already understood. Small-scale mining leases are the usual home of operators with a defined vein and a pre-feasibility study. Pick the title that matches the evidence you hold, because the application pack for leases adds a stamped pre-feasibility study and a survey plan that an exploration licence does not.
Checking whether ground is free
The cadastre FAQ describes a manual step that surprises people used to fully online portals. You read the coordinates of your area off the map, take them to the nearest NMCO office, and an information officer keys them into the database to show whether the area is free at that moment. The public map is useful for planning, but treat the office check as the one that counts, and keep a dated copy of the answer.
What the application pack asks for
NMCO’s published requirements for exploration licences and leases are more demanding than many first-time applicants expect. They include company incorporation papers, a beneficial ownership form and a fit-and-proper-person questionnaire, evidence of financial capability (a bank balance of at least half the cost of the minimum work programme), a minimum work programme stamped by a member of COMEG, the Council of Mining Engineers and Geoscientists, evidence of technical competence, a tax clearance certificate and a consent letter from landowners or occupiers with a High Court affidavit. Everything goes in triplicate.
- ✔ Processing time: permits and licences take at most 30 working days, leases at most 45, according to the FAQ.
- 📊 Renewals: apply three months before expiry for licences and leases, one month before for permits.
- 📊 Reporting: holders pay the prescribed annual service fee each year under Section 11 of the Act and file quarterly progress reports.
- ⚠ Landowner consent: the High Court affidavit requirement means community and land-access work starts before the application, not after the grant.
Active artisanal workings on a belt are not proof that nobody holds a title there. Several belts, Maru included, are crowded with both licences and informal diggers. Run the office availability check on the exact boundary and read the licence number against the holder before you commission anything.
What gold exploration in Nigeria costs: fees per unit and a calculator
Fee numbers for gold exploration in Nigeria changed in 2024 and the paper trail is not tidy. The federal government announced a new schedule on 4 July 2024. It lists an Exploration Licence at N600,000, a Mining Lease at N3,000,000, a Reconnaissance Permit and a Small-Scale Mining Licence at N300,000 each, and an annual service fee of N31,500 per cadastre unit, stated “for the first time”. NMCO’s own requirements sheet, however, shows a processing fee of N500,000 for an exploration licence of 100 units, with each extra unit costing N50,000.
A third document on the NMCO website is labelled as a committee’s recommended revision, with lower annual service fees (N20,000 per unit for the first term) than the ministry list. It is a recommendation, not a gazetted schedule, so we do not use it. The practical rule: take the NMCO sheet for the application fee, the ministry list for the annual fee, and confirm both with the office before paying.
Nigerian exploration licence cost by cadastre units
Assumptions: one unit is 20.25 ha (NMCO FAQ). Application fee is N500,000 for the first 100 units plus N50,000 per extra unit (NMCO application requirements). Annual service fee defaults to the N31,500 per unit in the July 2024 ministry schedule and is held flat for every year you enter; later terms may differ. Excludes survey, COMEG sign-off, legal, work-programme spending and royalties. Exploration licences cap at 930 units. Confirm all figures with the Mining Cadastre Office.
At the defaults above, a 200-unit block costs about N5.5 million to apply for and N18.9 million in three years of annual fees. If a screen of the block shows that a third of the units sit on cover or barren gneiss, drop them at the application stage rather than at renewal, when the renewal fee and late-renewal penalty rules apply.
A worked example: gold exploration in Nigeria on a 100-unit block
Take a block of 100 units, about 2,025 hectares, which is the size NMCO’s processing fee is quoted for. The application costs N500,000. At the ministry’s N31,500 per unit, annual service fees come to N3.15 million a year, so three years of holding cost N9.45 million on top, about N9.95 million in total. Now suppose a satellite and airborne screen shows that 30 units are cover, barren gneiss or ground already pegged by someone else. The same filing on 70 units still costs N500,000 to apply for, because the quoted fee is flat up to 100 units, but the annual fees fall to N2.2 million and the three-year total to about N7.1 million. The saving is roughly N2.8 million before a single sample is taken.
That arithmetic is deliberately simple, and it ignores the biggest cost of all, which is the work programme. NMCO asks for a bank balance of at least half the programme’s estimated cost, so a N40 million programme needs N20 million evidenced up front. A tighter block means a tighter programme, and that is the second place where screening pays for itself. Serious gold exploration in Nigeria is rarely lost on the application fee. It is lost on a programme that spreads thin money over too much ground.
What satellites can and cannot see in gold exploration in Nigeria
Satellites do not see gold, and that holds for gold exploration in Nigeria as much as anywhere. They record reflected light and radar, and from those records an analyst can infer iron-oxide staining, clay and mica alteration, rock-type boundaries and fracture patterns. For a schist-belt gold system, those are the surface expressions that matter: shear zones, silicified quartz ridges, sericite and clay alteration around veins, and drainage patterns that bend around structure.
Savanna in the north, forest and cover in the south
The Maru belt sits in savanna country, so in the dry season large patches of rock and soil are visible to optical sensors. A 2025 study of western Zamfara by Sani, Aku and Saleh in the Dutse Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences used harmonised Landsat and Sentinel-2 data, band ratios, principal component analysis and a fuzzy overlay. Colour composites picked out schist, gneiss, quartzite and limestone, and the processing flagged ferric oxide, argillic and phyllic alteration. Their three favourable zones took up 63.3% of the study area, which is a fair warning that regional satellite maps are broad filters, and that ranking inside them is the real work. The practical consequence is simple: acquire in the dry season, mask vegetation, and expect the cleanest results on ridges and bare slopes.
The Ilesha belt is a different problem. Dense vegetation and deep weathering mean the gold is in residual and eluvial soil rather than in outcrop, so optical alteration mapping sees less. Radar texture, topography and the airborne magnetic grids carry more of the interpretation there, and soil geochemistry remains the proof step.
If you are weighing gold exploration in Nigeria on a block you have not visited, seasonality is the first thing to ask of any satellite supplier. Ask which dates the imagery comes from, how vegetation was masked, and whether a second season was used to confirm a bright pixel. A single wet-season scene over a forested belt tells you very little, and a good analyst will say so.
Cover, laterite and the false positive problem
- ⚠ Laterite and iron-rich soils look like iron-oxide alteration. A strong iron-oxide ratio over a lateritic plateau is not a target on its own.
- ⚠ Wet-season cloud limits optical coverage for part of the year, so archives matter more than a single scene.
- ✔ Structure is the most transferable signal: lineament intersections and curved drainage show up in both optical and radar data, and Maru’s lineament study is an example of why they matter.
- ✔ Depth is not visible. Satellite data describes the surface; a shear zone’s grade and continuity at 50 metres are drilling questions.
“In the Maru belt, ground with very high lineament intersection covered 153.6 km², about 16.1% of the area studied.”
Because landowner consent comes first in the Nigerian application pack, a desktop screen is a gentle way to decide which communities and parcels are worth a conversation. It involves no vehicles, camps or pits on land that is already under pressure from informal mining.
Free data for gold exploration in Nigeria before you pay anyone
Before spending anything on gold exploration in Nigeria beyond the application itself, use what the state has already paid for. Nigeria is better supplied with open geoscience data than its reputation suggests. The NGSA airborne programme was flown in phases: a 2003 pilot over Ogun State, Phase I in 2005 to 2007 and Phase II in 2007 to 2010, at mostly 500 m line spacing and 80 m mean terrain clearance, for about 2 million line-kilometres. The agency publishes the 1:50,000 magnetic data as Geosoft grids and ASCII files for free download, and interpreted products at 1:250,000. Sheet pages note that the rest of each 1:100,000 sheet’s data can be bought from the Survey after a formal request. NGSA also reports a higher-resolution time-domain electromagnetic survey in three blocks.
- 📊 NGSA airborne magnetic downloads: grids by sheet, free at 1:50,000, and the starting point for structure over any belt.
- 📊 NMCO public map: layer control, area and length measurement, and coordinate entry, useful for sizing a block in cadastre units.
- 📊 Published theses and journals: the Maru lineament paper and the Ilesha geochemistry paper cited above are open entry points to those belts.
- ✔ Landsat, Sentinel-2 and ASTER archives: free to download, with ASTER’s short-wave infrared bands better at separating clay, mica and carbonate alteration.
For a broader comparison of cadastre portals across countries, including how Nigeria’s sits next to Ghana’s and Sierra Leone’s, see our guide to the mining cadastre portals by country.
A practical route for gold exploration in Nigeria, from open ground to drill targets
Here is the sequence we see working for holders and applicants on Nigerian schist belts. It keeps the cheap steps first and the expensive ones last.
- Read the geology. Pull the NGSA 1:250,000 interpretation and the magnetic grid for your sheet, and mark the shear zones and the contacts between schist and gneiss.
- Size the block in units. Use the NMCO map to count cadastre units, and run the calculator above for the application and annual-fee bill.
- Screen the polygon from space. Map alteration, structure and cover for the whole block and rank the units.
- Check the ground. Take the coordinates to the NMCO office for the availability check, and start the landowner consent letters.
- Apply for the units that matter, with a work programme that targets the ranked zones.
- Sample the targets. Soil lines over weathered terrain, rock chips on ridges, then trenching and drilling for what survives.
Gold exploration in Nigeria also rewards patience with data. The first three steps cost little and can be done in parallel, and the fourth step, the office availability check, is the one that can change your plan entirely if a neighbour’s application overlaps your best units. Step 3 is where we come in. Our satellite-based mineral detection takes your polygon (KML, KMZ or coordinates) and the target mineral, analyses multispectral and hyperspectral data, and returns prospectivity heatmaps, high-potential zones with estimated location and depth ranges, and the geological reading behind them, as a PDF with georeferenced GIS files. Reports arrive in 5 to 20 business days, and the Premium+ tier adds TargetMax drilling intelligence and 3D subsurface models. Across 100,000+ hectares, 20+ mineral types and 25+ countries, we have seen early-stage screening cut exploration cost by up to 80 to 85% and timelines from months to days against starting on the ground.
You can draw your block directly on mining.farmonaut.com, Map Your Mining Site, or request a quote through the mining query form. For a feel of the deliverable, see the satellite-driven 3D mineral prospectivity mapping overview.
Holding or planning a Nigerian licence block?
Send the boundary you would file with the Mining Cadastre Office. We return a satellite prospectivity read with ranked zones, so you pay for the cadastre units that deserve it.
A target from remote sensing is a place worth sampling first, not a resource and not a reserve. Nothing in a satellite report replaces a qualified person’s estimate or the COMEG-signed work programme that the cadastre expects. We are not a licensing agent or legal adviser, and we do not file or broker titles.
Frequently asked questions
Where is gold found in Nigeria?
Anyone starting gold exploration in Nigeria hears the same short answer. Mostly in schist belts in the northwest and southwest. NGSA lists Zamfara (Maru, Anka, Malele), Kebbi (Bin Yauri), Kaduna and Niger (Kushaka belt), Kogi (Egbe-Isanlu belt), the Federal Capital Territory and Osun (Ilesha belt). Gold occurs in primary quartz veins and in alluvial and eluvial deposits derived from them.
Who issues exploration licences in Nigeria?
For gold exploration in Nigeria, licences come from the Mining Cadastre Office, which runs the eMC+ system. Titles under the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act, 2007 include reconnaissance permits, exploration licences, small-scale mining leases, quarry leases and mining leases. The office states a maximum processing time of 30 working days for permits and licences and 45 for leases.
How big is a cadastre unit?
About 0.2 km², which the Mining Cadastre Office gives as 20.25 hectares or roughly 450 m by 450 m. An exploration licence may cover up to 930 units (200 km²), a mining lease up to 250, a quarry lease up to 25 and a small-scale mining lease up to 15.
What does an exploration licence application cost?
Two official sources differ. NMCO’s requirements list N500,000 for 100 units plus N50,000 per extra unit. The ministry’s July 2024 schedule lists an exploration licence at N600,000 and an annual service fee of N31,500 per unit. Ask the office which applies to your filing date.
Can satellite data find a gold deposit in Nigeria?
For gold exploration in Nigeria, satellite data cannot see gold itself. It can map alteration minerals, rock boundaries and fracture patterns that often accompany gold in schist belts, which helps rank ground before field work. In deeply weathered areas like the Ilesha belt, soil sampling remains the proof step.
Is there free geophysical data for Nigeria?
Yes. NGSA publishes 1:50,000 airborne magnetic data as Geosoft and ASCII grids for free download, plus interpreted products at 1:250,000. The remaining data for each 1:100,000 sheet can be purchased from the Survey on formal request.
Does Farmonaut apply for a Nigerian licence on my behalf?
No. We are not a licensing agent, legal adviser, broker or marketplace. Applications go through the Mining Cadastre Office. We supply the geological side: a satellite prospectivity analysis of the area you hold or plan to apply for.
Reviewed October 2026 against the Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office FAQ and application requirements, the federal ministry’s July 2024 rates announcement, the NGSA airborne geophysics pages, the Osumeje and Olajide-Kayode journal studies and Blueprint’s summary of NGSA’s gold document. Fees, units and procedures change; confirm with the Mining Cadastre Office before you file. General information only, not legal or investment advice.
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