At the African Studies Association conference here in Atlanta late last year, Professor Tade Aina, Senior Programs Director at the Andrew Carnegie Foundation and one of Africa’s most cerebral sociologists, called me aside and said while he appreciated my interventions on the insecurity engulfing Nigeria, he was disappointed that I had never explored how mining fuels it.
I never stopped thinking about the insights he shared with me, which several other people have corroborated. This week, I decided to stop thinking and start digging.
Let me be clear from the outset that illegal mining is not the sole driver of Nigeria’s insecurity. Professor Aina didn’t suggest that. It would be analytically lazy and factually wrong to say that. Nigeria’s unabating insecurity sprouts from state absence, rural poverty, elite complicity, climate stress, ethnic anxieties, religious extremism, collapsed local economies, ungoverned forests, arms trafficking, the hollowing out of traditional authority and the astounding incompetence of successive governments.
But illegal mining has become one of the least discussed engines that lubricate the machinery of terror in parts of Nigeria.
Ample evidence shows that bandits and terrorists sometimes operate around mining sites. This has made mining a conflict economy. It feeds violence, finances armed groups, incentivizes territorial capture, corrupts local authority and creates an illicit transnational supply chain that converts Nigerian blood into foreign profit.
As far back as June 16, 2020, Dr. Maurice Ogbonnaya of the Institute for Security Studies wrote that “collaboration between
politically connected Nigerians and Chinese corporations in illegal gold mining drives rural banditry and violent local conflicts” in parts of Nigeria, including the Northwest, the Northcentral and, to some extent, the Southwest.
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He also reported that sponsors of illegal mining also fund banditry and cattle rustling in mining communities to displace people and create opportunities for illegal miners to operate.
The ENACT policy brief of November 19, 2020, also written by Ogbonnaya, put it even more starkly. It said criminal collaboration in illegal gold mining between “Nigerians in high positions of authority” and foreign corporations deprives the state of legitimate earnings and “drives rural banditry and violent local conflicts.”
That sentence deserves to be engraved on the forehead of our national security establishment. For too long, official Nigeria has treated insecurity as merely a military problem. It deploys soldiers, bombs forests, declares bans, arrests a few expendable poor people and then returns to sleep.
But the people who buy the gold, arrange the licenses, launder the proceeds, bribe officials, hire local muscle and export the minerals are rarely the ones who face the law.
