Hopes of a mining revival in oil-addicted Nigeria
ILESA, NIGERIA: Locals have always known that a vast deposit of gold sits underneath the cocoa trees and towering thickets of bamboo in the tropical jungle of Osun state in southwest Nigeria.
The country’s focus on oil has meant the gold has been ignored for decades.
But the government is now looking to revive the moribund mining sector as it seeks to diversify revenues following the 2014 crash in global crude prices.
A few companies are already venturing into the sector, hoping to repeat the success of mining in nearby west African countries Ghana, Senegal and Sierra Leone.
On a humid morning, Segun Lawson, chief executive of gold mining firm Thor Explorations, leads a site visit of his proposed mine.
“No one has a clue about mining in Nigeria,” said Lawson, dressed in a white shirt, chinos and construction boots as he walked down a red dirt road swatting away tiny insects.
The Nigerian government mined the vein in the 1980s “but oil was so prolific they just left it”, he added, stopping at an abandoned 20- metre ( 65- feet) deep trench.
“The gold runs 210 metres deep,” the geologist said, rattling off statistics about the deposit to the group of investors. One British broker sounded impressed by the numbers.
Lawson hopes to star t production at Nigeria’s first largescale gold mine in early 2020.
“This is the low-hanging fruit. This is a small gold province that no- one has explored with modern technology,” he said.
Gold-mining has a long history in West Africa.
The region was home to the powerful Asante and Mal i empires, who were a major source of bullion to the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds in medieval times.
The trade took a back seat to slavery before being ramped up again in the late 1800s, when Europeans introduced industrial mining techniques.
In the 2000s, a commodity ‘super- cycle’ drove another boom, with technical advances helping to discover new sites and make mining more efficient.
But this new technology has been slow to come to Nigeria.
Down the road from Lawson’s mine is a small gold market in the city of Ilesa, where artisanal miners sell alluvial gold extracted from the earth with backbreaking labour. People can only dig so deep. “We’ve always had the gold but we haven’t had the people to mine it,” said traditional ruler Adeyeye Bamidele Adeniji at his house in Ilesa. My mind is very clear, I want to start the work.”
“My expectation for you people is to let us benefit,” he told Lawson and his team.
Across Nigeria and West Africa, tens of thousands of people work in dangerous open pit mines, digging everything from gold and tin to sapphires. — AFP