Digging up the numbers on informal mining in Nigeria
Millions of people in Nigeria survive on artisanal and small-scale mining, the country’s minister of mines and steel, Abubakar Bwari, reportedly said recently.
“With the renewed interest in mining brought about by the current administration’s diversification efforts, at least 2 million people in Nigeria are now directly or indirectly dependent on artisanal and small-scale mining for their livelihood,” the Nation newspaper quoted him saying.
Bwari was speaking at a national conference on small-scale mining in Abuja in August 2018. Artisanal and small-scale mining are simple mining operations, done mostly without the help of machines, that can be started without much money but need a lot of labour.
“At this stage in our development, these are the people responsible for 90% of the country’s mineral production,” Bwari said.
But available data doesn’t support the minister’s claims about the number of people who depend on small-scale mining, or the amount of minerals these miners dig out of the ground. Here’s why. In his speech, the minister referred to a January 2018 report published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The think-tank, based in Canada, promotes human development and environmental sustainability.
The report says there are 500,000 small-scale miners in Nigeria, who support another 2.5 million people.
But how many people do small-scale miners support?
Africa Check traced the original source of the claim to the World Bank’s Communities, Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (CASM) initiative, which ran from 2001 to 2010.
The initiative’s records are kept on the website artisanalmining. org, which hosts copies of CASM reports as well as an inventory placing the number of small scale miners in Nigeria at 1 million.
Dr Felix Hruschka, a mineral economist who runs the website, told Africa Check his methodology included “triangulation of legacy data, empirical statistics on the gold price and unstructured interviews.”
It also “draws on informal conversations with various Nigerian mining professionals” from when he visited Nigeria in March 2018. Hruschka is also a board member of the Alliance for Responsible Mining.
The figure of 1 million small scale miners was only an estimate. “Bottomline, I would call it an ‘informed best guess’,” he told Africa Check.
Hruschka said each miner supported an average of five people, according to previous estimates. He had found this ratio of one miner to five dependants to be true on the ground for most local miners in Nigeria.
“Based on this rule of thumb, I would consider 5 million a reasonable guess for dependants on artisanal mining activities in Nigeria.” ‘No way of verifying the data’ Prof Gavin Hilson of the University of Surrey’s business school told Africa Check that nobody knew for sure how many small-scale miners there were in Nigeria. He wrote a 2016 paper exploring the links between agriculture and artisanal and small-scale mining in rural subSaharan Africa.
“These are all estimates,” he said. “There is no way of verifying the data, as they are all requoted from outdated reports.”