[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith orders given to stop all mining activities in Zamfara, I am afraid the next eruption is going to be in the southern forest of Itagun all the way to the southeast parts of Ile-Ife and Ilesha in Osun state.
I have toured those forests and see for myself and I can see that if you drive Zamfara miners off the fields, they will migrate straight into the Itagun fields.
In 2015 I had a cause to recon that area. We were rolling down the forest one day around ten in the morning when we suddenly came upon about a hundred motorbikes parked under the bushes by the roadside.
Everywhere was quiet and not a soul was to be seen. A stream gurgled nearby and birds fluttered in the trees like some Paradise without a serpent.
But what about these bikes, this real Leviathan here, this stark thing! We have to be worried people, and I can tell you there is fire coming into those areas of Osun state unless the general atmosphere in Nigeria improves.
I drove to Itagun and mingled with these gold miners. They are just everyday people, young people from the north in search of honest living.
They are a huge community in the heart of the forest there. I met just one person from the East among them.
There were a few Yoruba boys as well. The Oba told me they are always peaceful though there have been a few troubles when they dig up people’s cocoa farms in search of gold.
They panned away the muddy waters all day and in the evening, they pocket their finds, which is just a few ounces of yellow grains.
A few ounces but they are buying brand new bikes of N250,000 and in that forest they already have started a motor park with buses from all cities in the north.
You could take a bus to Katsina, Zamfara, Kebbi, Kano, name it! I found this alarming enough that I had to alert a few people who I thought should be told.
The miners are not structured in any form. There are no rules or guides and no form of law enforcement is in their area of their patently illegal operation.
Of course they are just regular Nigerian young people who will rather do this than engage in duping people or stealing women’s pants for blood money.
I imagine what could happen if you stopped them. They could be forced into crimes as a result of unemployment. I discussed the problem with a few people who have a stake and our conclusion was that they are better left alone to keep mining.
After a few years the surface gold will be exhausted and the business with die out naturally. The next stage of the mining will be with equipment and that will be left to organised miners.
With the reports of such activities being infiltrated by criminals as we are seeing in Zamfara, I can clearly now see the need to beef up security among those men and get the secret service to embed men among them (that second part should of course have been done much, much earlier than now).
If not, the same thing will happen and Osun state will be on fire in no time. And now that Zamfara mines are being closed down, the natural thing is for those boys to move down here.
Make no mistake about it, it will happen! Security agencies have an urgent work to do to make sure those forests are not infested with arms and itinerant fighters driven from the north.
The problem must be addressed in two layers: there has always been a need to have both overt and covert security among those peaceful miners.
Two, there is a danger of their being suddenly militarised at this time and the need for attention has become urgent.
You remember how the fall of Ghadaffi and the dispersal of his fighters fuelled the armed rebellion in NE Nigeria? Some of us saw the link that time and warned this will happen.
You had thousands of these Tuareg fighters who used to be patronised and maintained by Ghaddafi suddenly broke and jobless but in possession of real good arms in large quantities.
This is just the way conflicts reproduce and multiply.
Do you know that Zamfara State has gold in commercial quantity and the battle for gold and gold mines is one of the reasons why the killings going on in that state won’t stop any time soon?
Zamfara is a mineral-rich state, with significant deposits of gold. The acute lead poisoning in Zamfara that happened few years ago was as a result of artisanal gold mining: small scale mining done with rudimentary tools.
Zamfara State has gold in commercial quantity, just like you have it in South Africa.
The difference is that while South Africa government owns the gold mines and then also issue license to companies prospecting for Gold, South Africa government as well earns dollar revenue from the export of Gold
The country can also boast of a billionaire gold mogul Patrice Motsepe who made his billons selling gold.
In Nigeria, the reverse is the case .
Most of the gold mining in Zamfara up until the present is carried out illegally. It is usually done by a ‘cartel’ that just shows up in these communities and begins to cart away the minerals in collaboration with ignorant and vulnerable community members.
Some of the illegal mine traders are from South Asian countries, especially China, but they do not perpetrate these criminal actions without the collaboration of some locals and the elites in Zamfara State.
The recent mass killings going in Zamfara is not about bandits at all, but about massive gold deposits being mined by locals in collaboration with their foreign backers in South Africa and China and turf wars being fought by different groups, clans, cartels and overlords to control the largest mining sites.
According to one unverified source, the kind of money that is coming out of the illegal mining going on in Zamfara is more than what we are earning from crude oil sales as revenue but the irony is that while Niger Delta Crude oil belongs to all Nigerians, the gold deposits in Zamfara State as it were belong to the elites and people of Zamfara State.
One Nigeria indeed!
John Ogunlela is an agricultural scientist, entrepreneur, blogger, public policy analyst. He resides in Osogbo an can reached via email.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
