From soil to gold: The story of Zamfara local mining culture
Mohammed Bello Mafara is one youth who cherishes being self-reliant and distancing himself from ‘Maula’, a word commonly used among Zamfara people to describe social begging by healthy people who have no form of deformity. Mafara who was in the Immigration service, said he resigned from the para-military because it was not a good platform […]
Mohammed Bello Mafara is one youth who cherishes being self-reliant and distancing himself from ‘Maula’, a word commonly used among Zamfara people to describe social begging by healthy people who have no form of deformity. Mafara who was in the Immigration service, said he resigned from the para-military because it was not a good platform for him to achieve what he wants. He said as an Immigration officer, he was always subjected to orders from his supervisors with very little opportunity to do things the way he wanted.
“Few years after I left the Immigration, the business of gold mining started flourishing in my state, Zamfara. I studied the whole thing and discovered that I cannot go far into the bush and start exploring the gold from the caves and valleys because of the risk involved. What I did was to team up with some youths to set up a local gold washing factory near Danbaza here in the state. When people go to the bush and explore the gold amidst sand and stones, they bring to us and pay us to grind the sand and extract the gold for them.
“You know, when they go to the bush and dig out the area they think there is gold, you don’t see the gold clearly. But you can see some shining particles that indicate that there may be gold in the sand. So, when we grind the sand very well, the sand will be very smooth leaving the gold particles in their original size. That makes them easy to be noticed. So, when we use a lot of water to wash the sand, the gold is easily separated from the sand. But even at that, some small particles of gold still remain in the sand. After washing the sand, we don’t throw it away with the water. We spread the sand to dry. Thereafter, we contract some boys to search through the sand and bring every shining particle out. More gold are found in the process.
“We are using a Leister machine, the type they use in grinding grains to grind the sand. We also have two camels that we use in transporting the sand for our prospective customers in addition to the ones provided by others for commercial transportation. We were about digging a borehole to have easy access to clean water for the washing of the sand when the lead poison saga started and we closed down the factory before things normalize. Yes, we can grind and process ten bags of sand in one day because we have 11 people working at the factory and we work even in the night. It was a good business with a lot of prospects even though the defunct Mahmuda Shinkafi led administration could not support us,” he said.
Mafara said as the chief executive of the ‘factory’ with an investment of about N300,000, he made over a million naira within the 13 months the factory lasted. He said the factory has impacted on the lives of several families in the area. He said several people had brought sand to the factory where the sand was grinded and some amount of gold extracted that generated a lot of money for his factory and jobs for others. Mafara’s factory was not the only one in Maradun and Maru local government areas of the state where Sunday Trust visited. There were other similar factories without names in the area doing similar business operating side by side with some foreign factories owned by some Chinese and Lebanese.
Alhaji Isa Bozer is one of the owners of such factories. His factory, located at the outskirts of Maradun, is similar to that of Mafara except that Bozer’s factory was into a lot of competition with many other stronger factories whose owners are not clearly known. He said while local factories like his are giving jobs to so many people from the locality, majority of the advanced factories bring their workers from outside the state thereby depriving the local residents the opportunity of benefitting from them.
“I had between 12 and 18 water vendors supplying water to my factory when we were in full operation. I had 5 workers at the factory with over 30 youths bringing sand for me to grind. We had tens of youths in the bush exploring the gold and about six camel riders transporting the sand to our factory. The real operation is in stages. You have the boys in the bush who use their native intelligence to trace areas with potentials of gold. They dig for themselves and sell the sand to merchants not knowing the actual quantity of gold in the sand.
“In some cases, the merchants hire the boys to dig a particular area and excavate all the sand for them. Where the boys are working for themselves, they bring the sand to us to grind and wash for them and they pay us for that. But where they are working for merchants, the merchants now bring the sand for us if they do not have their own factories. Then you have the transporters who use their camels to transport the sand from the bush to the factories. The camel riders give out their phone numbers to the boys to call them when they require their service.
“It was a very good business that was providing jobs to a lot of youths until the Emirs and top state government officials came in to float their companies and also brought the Chinese and other foreigners to compete with us. That is why we are calling on the present state government to investigate what happened between the previous administration in the state and those foreign collaborators who came to cart away our mineral resources. We need to know how much was generated and where the money is. No, government was not collecting any revenue from us,” he said.
Fifteen-year old Ahmadu is a primary school dropout. He left school to take part in the gold exploration business in Maradun local government area. Ahmadu said he has been the breadwinner of their family of seven since he became a gold explorer. He said he changed the thatched roof of their house to zinc and bought a motorcycle for his father, a full time farmer, all with the proceeds of the gold business.
“I also bought two motorcycles that some older youths from my village are using for commercial transportation for me at Talata Mafara. I used part of the money I generated from the gold business to open a shop in my village with an investment of over N800,000 in the shop. I have two large farms where I employ people to be farming for me. I had nothing before I started exploring gold. I was an ordinary primary school pupil relying on my poor father for N5.00 pocket money,” he said.
Little Ahmadu said over 90 percent of all he got from gold exploration were attained by him from one ditch he dug for several months. “We were told that the colonial masters had marked areas believed to have gold deposits in this area. They marked them by using stones that they buried half way into the ground and wrote some unclear inscriptions on them. I heard this from the primary school I was attending. So, when I came here in company of other boys in search of gold and I saw a stone with some writings on it, I decided to explore there.
“When I dug to knee level, I saw a brown line that goes into the sand. People told me it was the movement of gold into the sand. I kept digging the sand following the line. Incidentally, I found some gold in every heap of sand I packed from the place. You can see how far I dug the place. I cannot remember how long I have been digging this place but I know I have been on it for more than seven months. Apart from one piece of gold I first picked somewhere after it rained that I sold at N4,500 to one woman. All the gold I got were from this hole,” he said.
Efforts to speak to some of the foreigners seen operating one of the semi standard gold processing factories near Maradun was met with serious resistance as they insist that the reporter must obtain the permission of a prominent Emir from the area whom they claimed to be working for. Sunday Trust, however noticed that the type of machines being used by the foreign firms for the washing and processing of gold are more superior to those of the locals. The foreign firms, through their better equipped explorers, invade farmlands and villages suspected to have gold deposits and massively dig out suspected deposit areas in search of the gold.
But one of the registered miners from the state, Alhaji Aminu Bello Danmaliki, the Danmalikin Maradun, said governments inability to regulate the exploration activities of gold miners in the country and especially in Zamfara state is the genesis of all the problems associated with the business. He said if the past state administration in whose time all the mining activities took place had regulated the activities of illegal miners in the state; the loss of lives as a result of the lead poisoning that ravaged the state could have been avoided.
“There are several countries of the world that rely solely on gold as their major source of income. Some of them do not even have as much gold deposit as we have but yet, the whole country rely on what is generated from that gold for the running of the country. They succeeded in doing that because of good management of their mining business. Ours was more of a criminal activity than mining. The state government was doing its own on one side, some Emirs were doing theirs, and top government officials were also at it. The illegal miners and those of us with license could not be differentiated.
“In all that, nobody was accountable to the government. I am not even sure government has a record of what the foreigners it brought took out of this country in its name. I am not also sure if the federal or state government got anything in form of royalty or revenue from the mining activities that lasted many years. I am yet to see a single benefit the government recorded from all that happened which incidentally, and regrettably let to the loss of hundreds of lives and destruction of farmlands. All that was as a result of the failure of government to do what it supposed to have done,” he said.
Alhaji Danmaliki said though most of the illegal miners who are from the state are happy that they made some money from the illegal mining activity, the damage they have done to the environment by digging several unwanted holes and destroying the farmlands will forever remain. He lamented that the previous state administration did nothing to forestall the environmental damage to the state that may likely lead to further environmental disasters. He said rather than government devicing a means of generating revenue from the mining activity, state officials and middlemen only engaged in making their own money.
One of the middlemen who said he relocated from Kano to the state during the gold mining business, Alhaji Salisu Jinjiri, said he bought gold worth N15 million within two months from the state, adding, “I have been in the state for over nine months. I came here with about three million. After supplying the Lebanese in Lagos twice, he gave me an additional N2 million to add to my money and buy more and supply him. I refunded his money after two other supplies. Within three months of supplies, my capital increased from N3 million that I started with to N15 million. We really got a lot from that business.
“I don’t know the number of middlemen in the gold business. No, I have never paid any royalty or tax to any government official there. Zamfara state government does not know how to generate revenue from the miners and those doing business there. Mining activity to the magnitude going on in Zamfara state is capable of providing the state enough to do its budget. I don’t know why the state government is not interested in any revenue coming from the mining activity,” he said.
When this reporter visited the Federal Ministry of Mines and Steel Development in Abuja, an official of the ministry referred him to the Nigerian Geological Survey Agency of the ministry that handles exploration matters. Officials at the agency, however, refused to speak on the matter claiming that as civil servants, they cannot talk to the press. However, documents obtained from the agency indicate that gold production in Nigeria started by 1913 and peaked in the period 1933-1943 when about 1.4 tonnes of gold were produced. The gold production declined during the Second World War period and never recovered as mines were abandoned by mostly colonial companies.
The Nigerian Mining Corporation started exploration for gold in Nigeria in the early 1980s, but failed to be sustained due to lack of funds. The discovery of petroleum and its subsequent domination of the Nigerian economy also contributed to the lack of attention to gold exploration despite the widespread potentials.
Gold in Nigeria is found in alluvial and eluvia places and primary veins from several parts of supracrustal (schist) belts in the northwest and southwest of Nigeria. The most important occurrences are found in the Maru, Anka, Malele, Maradun, Mafara (in present day Zamfara state), Tsohon Birnin Gwari-Kwaga, Gurmana, Bin Yauri, Okolom- Dogondadi and Iperindo areas, all associated with the schist belts of northwest and southwest Nigeria. There are also a number of smaller occurrences beyond these major areas.
“Two old gold mines are most important and are with Maru schist belt. Duki Mine is hosted by a shear zone tranversing a quartzite-schist series, often exploiting the S1 schistosity planes. The mineralization apparently made up of gol- quartz veins, was exploited by past miners for over 1 km of strike length, leaving behind series of collapsed N-S trending workings without any surface exposures of the mineralization. Recent exploration drilling by the Nigerian Mining Corporation have shown the continuity of the gold-quartz- sulphide veins below the old workings. The other old gold vein (Maraba) is a two sub- parallel quartz floats and altered wall rocks are the only indicators of mineralization, as there are no in situ exposures due to intensity of past mining.
“In this area, there are a number of old gold mines, such as Kwali, Jameson, Zuzzurfa and Kuba, hosted by schist belt. Individual veins or reefs seldom exceed 0-5 km of strike length as indicated by the extent of past workings, and are concordant with the host rock foliation. These mineralized wallrocks show metal values in the following range: Cu = 647.5410 ppm, Pb = 7550-22600 ppm. Ag = 1.5-8.6 ppm, and Au = 123-6320 ppb.
“The Malele area is in the extreme southern part of the Maru schist belt. Gold mineralization occur in a NNE trending gold quartz vein series cutting both biotitegneiss and chlorite, now represented by a series of sub- parallel syrface workings (pits, trenches and water ponds) with the vein exposures seldom observed. The mineralization was discovered in 1934 with the most prominent of the veins being 15 m thick, 370 m long and a grade of about.
“During the period between May 2006 and October 2007, the Nigeria Geological Survey Agency (NGSA), embarked on commodity exploration and assessment projects. A key commodity given priority in exploration consideration during the period was gold. The six states in which there was either insufficient or no information but with geological setting favoring a successful predictive exploration were targeted. The states are; Cross- River, Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara, Niger and Oyo,” the document reads in part.
Sunday Trust investigation at the agency revealed that gold mineralization in Nigeria appears to be controlled by deep curvilinear features seen clearly on satellite images of the earth’s surface area covering the Nigerian terrestrial territory. For one to be a registered miner in Nigeria, he is required to apply for mineral titles with a view to wholly own the mining rights for the gold deposits or partner with existing title holders for detailed exploration as consultants and specialists. On the other hand, one can partner with title holders in a joint venture agreement to explore, mine and market the gold resources of areas of interest.