Zamfara lead poisoning:The Chinese connection
He has lost a child to the lead contamination which has built up in the village over time from gold processing activity poisoning the soil within and outside the home where the children play. The death of close to three hundred children combined together from fatality cases in the lead poisoning in the villages of […]
He has lost a child to the lead contamination which has built up in the village over time from gold processing activity poisoning the soil within and outside the home where the children play. The death of close to three hundred children combined together from fatality cases in the lead poisoning in the villages of Yargalmal, Dareta, Tungar Daji, Sunke and Abare has drawn local and international attention with the federal government reiterating its often-stated warning that the mining done by the villagers is done illegally and is to be stopped. But for Azage there is no stopping him in the trade of mining, even if the federal government says he is breaking the law. He told Weekly Trust: “If we leave this job we have no means of livelihood. How do we survive?”
This is the big question hovering in the air, not only in the village of Yargalmal where poor villagers risk their lives to excavate gold without equipment except for shovels, diggers, ropes and lamps but also in the Zamfara State capital, Gusau where dealers in gold rely on local miners to fuel their trade. Traditional rulers in the villages where the illegal mining is done are also jittery about the security implication should the youths in the villages wake up one morning and realize that the lucrative trade in gold is no more.
“I remember when we went to talk to the youths in the village about the federal government’s directive on illegal mining,” says Alhaji Muhammad Usman, the Sarkin Dankon Bukkuyum, who is the traditional ruler overseeing the local government area and its villages. “They told us if we ban them from mining, we will leave them with no option but to resort to armed robbery on the highway because they have no other viable means of livelihood they could depend on. The youths are more than 500 in number.”
Just after one leaves Gusau and gets to Anka (another Local Government Area where illegal mining is thriving) a trip to the barely passable road to Bukkuyyum is tortuous and frustrating. A journey which in good conditions couldn’t have been more than a mere thirty minute’s drive, stretches over two hours. Hardly any vehicle passes on these roads where the only houses are mostly made from mud and the villages are sleepy with little indicating that any sort of economic activity is going on. It is a total contrast with most northern Nigerian roads where small buses, salon cars and trucks ply the roads with goods to meet consumer demands. Also absent are the busy roadside grain mills that indicate a viable farming activity; the mills are silent. The tractors working the farms are few and the villagers rely mostly on camels and cows to plough the fields. Robberies, mostly perpetrated by herders and farmers, are a common occurrence. The bad road also serves as the route where gold ore from illegal mines are transported to the villages for processing. The terrain alone where bush paths have been created as a result of the poor state of the road puts a huge question mark on any suggestion that the police can be able to monitor and stop the illegal mining going on.
“Poverty has everything to do with illegal mining,” says Sarkin Dankon Bukkuyyum. “If you see how they go about the mining, even you too will feel sorry for them. If they farm in a year with all their strength, they would be lucky to get N50, 000, but in two hours if they are lucky they are able to make gold finds that are worth N300,000 to N400,000. So tell me how you intend to stop them.” While there is a lull in the mining going on in the villages, the miners say they are only waiting because the rain has flooded the mines. And while the Blacksmith Institute of New York is busy cleaning up their villages of lead contamination, they are waiting with the hope that another mine they would excavate would be free from lead ores.
Dealers join the fray
They are not the only ones waiting. The dealers in Gusau who buy the gold from the miners in the villages, acting as middle men for its onward transportation to much bigger dealers in the chain are also waiting for the return of business which has slowed since the outbreak of lead poisoning in the villages as a result of the illegal mining going on. Sa’adu Maizinari, a gold dealer in Gusau is not happy about what he sees as a threat to their business. He says bitterly: “The federal government keeps harping on about illegal mining. But it is from illegal mining that you get legal mining because if the labourers do not go to the bush to dig for these minerals, the federal government doesn’t usually know of their existence.”
Maizinari’s bitterness with the federal government extends further, specifically on registration. “Our biggest problem is any time we go to Abuja to register for an area to mine the officials tell us the license for the area has been granted to another company. But the companies that they say have been granted such license don’t come to the area to mine these minerals, so we simply take it over.”
At the height of the recent lead poisoning saga in the villages when top government officials paid a visit to condole with the villagers, the Sarkin Dankon Bukkuyyum says he posed a challenge to the Minister for Mines and Steel, Mohammed Musa Sada when he came to him brandishing papers saying that the mining done in the villages is illegal. He says: “I challenged him to expedite the process of granting license to big companies who will employ the miners in the village to work for them. If they employ them at least the companies would pay them wages for their labour and take care of their health in addition to providing them with better equipment and expertise that would make mining in these areas safe. This is better than the current situation where they have failed to grant license to people who could come to mine these ores and are banning the villagers from exploiting the minerals when they have no better means of livelihood.”
The villagers don’t only have the dangers associated with using crude methods of mining to cope with, they also have to embrace their bad luck sometimes when after putting in so much painful labour to extract the ores they get nothing out of it. “Our method is usually based on trial and error,” says Maizinari. “The miners incur heavy losses sometimes. Sometimes when they have a truck full of rock and sand deposits, they don’t get mineral deposit worth N20, 000 from it, whereas the expenses involved in the excavation work and everything they put in is above N100, 000. So the gains are not guaranteed, you gain and you lose just like every other business.”
Even though the extraction of the gold is done crudely, the dealers are learning to be sophisticated about how they sell the gold they get by regularly tuning in to CNN and Aljazeera to know what the going rate for gold is in the international market so they should not be cheated with lower pays by the bigger dealers in the cities of Kano, Zaria and Kaduna with whom they do business with.
Enter the ‘Dragon’
While Anka and Bukuyyum Local Government Areas of Zamfara State are the ones most often mentioned in connection with the illegal mining in gold because of the tragedy that took place in the villages there, the illegal mining in gold is a wide activity that covers the whole of Zamfara State. While in Anka and Bukkuyyum villagers rely on crude equipment to excavate gold, in Maradun Local Government Area the equipment in use are sophisticated machinery. The machines are not used by some villagers who just got lucky but by Chinese illegal miners who are displacing the locals. The Chinese miners have set up structures with satellite dishes and have heavy duty trucks that could withstand the toughness of the terrain. The presence of the Chinese is like a second chapter in a saga that shows a government that couldn’t care less about the resources that belongs to it and how to exploit it for the betterment of the lives of its people.
Even though their work is illegal, the Chinese work undisturbed because they seem to enjoy the support and patronage of the Emir of Maradun, Alhaji Garba Tambari, in whose farm the processing and washing of the gold ores mined by the Chinese takes place. Villagers in Maradun say the Chinese came stealthily, offering them money ranging from N100, 000 to N150, 000 to acquire each of their farmlands. They thought they were getting a very good bargain and this way the Chinese miners were able to acquire 12 farmlands from them. They started regretting the sale of their farmlands when they realized that the Chinese were excavating gold from the soils there.
Efforts by Weekly Trust to get the Chinese to speak was not successful even though some of the Nigerians working with them were willing to act as interpreters. When Weekly Trust tried to get access to the Emir, it proved impossible. Locals are afraid to say too much about what they know because they don’t want to run into trouble. But it is well-known to government officials in the state ministry of environment that the Chinese are illegal miners working under the umbrella of the Emir. The mining done here is better organized with sophisticated machines been deployed.
The area where the Chinese carry out the processing and washing of the gold is at the bank of River Bakori. Just some hundreds of metres downriver, the dirt from the ore washed by the Chinese mixes with the water and floats down to a point where the local government has set up a pumping machine which pumps water from the river to a surface reservoir from which the villagers source their drinking water. Apparently, the sophisticated nature of the mining done by the Chinese has not made them mindful of the implication of their activity there to the health of the locals.
More exploiters join the gold rush
Two months ago when the Zamfara State governor, Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi invited President Goodluck Jonathan to commission a solid minerals processing factory, the Integrated Solid Minerals Processing Factory of Zamfara State it was like fresh air coming after the long suffocating odour that has been emanating from the mineral exploitation in the state. It was the only interest by any government of any kind in the state, whether federal, state or local government to take any interest in the mining going on.
The Federal Ministry of Mines and Steel is putting the blame on the Zamfara State government for failing to stop the illegal mining going on in the state. Another chapter to this saga is likely to unfold soon should the federal government decide to deploy more policemen to the villages to enforce its ban on mining. The Sarkin Dankon Bukkuyyum said: “Whenever the villagers find an opening, they would continue to do mining illegally. The federal government is supposed to take the initiative in mining these ores because any mineral resources found in the land by law belongs to the federal government. But it has not done so and has failed to grant license to those who could do so. Meanwhile the poor villagers are seeing wealth very close to them. Even if you threaten them with death it would not deter them, because to them they have found a means of survival.” In Zamfara, it is now the survival of the fittest. Who wins?