The Paradox Of Mining As A Lucrative Business And The Minister Of Mining As “Non Juicy”

The Paradox Of Mining As A Lucrative Business And The Minister Of Mining As “Non Juicy”

By Bagudu Mohammed

The Nigerian nation is once again engulfed by the tragic news of the death of 57 so-called illegal miners, 37 of them allegedly dying in the custody of the Civil Defence in Niger State after arrest, and another 20 perishing in an underground pit collapse in Taraba State.

The grim figures provoke a chilling irony that has refused to leave my mind, and it is an irony that captures the entire contradiction of the Nigerian state.

While local mining is quietly emerging as one of the most lucrative businesses in Nigeria, sustaining millions of livelihoods, give a man the portfolio of Minister or Commissioner for Mining and his own townspeople will ask in pity, what did you do to Tinubu that he gave you that ministry, is it not a non-juicy one, did you offend him?

Suddenly you stop hearing the name of that minister or commissioner, not because he is humble, but because his ministry has been branded dead, not juicy, not lucrative.

Yet the reality on the ground tells a completely different, thrilling, and almost cinematic story. Millions of citizens are living, feeding, and building futures directly on local mining and its related value chain, creating an entire informal economy of diggers, washers, transporters, middlemen, gold buyers, and food vendors that has become the largest employer in many rural corridors.

This is precisely what Dr. Ibraheem Dooba has rightly argued, that this chaotic energy can be institutionalized, that these local miners can be trained, formalized, licensed, and turned into a cooperative industrial army, and that the minerals they chase daily, whose reserves and sheer size we barely even understand, can be mapped, quantified and harnessed.

The paradox is thus fascinating, there is grinding poverty in the land, there is crippling unemployment, there is hunger for opportunity, yet we are comfortable to call only ready-made revenue agencies like Finance, Customs, NNPCL and Marine and Blue Economy as juicy while despising the very ministry that requires a little vision, a little work and a little investment to harvest tomorrow’s fortune as a dead ministry.

This mindset is a classic symptom of what economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner famously termed the resource curse, and what political economist Terry Lynn Karl called the paradox of plenty, where a state obsessed with rent collection from FAAC allocation loses its entrepreneurial imagination.

Research by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative has repeatedly shown that solid minerals contribute less than one percent to GDP, not because Nigeria lacks minerals, but because the state has refused to govern the sector, leaving it to informality. Global findings from the World Bank on artisanal and small-scale mining reveal that formalization in countries like Rwanda and Ghana increased revenue by over 300 percent and cut fatalities by more than half, because training and simple safety equipment were introduced.

Nigeria has one of the world’s most promising lithium deposits, a mineral that Goldman Sachs has described as the new oil and white gold, capable of powering the global energy transition, yet we are too fixated on food that is already ready, on allocation that comes monthly, to take any enterprise that demands future gains seriously.

The same illegal mining that we dismiss is now at the heart of our national insecurity, and this is where the story becomes even more thrilling and dangerous. Scholarly work by the late Professor Isaac Olawale Albert on conflict economy and recent security mapping by SBM Intelligence have shown how foreign nationals, shadowy corporations and influential local protectors are allegedly fueling displacement of communities to create ungoverned mining enclaves, destroying farmlands in the process, which in turn triggers farmer-herder clashes, banditry and a cycle of loss that the state can no longer contain.

We are told we have lithium, gold, tantalite and rare earths in commercial quantities, treasures that could bail out a country in fiscal distress, but we treat them like sand.

While I deeply sympathize with the victims of these recent tragedies, the narratives around their deaths deserve a more penetrating interrogation. Various accounts suggest some may have died from inhaling poisonous gases from poorly ventilated pits, judging by the symptoms observed, while others point to possible torture or overkill by custodians of the prison where 37 died not in the mining site but under custody.

The convenient narrative of government negligence as the sole reason local mining flourishes obscures a darker truth, that sometimes it is not government inaction but government action, its direct participation in the proceeds, its collusion and its brutal overkill, that sustains illegality.

A state that looks the other way to chase Customs, NNPCL and Marine as the only juicy sectors that matter, while solid minerals are not appealing, will never lack jobs to create, but it will lack the will to create them, even when the informal mining boom is screaming with both gains and threats and insecurity right in front of it.

Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575