Mohammed Nasir, Gusau.
Mining in Zamfara State is an age-long occupation. That has been the source of livelihood and a way of life for generations. It has brought riches, wealth and prosperity for many.
In times past, there was hardly a family or a town in the state that was without a miner of some sort. Unlicensed though, the people dig up this wealth of nature, reconstitute it to suit their purposes and turn it to pure gold and precious stones.
But of late, the irony of natural resources has crept in. Instead of the prospects of abundance, the people are in tears, pains and grief, dying daily to the brigandage that has overwhelmed the land and its security arrangements.
The state has been transformed into a vast killing field where the number of death by killer bandits is becoming uncountable. There is hardly a week without a cast of violence spat by the agents of death. The headlines have since shifted to state while the gold of the state has been dented and turned into blood.
Alhaji Audu Abubakar, a resident, told Daily Sun of his first experience about nine years ago, during the outbreak of lead poisoning in Dereta, Yargalma and Bagega villages. He said in June 2010, another outbreak of lead poisoning in Anka and Bukkuyum local government areas claimed the lives of over 163 children:
“The state witnessed another outbreak in 2012. This time, the tragedy happened in Gusau Local Government Area but was not as devastating as the first one. Less than 10 lives were loss before it was contained.”
Statistics indicate that these deaths were as a result of the unchecked activities of illegal miners in the state, who turned their homes into gold mining processing sites. Apart from calamities caused by the unprofessional conduct of illegal gold miners, the present tragedy was the handiwork of criminals, who destroyed and killed their victims under the different shades of excuses.
At the present, the state has one of most notorious records of death by armed bandits, who could take on an entire community and wipe out as many people as possible. Anti-gold processing campaigners associated these crimes with the activities of gold miners. They insisted that the government must be drastic in its response to find an enduring solution to the problem.
Only recently, the Federal Government responded to this challenge, placing a ban on mining of the natural resources in the state. The decision, according to the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Muhammad Adamu, was to stem the flow of blood occasioned by the activities illegal gold miners.
He described the miners as collaborating with the bandits terrorising the people: “Therefore, the ban on mining activities is a proactive measure to stop the gold miners and their collaborators from carrying out further damages in the state.”
Former governor Abdul’Aziz Yari Abubakar lauded the ban, which he said would help in tackling the wave of insecurity in the state. He observed that despite the fact that mining sites are closer to the bandits’ suspected hideouts, the miners are not being touched by the bandits: “The decision is a good one because these miners are just exploiting our resources without any commensurate benefits, accruing to the state or Federal Government.”
However, some miners faulted the ban, describing the policy as anti-development in nature. They held that the state and the Federal Government ought to have provided an alternative source of livelihood for the miners before implementing the ban.
The miners held that linking their trade to banditry denotes the highest level of insincerity by the Federal Government as over150 miners in the state have been killed or kidnapped by the bandits in the last three years.
They recalled that in a recent attack on a mining site in Bindin village in Maru Local Government Area, 48 miners were killed in a broad daylight, adding that the same fate befell them on Horo mining site in Anka Local Government Area and in Dareta village where 32 and 13 miners were killed respectively.
A manager with one of the licensed mining sites, who did not want his name mentioned, decried the decision of the Federal Government: “It is unfair to de-licence miners because they secured all legal documents to operate. This ban is not fair to us because we too are being attacked by the bandits, so it is very wrong to tag us as abettors or collaborators. It is just like giving a dog a bad name to hang it.”
Abubakar said banning mining activities without providing an alternative for him and others like him, is like turning them into liability to the society: “Our prayers and hope is for this banditry going on in the state to end so that we will not die of starvation because of this ban by the government.”