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By Enyeribe Ejiogu
Long before he went into full time Christian ministry and rising to become the Anglican Archbishop of the Ecclesiastical Province of Southern Sudan, His Grace, Most Rev. Silas Eze Anoruo, was a successful entrepreneur who engaged in mining business in Nigeria and Ghana alongside other enterprises.
His exposure to the mining industry enabled him to appreciate the enormous benefits that can accrue to the Federal and state governments, if genuine patriotic efforts are made to develop the solid minerals subsector in a holistic manner.
In this interview, he makes a clarion call on Southeastern governors to get their act together and take strategic steps to develop the solid minerals sitting under their feet. He said that if they do the needful, the geopolitical zone would witness enormous economic growth with the resultant rapid increase in GDP, job creation and development of the solid minerals value chain.
Prior to going into full time Christian ministry, you were a mining entrepreneur. Tell me about your days in the mining business.
Back in those days, I used to mine tantalum and gemstones. I also got into mining of gold in Gurara in Niger State. After we had made reasonable progress, we brought in equipment from China to expand our operations. That was when the insecurity in Niger State started. The terrorists and jihadists attacked the areas and carted away our washing machines and other equipment. Those machines cost a lot of money. I had gold mining sites in Ghana. But eventually, the Nana people took the mining sites from my company.
How do you feel about the Federal Government’s policy on mining and gold?
I would say, the present administration is putting the right policy framework in place. In the past, it was not controlled by anybody and the Federal Government was losing huge revenue from the royalty that was supposed to be paid to it. But today, I want to tell you, the federal government is 100% in control. We have a set of structures to manage the resources we have. Before, you could see the Chinese in the bush with their money. However, whatever they buy, they take it away with the helicopter.
But illegal mining is taking place…
Yes. We still have illegal miners. As the chief executive officer of Proisa Oil and Solid Minerals Limited, in Ibadan, I brought the illegal miners together, to formalise and legalise what they were doing. I got them to form cooperatives registered by the government. This way, they began to pay royalty to the government and no longer be known as illegal miners. The cooperatives are still functioning.
If you were to meet the Minister of Solid Minerals, what advice would you give him based on your experience in mining?
First, let me tell you a bit about the late former Oyo State Governor Alao Akala. I sat down with him one-on-one and discussed how the state could benefit from solid minerals development. I prepared a very good proposal on how the state government could make about N7 billion monthly from solid minerals.
Instead of them putting me there to assist in making it work, the government chose one northerner and used the proposal to get a loan of N300 million. And was the end of the matter. No project, nothing. I don’t know what they did with it.
Even here in Imo State, where you are interviewing me, we wrote a proposal sent to the state government because Imo State is very rich in solid minerals. For instance, it has vespa, which is used to produce POP (plaster of Paris). We have lithonite here. We have industrial salt in Uturu, where Abia State University is located and also in Ohaji, Imo State. Again, we have bentonite (known locally as nzu) in Imo State. The whole of Mbaise, Ikeduru and several other communities are sitting on bentolite. What people know is that you can rub Nzu on the body when a woman has given birth and it is used by native doctors. The fact is bentonite can give the government more money than crude oil. Bentonite is used for so many.
It’s used for drilling, production of medicines by the pharmaceutical industry worldwide. It is used to make cosmetics, where it serves as base material. Bentonite is used in the textile industry and just as it used is production of ceramics. There are about 15 things you can do with bentonite.
The multiple uses and benefits of bentonite is the primary reason it is well sought for abroad. You see, one tone goes for more than $200. We have more than 600 trillion tonnes spread all over.
We also have bulk clay, which is highly needed to industrialise Imo State. It occurs in large commercial quantities in Amauro and wherever you see sticky, reddish soil. It is used for making burnt bricks and so many other things. We once had a burnt brick industry, which was allowed to fail as a company. Do you understand what I am saying? As an indigene of Imo State and Nigeria, I deeply pained that we are not making any effort to develop these solid minerals.
We have these undeveloped solid minerals and most of our children are not employed. Are you getting what I’m saying?
Then we have talc, commonly known as powder. But it is more than that. If you are going to Okigwe and Enugu, by the side of the expressway, you will see thick, deep, whitish layers of earth running along the road, exposed by construction works; that powdery substance is called talc. It is highly needed for cosmetics, medicine and so many other things. But you see by the side, wasting, and nobody’s talking about it. If you care to explore it a bit, you find that the distance of the deposit is n far. It spreads from Imo State to Ebonyi State.
Further, we have dolomite, another solid mineral used for making medicines. It usually occurs with limestone. So, we have limestone and dolomite. Every tablet of paracetamol is made with dolomite. It is used for so many things. This dolomite has calcite. As I said earlier, dolomite occurs with limestone. You cannot make cement without dolomite. That’s why anywhere you are mining dolomite, there are pharmaceutical crushers – you can see more than 1,000 crushers, because it’s whitish.
Now, if you are talking about limestone, the only thing we use to make is cement. But we are wasting the whole limestone because we can extract other things like hydrated lime. This hydrated lime will give you money, more than the limestone, because it’s a chemical that different industries in the whole world need, and you know that lime is used for water purification and so many other things.
We have limestone in Okigwe, Imo State, but nobody has tapped it. The state government is just sleeping on this resource, which lies under our feet, undeveloped and un-utilised.
Now turn your attention to Owerri, the Imo State capital, we have glassy sand, which is called calcite. Sadly, we are selling the glassy sand cheap, only for building and wasting it. We are wasting it. Every glass or vehicle windscreen is made from glassy sand.
And God gave us the sand but we are only using it to build houses. One tonne of glassy sand goes for $150. Now, imagine a truckload of 30 tonnes of glassy sand at $150 per tonne. That is about $4500. When converted to Naira at N1700, that will give N7,650,000. Now this is what is sold at just N120,000 for building houses. Do you know that the glassy sand is crushed and sent abroad when it is refined?
There is no local government that is not blessed. When my water borehole was being drilled, I saw heaps of quartz. We have a lot of quartz for jewellery. If I want to do the excavation, I can start anywhere in my compound and turn it into a mining site. So, if you are looking at the states that have solid minerals, they don’t put Imo State in number one or two. They look at the Northern parts of the country.
Could that be attributed to the fact that we have not communicated enough about what we have?
No. You know that when the geological survey was done in the 1940s, they did not find much because the right equipment was not available at the time. So, we are asking the government to help us, to get us modern equipment. We now have the right equipment for the kind of geological survey that needs to be done, to determine the depth of the deposits and the spread. In essence, we are calling on the state government to redo the geological survey. These equipment are very expensive for just one person to afford. Sadly, we are still working with the geological survey done in the 1940s.
Again, I must call on the government to stop putting the wrong people in office. I remember that when I
In the proposal I made for Oyo, just from billing trucks, the money would have been more than enough to maintain the road used by the trucks. Reclaiming the land was part of our proposal so that the money we get from them, even if they don’t reclaim it, we can reclaim it ourselves, and still have surplus. There are several ways of making money from solid minerals. But they are just focusing on one-way traffic.
