The Great Northern Heist: Who Is Mining Nigeria’s Gold and Lithium, and Why Nobody Wants You to Know
By Kio Amachree
Letters from Stockholm
STOCKHOLM — Beneath the red earth of northern Nigeria lies a fortune that would make the oil delta blush. Gold in Zamfara and Kebbi. Lithium — the white gold of the electric age — stretched across Kaduna, Nasarawa, Niger and Kwara. An estimated 700 billion dollars in commercially viable minerals, enough to rebuild every school, every hospital, every road in the federation.
So ask a simple question: who is digging it out, and where is the money going?
The answer, pieced together from mining records, investigative reports and government disclosures, reads like a heist executed in plain sight.
Start with the names that are known. Chinese companies including Jiuling Lithium and Canmax Technologies have committed more than 1.3 billion dollars toward processing facilities, including in Kaduna State. Canmax — whose founder made his fortune as an investor in CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker — is investing over 200 million dollars to develop two lithium deposits in northern Nigeria with a local partner, Three Crown Mines Ltd. According to sources in the Solid Minerals Ministry, Chinese-led firms have secured a dominant presence in the North Central region, which holds over 70 percent of the nation’s proven lithium reserves — while few Nigerian investors have any stake in the boom at all. On the Western flank, UK-based Jupiter Lithium and US-based ReElement Technologies have commenced exploitation across 442 square kilometres of lithium-rich terrain, set to become Nigeria’s first large-scale lithium mine.
That is the legal ledger. The shadow ledger is darker.
An estimated 80 percent of mining in the North West is carried out illegally. And when researchers followed the money, they found something the government would prefer buried deeper than the ore itself: criminal collaboration between Nigerians in high positions of authority and Chinese corporations in the illegal mining of gold drives rural banditry and violent local conflicts.
Read that again. The banditry that has emptied villages, closed schools and turned Zamfara into a war zone is not separate from the mining. It is the business model. The sponsors of illegal mining are protected by some state governments and act as if they are above the law. Political godfathers have pressured the government to free Chinese nationals arrested for illegal mining in Zamfara. Reporting by The Times found Chinese firms striking security deals with insurgents, with some miners operating as spies for Chinese businesses controlling gold-mining sites.
The state knows. A joint NEITI and ANEEJ report found that Nigeria loses vast mineral revenue to illegal trading networks dominated by foreign buyers, shell companies and armed criminal groups — with Chinese actors exerting disproportionate influence over pricing and export channels. More than 327 persons, including foreign nationals allegedly linked to illegal mining and terrorism financing, have been arrested — a disclosure made only after United States lawmakers publicly linked illegal Chinese mining in Nigeria to the funding of terrorism.
And why the secrecy? Because transparency would name names. When journalists asked Nigeria’s federal mines ministry basic questions about a major lithium acquisition, the ministry did not respond. The companies declined to comment. The minerals leave through false documentation or concealment within legitimate cargo. A country that publishes every barrel of oil cannot tell you how many ounces of gold left Zamfara last year. That is not an accident of capacity. It is a design of convenience.
Here is the pattern this column has documented for years, from Lagos to London to the British Virgin Islands: opacity is never neutral. Where the books are closed, the beneficiaries sit inside the state. The villagers of Bukkuyum are terrorized so that the ledgers stay blank. The gold funds the guns; the guns clear the land; the land yields more gold. And somewhere far from the pits — in Abuja, in Shenzhen, in discreet accounts across three continents — the proceeds settle quietly into place.
The diaspora is watching. The FATF is watching. And as this column has warned before, under the Isabel Precedent, assets built on plundered resources do not stay hidden forever.
Northern Nigeria is not poor. It is being robbed. The only question is how long Nigerians will accept that the names of the robbers are a state secret.
Kio Amachree is Founder and President of Worldview International, Stockholm.
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