In Nigeria’s lithium boom, many mines are illegal and children do much of the work
NASARAWA, Nigeria — Wearing a faded pink dress, Juliet Samaniya, 6, crouches under a scorching sky to carve a jagged white rock with a stone tool. Dust covers her small hands and hair as she works hour after hour for less than a dollar a day. The landscape around it is dotted with active and abandoned mine shafts, farmland that may soon be cleared in search of richer ore, and other miners, many of them children.
Juliette should be at school, admits her mother, Abigail Samaniya. Instead, she spends her day mining lithium, a mineral essential for batteries needed for the world’s transition to clean energy, to earn money that helps support her family.
“It’s the only option,” Abigail Samaniya said.
THE International Labor Organization estimates that more than a million children work in mines and quarries worldwide, a problem particularly acute in Africawhere poverty, limited access to education and weak regulations compound the problem. Children, working mainly in small-scale mines, work long hours on hazardous sites, crushing or sorting rocks, carrying heavy loads of ore and expose oneself Toxic dust that can cause respiratory problems and asthma.
The growing demand for lithium has created a new frontier for mining in mineral-rich Nigeria. But this has come at a high cost, because she exploits the poorest and most vulnerable: her children. Their work often provides material for Chinese companies that dominate Nigeria’s lax extractive industry and are often accused of illegal mining and labor exploitation.
The Associated Press recently traveled deep into the Pasali bush, near the federal capital of Abuja, in Nasarawa state, to track and interview miners operating illegal mines, including the one where Juliet works. AP also witnessed negotiations and an agreement to purchase lithium by a Chinese company without any questions about the source of the lithium or how it was obtained.
This company, RSIN Nigeria Limiteddid not respond to repeated requests for comment. But in a statement to AP, the Chinese embassy in Abuja said Chinese mining companies in Nigeria “operate in accordance with local laws and regulations.”
Nigeria has laws requiring basic education and prohibiting child labor, but enforcement is a challenge due to many illegal mines located in hard-to-reach areas. Corruption among regulators and law enforcement officials is also a problem. The government has said it is pursuing reforms aimed at toughening laws. Earlier this year, it also launched a “mining commissioners corps” to combat illegal mining, but campaigners say it is too early to say whether the scheme is helpful.
Lithium mining began in Pasali a decade ago, transforming an isolated, sleepy community into a bustling site of illegal, small-scale mining, said Shedrack Bala, a 25-year-old who started working in the mines at the age of 15 and who now owns his own. ditch. Dozens of mines now dot the region, all without permits.
Mining methods are primitive and dangerous. Miners use chisels and heavy hammers to drill through the rocks, descending several meters into dark pits. In some old but still viable mines, they crawl through narrow passages winding between unstable mud walls before beginning to dig. For new mines, the ground is opened with dynamite.
Bashir Rabiu, now 19 years old, started in these pits as a miner. AP journalists saw him writhing at the bottom of a pit, where miners may be at risk if the dynamite explodes prematurely. They also risk suffocating in the narrow tunnels that connect the pits, or being buried when the walls collapse – all fates Rabiu has seen happen to other miners.
“But it is God who protects,” he said.
Rabiu transported raw lithium ore and passed it to Juliet and five other children, all under the age of 10. Wearing rubber slippers and dust-stained shorts and shirts, the children bent over piles of rubble and tore them apart with crude stone tools to extract precious fragments. . Once sorted, the minerals were bagged to begin their journey from Pasali to the global supply chain.
A team of six children can sort and package up to 10 25-kilogram bags of lithium-rich rock per day. During the AP’s visit, they weighed 22 kilograms (about 48.5 pounds) in an hour. To work from early morning until late at night, children typically split 4,000 naira (about $2.42), according to Bala and others who use them. They said it was enough money to cover meals in children’s homes.
In Juliette’s group, only she and a 5-year-old boy named Zakaria Danladi had attended the local primary school. Zakaria stopped when he became an orphan. Juliet was removed because her family couldn’t afford to send her and her 11-year-old brother and her education took priority, her mother said.
Basic education is supposed to be free in Nigeria, at least in public schools like Pasali’s. But hidden fees often put it out of reach for poorer families. For example, in Pasali, a parent-teacher association fee of 5,000 naira (about $3) is charged per term, parents said. For Juliette’s family and others, even this amount is too high. About 63% of the Nigerian population lives in poverty.
Sule Dantini, the schoolmaster, said his classes had become virtually empty with only three students present when he spoke to AP in early December. “Before, I had up to 300 students, but attendance is very low because of mining. » He denied the tuition fees.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, but it also has significant mineral resources, including granite, limestone and gold, and it seeks to exploit them to reduce its dependence on oil exports. Yet much of this wealth – including lithium – is siphoned off by unlicensed mines that cost the nation billions of dollars and fuel insecurity, according to a parliamentary inquiry This year.
Illegal mining thrives on informal networks of buyers and sellers who operate without much fear of the government. Aliyu Ibrahim, a lithium merchant in Nasarawa, owns mines without permits and also buys lithium ore from other illegal sites. In his warehouse, he told AP his business thrived by paying officials to look the other way. Ibrahim said he then sells his lithium in bulk to Chinese companies.
Ibrahim said he knew children worked in his mines and those from which he sourced, but added that many of them were orphans or poor.
“It’s dangerous, but the work helps them survive, while the government has abandoned the poor,” he said.
Some bush miners avoid middlemen like Ibrahim and sell directly to Chinese companies or Chinese nationals.
AP accompanied the miners from the illegal Pasali mines to the Chinese company RSIN Nigeria Limited, where a sales agreement was reached without asking questions about the source of the minerals or the conditions under which they were extracted. Sellers were asked to leave samples to test for lithium content. A price list from buyers offered 200,000 naira (about $119) for a ton of minerals containing up to 3 percent lithium.
Chinese citizens and businesses are often in the spotlight for environmentally harmful practices, abusive labor and illicit mining activities in several countries. Nigeria saw several cases arrests and prosecutions linked to illegal mining activities involving Chinese nationals in recent months. Experts say the materials are exported in a variety of ways, including shipping them with false documents or hiding them in legitimate shipments.
The Chinese Embassy’s statement to the AP said its government has a zero-tolerance policy toward any illegal mining activity or illegal work by Chinese companies operating overseas.
Philip Jakpor, a Nigerian activist, said his nonprofit Renevlyn Development Initiative has documented widespread child labor practices in Nasarawa State.
“Revenue generation seems to have taken precedence over the need to protect human rights,” Jakpor said. “We expect those operating at higher levels of the supply chain to adopt responsible models that avoid exploitative conditions in mining. »
Juliane Kippenberg, deputy children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch, said global demand for lithium is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years and it is imperative that governments protect human rights and make pressure on businesses to do the same.
Segun Tomori, spokesperson for the Ministry of Mines and Solid Minerals Development, said ongoing reforms, such as amending the Minerals and Mining Act, aim to minimize the use of child labor. Tomori also said social safety net programs such as school feeding initiatives are being revamped to keep children in school and combat child labor. He also cited the program to add mining commissioners announced this year to combat illegal mining.
Abigail Samaniya, the mother of 6-year-old Juliet, said she hoped her daughter would one day escape the mine.
“I still want her to go to school, to have a better life, to work in an office, not in a mine forever,” she said.
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