Blood Money: How Nigeria’s Gold Pays the Kidnappers, Arms the Bandits, and Protects the Foreigners Who Dig It

By Kio Amachree
Letters from Stockholm

In April of last year, the Nigerian Air Force bombed the village of Kurebe in Niger State, killing at least fourteen villagers, including minor girls and a woman. The military said it acted on intelligence. What the intelligence apparently missed was this: while Kurebe’s farmers were being buried, Chinese-affiliated miners operating under the licences of two Nigerian companies, Eso Terra Investment Limited and Majelo Global Resources Limited, were plundering minerals in that same axis, and they were doing it by bribing the armed faction of the terror warlord Dogo Gide for access.

Sit with that. The villagers got the bombs. The foreign miners got a receipt.

This is the true architecture of northern Nigeria’s carnage, and the paper trail now runs from the pits of Zamfara to the fortresses of Abuja.

The money first. Nigeria’s own transparency agency, NEITI, puts the loss to illegal mining and gold smuggling at nine billion dollars every year, roughly 13.7 trillion naira. And the country’s officials are no longer pretending it is small men with shovels. The Commissioner of Police for the Federal Capital Territory, Ajao Adewale, said it plainly in August 2025: powerful Nigerians are the primary drivers of these operations, using foreigners merely as fronts, while banditry and terrorism are bankrolled through this criminal network. That is a serving police commissioner describing a terrorist financing scheme run by his country’s elite. In May 2026, Solid Minerals Minister Dele Alake disclosed that more than 327 persons, including foreign nationals allegedly linked to illegal mining and terrorism financing, had been arrested, a disclosure made only after United States lawmakers publicly linked Chinese illegal mining in Nigeria to terror funding.

Now the warlords, by name, because the villagers of Zamfara already know them.

Residents told Daily Trust that the bandit leaders Bello Turji and Ado Alleiro own mining sites across Maru, Bukkuyum, Maradun and Tsafe local governments. In Birnin Magaji, communities entered an agreement with the kingpin Dan Karami giving him control of all mining sites in Gotal and Shamshalle in exchange for being allowed to live. A commander called Damina levied 200 million naira on the village of Mutunji after hearing a local miner had struck gold. The gunrunner Sububu ran gold mining around Bagega alongside arms trafficking and kidnapping logistics until soldiers killed him in September 2024, travelling, tellingly, with 198 escorts. And in Birnin Gwari, the al-Qaeda-linked group Ansaru fought a pitched battle against Dogo Gide’s bandits in 2024, killing the wanted terrorist Mudi and his son, in a war of supremacy over gold mining sites whose product is smuggled into Niger Republic. Investigators across Zamfara, Niger, Kaduna and Kwara have found the same pattern: armed groups use proceeds from illegally mined gold, lithium and tantalum to buy weapons and finance kidnapping and violent operations. Eighteen villages in Dansadau district alone are mined by bandits. The ransom your cousin paid was seeded by the gold under his own village.

Now the question every northern mother should ask: why are the foreigners safe?

Because they pay the killers. The WikkiTimes investigation documented the bribes to Dogo Gide’s faction directly. Reporting by The Times of London found Chinese firms striking security deals with insurgents, with some miners operating as spies for Chinese businesses controlling gold sites. Protection is a line item. The villager has no such budget, so the villager is the product: kidnapped, taxed, displaced so the pits can expand. It is not perfect immunity — four Chinese workers were kidnapped in an attack at Ajata Aboki in Shiroro that killed scores, including security operatives — but the asymmetry is the business model. As the Vice Chairman of the Miners Association of Nigeria told Truth Nigeria, for every Chinese arrested for illegal mining, there are Nigerian politicians and village chiefs behind them.

And when arrests happen, watch what follows. Two Chinese nationals paraded in Bukkuyum in April 2020 were never heard of again. Researchers documented political godfathers pressuring government to free arrested Chinese miners in Zamfara. In Niger State, mining in Shiroro, Munya and Kagara was officially suspended over bandit attacks, yet the governor and cabinet members sat down in September 2023 with the very actors, including Chinese investors, whose operations the suspension targeted. The suspension applied to the law. It did not apply to the money.

Which brings us to the presidency, and here precision cuts deepest. There is no published evidence that any occupant of Aso Rock takes a cut from the pits. What is documented is worse in its own way: six years of a presidential mining task force chaired by the Inspector General of Police, the Chief of Army Staff and the National Security Adviser, and nine billion dollars still departs annually on private jets from Nigerian airstrips. Senator Adams Oshiomhole alleges retired military officers coordinate illegal mining nationwide. Reporting has named former Head of State Abdulsalami Abubakar and former Defence Minister Aliyu Gusau as alleged cartel beneficiaries, allegations both men deserve the chance to answer in a courtroom that never seems to convene. The House of Representatives opened a probe in November 2023. It has gone silent. President Tinubu calls for illegal mining to be treated as an international crime while his own security architecture cannot explain a single godfather prosecution. As Professor Farooq Kperogi wrote, arresting poor artisanal miners while leaving financiers and corrupt officials untouched is judicial theater. The military bombs forests while the mineral money flows. A presidency that can find Kurebe with a fighter jet can find the flight manifests of the gold jets. It chooses not to look.

So let the ledger be read aloud. The gold funds the guns. The guns take the children. The ransoms return to the sponsors. The sponsors sit in Abuja, in barracks, in Government Houses, shielded by the very services sworn to hunt them, while their foreign partners mine under warlord escort. Nigerian blood, as Kperogi put it, converted into foreign profit — with Nigerian hands doing the converting.

The diaspora is assembling this record for jurisdictions where silence has no veto: the EFCC seizure logs, the WikkiTimes documents, the company registries of Eso Terra and Majelo Global, the Dubai gold import data. Under the Isabel Precedent, every naira of it is traceable and every asset it bought is freezable. The warlords will die in forests. Their bankers should answer in court.

Until then, remember Kurebe: fourteen villagers dead by their own air force, and the mine still open.

Kio Amachree is Founder and President of Worldview International, Stockholm.