‘We Have No Other Work’: Miners Return to Niger Site After 37 Die in Custody

MINNA — “We are ready to die here.”

The words sound like defiance. But behind them is something darker.

Teenage and adult miners have returned to the M.I. Wushishi mining site in Niger State even as authorities continue the investigation into the deaths of 37 people arrested during an operation against suspected illegal mining.

Some of the miners said they had returned because mining was their only source of income.

Witnesses saw boys, women and adults working with shovels, picks and other hand tools at the site. The return is striking because the mining crackdown has already produced a tragedy that has shaken Minna.

The 37 detainees died while in the custody of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps after arrests around mining sites.

The exact cause of death remains under investigation.

Authorities initially pointed to a possible disease outbreak, while survivors and families have raised allegations involving severe overcrowding, poor ventilation and mistreatment.

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President Bola Tinubu ordered an investigation and suspended senior NSCDC officials following the deaths. But enforcement alone does not answer the question confronting the miners who returned.

What happens to a family when the mine is its only income?

That is the uncomfortable part of the Niger mining crisis.Illegal mining can create serious security and environmental problems.

But poverty can also make a dangerous mine look like the only available workplace.

Among those returning are children. And that means the crisis is no longer only about illegal mining. It is also about child labour, education, poverty and the absence of safer livelihoods.

The International Labour Organisation has previously documented children working in Nigeria’s artisanal gold-mining communities, including in Niger State.

Its research identified children exposed to dangerous work while poverty and weak access to education pushed families towards mining. That makes the latest images from Wushishi especially painful.

A child holding a shovel in a gold pit is not simply a picture of a young worker.It is a picture of a childhood being exchanged for survival.

The deaths of 37 people in custody have also exposed the human cost that can follow when enforcement becomes disconnected from the conditions that created the problem.

The answer cannot be to romanticise illegal mining. Nor can it be to pretend that arrests alone will remove children and poor families from dangerous pits.

Nigeria’s challenge is to enforce mining laws while creating realistic alternatives for communities that depend on mining.

Otherwise, the same cycle can continue.The authorities may close one pit. Another may open. And another child may pick up a shovel. ValidViewNetwork reports.