How much longer must the Niger Delta carry 220 million Nigerians on its back while the mineral wealth of the north is carted away by a handful of big men and their foreign partners? That is not a rhetorical question. It is an arithmetic question, and the arithmetic is an outrage.

Start with what the Delta gives. Crude oil from the creeks of Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta and Akwa Ibom remains the financial spine of the federation, accounting for roughly ninety percent of Nigeria's export earnings and the overwhelming share of the foreign exchange that keeps the naira breathing, the budget funded and the states paid. 

Every federal allocation collected in Sokoto, every security vote spent in Zamfara, every salary paid in Abuja is drawn substantially from oil pumped out of a region that remains polluted, under developed and filled with unemployed youth who live on top of the wealth of the nation and see almost none of it.

Now look at what the north holds, and where it goes. A preliminary survey by the German firm GeoScan valued Nigeria's solid minerals at about 750 billion dollars, and the Minister of Solid Minerals himself called that a conservative estimate. 

Nigeria sits on at least 44 commercially viable minerals including gold, lithium and iron ore. And yet in 2023 the formal mining sector contributed a pathetic 0.72 percent of GDP, 0.28 percent of government revenue and 0.75 percent of exports, with formal output of roughly 401 billion naira, a figure regulators themselves regard as a dramatic undercount of what is actually being dug out of the ground.

Where is the difference going. The House of Representatives Committee on Solid Minerals told us plainly, Nigeria loses about 9 billion dollars every single year to illegal mining, while the treasury collects only a 3 percent royalty from the few licensed operators. Other official estimates put the annual losses as high as 12 billion dollars. 

In the northwest, in Zamfara, Katsina and Kaduna, up to 80 percent of all extraction is unlicensed. NEITI recorded a 90 percent collapse in officially exported mineral tonnage from 2022 to 2023, not because the digging stopped, but because the gold stopped passing through the books. It passes instead through Niger Republic and Togo into the souks of Dubai, mined under the protection of politically connected godfathers working hand in glove with foreign operators, including Chinese firms whose workers have been arrested by the EFCC in Kwara and by police in Zamfara, only for pressure from above to descend on their behalf.

Sit with that comparison for a moment. Nine billion dollars a year in stolen minerals. That is more than the entire annual federal allocation to many groups of northern states combined. 

The north is not poor. The north is being robbed. Its poverty is manufactured by the very men who pose as its leaders and protectors, and the insecurity that burns its villages is the business model, because banditry clears the land, terrorizes the witnesses and guards the pits. The same networks that finance illegal mining finance the gunmen, and the ordinary farmer in Shinkafi and the fisherman in the Kalabari creeks are robbed by one and the same class of protected criminals.

So I say this without diplomatic softening. The DSS knows these men. The Defence Headquarters has published wanted lists with their names on them since November 2022. Foreign courts in Abu Dhabi have convicted the financiers by name and the United States Treasury has sanctioned them, while Abuja wrote polite letters asking for feedback. 

The military should be fighting these criminals with the full weight of the state, not negotiating with them. The DSS should be arresting the godfathers whose files sit in its cabinets, not watching them collect chieftaincy titles. And the Presidency should stop shielding them, because a government that knows the names and does nothing is not a bystander to the theft. It is a partner in it.

The solution is not complicated and I have said it before as part of The Kio Solution. The federal government must take real physical and fiscal control of the mining sector, license it, police it, tax it, and pay the proceeds into the Federation Account so that every state, from Bayelsa to Borno, shares in the mineral wealth of Nigeria exactly as every state today shares in the oil wealth of the Delta. 

If the Delta's oil belongs to all Nigerians, then the north's gold belongs to all Nigerians too, not to a syndicate of big wigs, their Chinese partners and their Dubai bankers. Reform is already showing what honesty can yield, with mining revenue rising from 6 billion naira to 38 billion naira in a single year the moment even modest enforcement began. Imagine what full enforcement would deliver.

I publish these facts so that no Nigerian can say again that we did not know. We know. We are being played by evil men operating with total impunity, and the cost is counted in stolen children, burned villages, a poisoned Delta and a generation without work. A government that will not arrest them, will not freeze their assets and will not try them has made its choice, and in 2027 the Nigerian people must make theirs, peacefully, lawfully and decisively, at the ballot box. Vote out the protectors of the syndicate. Vote in a government that treats the mineral wealth of Nigeria as the inheritance of 220 million people and not the private treasury of a criminal few.

The Delta has paid enough. The north has bled enough. Enough.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kio Amachree writes Letters from Stockholm and he is the Founder and President of Worldview International.