Provincial towns and villages are littered with machines of the Chinese exploring and exploiting Sierra Leone’s mineral wealth sometimes without licences and royalties.
Their thirst for minerals is hardly quenched evidenced by a ceaseless search for natural resources especially Gold, Diamond, Chromite, Titanium, Rutile sometimes in reserved forest. In most communities, they have it hot with the locals who tend to protect and conserve their forest from exploration and exploitation.
However, in connivance with some clueless and unwary villagers, they deploy into deep forest to extract the mineral resources which are largely unaccounted for by state bodies.
Almost ten years ago, the illegal mining carried out by a group of Chinese was detected in the thick forest of Baomahun town in Valunia Chiefdom, several kilometres away from Bo city Southern Sierra Leone.
For years, the Chinese have been exploiting minerals there unchecked. One of their employees, Thomas Wai, not his real name, was compensated with the machines after the Chinese left their community. Row as to who should be in control of the machines landed them in the police net, but the Chinese miners had already left.
“The Chinese entrusted the machines to me for care and nothing else,” Wai told the police while others contradicted him saying he was not the trustee. Accounts from other sources held that the machines were abandoned in a thick forest between Baomahun and Lablama vilages and that anyone could take control of them. The Conflict among the villagers went on for months before it died down.
Once in the villages, the Chinese guys would employ the village youth who they pay pittance to help them ply their secret trade.
In remote communities badly wrecked by abject poverty, such jobs are highly lucrative and the youth are ready to betray state authorities for their own survival. The trend however seemingly changed a bit following the declaration of Julius Maada Bio President of Sierra Leone in April, 2018.
Bent on blocking leakages, the new government, looked at many areas especially the mining sector from which it hoped to derive much of its funds especially foreign exchange. Bio’s government was looking out for serious investors who will meaningfully contribute to national development. It was a manifesto commitment that must be fulfilled, and going after rogue investors is a government priority.
On several occasions, the Chinese fell victim of police raids and many found themselves in police cells as they mine without licences and royalties.
The act puts the country at a loss as government is deprived of money badly needed to provide essential services to the country. If the Chinese register any business and pays licences or royalties to government, they take it back in the form of pittances and not remittances.
They pay little wages to locals as a way of taking back their money while they pay huge sums to the Chinese expatriates creating a huge salary gap between the local employees and the foreigners. The money paid to the expatriates will be ploughed back to Chinese coffers as part of the GDP.
Mining without licence is bad but worse when the looted wealth is not processed here. The export of raw minerals to China instead of opening factories here is one of the biggest debates among Sierra Leoneans at the moment. The people of Sierra Leone have longed for a long time to see their minerals processed here.
Why can’t the Chinese build factories here in Sierra Leone to transform the raw minerals into finished goods remains one of the most critical questions?
Several African countries have tapped great benefits from serious investors who construct factories for the transformation of raw minerals into finished goods.
Benin is one those African countries whose cotton has been translated into finished and useable goods by a company known as Arise Integrated Industrial Platforms.
Owing to the wave of industrialisation, Benin is today one of the world’s largest exporter of cotton to the world market getting enough foreign exchange earnings from their export.
Sierra Leone is yet to benefit from such serious investment as the Chinese are yet to develop any plan to have their factories built here.
If they have any such plan, it would take years before it would materialise. The Chinese got a strong grip on the mineral wealth years back after key mining companies went out of business after Ebola struck in May, 2014. The Iron ore miners, London Mining Company (LMC) and African Minerals Limited (AML) went out of business in Sierra Leone when Iron Ore price considerably fell at the world market.
Sierra Leone government saw the Ebola outbreak and the fall of Iron ore price as dangerous twin shocks and the Chinese became the only people government could turn to for the exploitation of the mineral wealth.
In the Absence of LMC and AML, Chinese companies took over the mining sector using the rail, road and port facilities already constructed by the defunct Iron ore miners.
Investigation previously carried out by this press showed that government benefitted little from the use of such facilities thereby depriving the country of much-needed revenue.
The Chinese companies always have it hot with government when new companies wanted to take over port and rail to generate income for the government.
Early this year, Arise IIP wanted to go into agreement with government to manage the transport facilities but it was no pushover for them. The Chinese always have had an edge of signing agreements which they bank on as a means of legality.
The fraud schemes carried out by Chinese companies in the mining sector is not only seen in Sierra Leone but in other West African countries.
Neighbouring Liberia hosts a large number of Chinese illegal miners who sometimes were arrested and taken to police stations for investigation.
In January, 2020, the Liberian Deputy Minister of Mines, T. T. Suen told journalists at a press briefing that the Chinese had invaded their forest in search of minerals without obtaining licences for which they had been arrested.
The Liberian Minister said they would be taken to court to account for their illegal action.
But, the community people would always come to the side of the Chinese calling for their immediate release. Mr Suen was threatened by a youth leader in a remote Liberian village saying they wanted to see the Chinese get back their freedom so that they could continue to exploit the resources.
With the Chinese, the youth are better off, but it is at the expense of the state as they hardly pay royalties to government.
Nothing happened without a cause and questions about who backed the Chinese in their shady deals in Sierra Leone have incessantly popped up. The Chinese, most times, have been accused of passing kickbacks to authorities to evade checks and oversight as they loot the county’s mineral wealth.
As long as they go unchecked, the Chinese could carry on their illegal activities which direly costs the state raising questions about government’s commitment to sanitise the mining sector.