By Peter Olorunnisomo – Gold is one of those mineral deposits that simply blesses whichever country is endowed with a large quantum of deposit. It has financed civilisations and verily many a military campaign as well as seducing the loyalties and virtues of many military stalwarts.
History educates us that the trans-Saharan trade was largely fuelled not just by the commercial zeal of the middle east who brought down camels, perfumes, dates, Qur’anic education and Islam among other produce but rather value, prestige, and affluence gold impacted by the trade in it.
At that time, Ghana was renowned in gold and financed it as an empire where the symbol of authority and rulership was a gold stool. It was also the financier of the campaigns of Sundiata and, at the height of it, Mansa Musa’s expansive Mali empire bring Gao and Timbuktu into world renown according to the chronicles of Leo Africanus.
So gold not only attracted the East, it informed the West who also had a different template with which to ‘exploit’ whatever gold had not gone to the East.
Today, the gold is still going east according to research findings by investigative journalists. Unlike the trans-Saharan trade which showed a sense of organised economic activity yielding value and funding development at the time, the same is bereft of this ‘trans-Saharan’ gold trade.
Reports have it that Gold worth billions of dollars is being smuggled out of Africa yearly through the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East as a gateway to markets in Europe, the United States and beyond according to Reuters.
Customs data shows that the UAE imported $15.1 billion worth of gold from Africa in 2016, up from $1.3 billion in 2006.
The total weight was 446 tonnes, in varying degrees of purity – up from 67 tonnes in 2006.
Much of the gold was not recorded in the exports of African states and this suggests a negligence that is both permissive and corrosive to sovereign national wealth and interests when the trade in imbalance against other commodities of trade puts African states at a perennial disadvantage.
Industrial mining firms in Africa denied sending their gold to the UAE – indicating that the Gulf country’s gold imports from Africa come from other informal sources.
Experts say large amounts of gold are leaving Africa with no taxes being paid to the states that produce them. This is very indicative, not of the abilities of African states to reckon taxes or the infrastructure to execute tax policies of customs, but of the permeation of a culture of corruption that is uncheckable not to mention sanction-able. So did the citizenry also ‘negotiate’ their own terms and allegiance thereby deregulating production, regulation, and market monitoring?
African governments such as Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia complain that gold is now being illegally produced and smuggled out of their countries on a vast scale, sometimes by criminal operations, and often at a high human and environmental cost.
According to Reuters, their journalists underwent only a few days of research to work out that the numbers coming out of Africa’s vast gold trade did not add up.
It then took almost another 15 months – and the contributions of colleagues and analysts across the world – to show how those discrepancies pointed to a vast web of smuggling operations, reaching from the pit mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo across the continent to the Gulf.
The news organisation has now published the first results of all that work – an exclusive report on the billions of dollars’ worth of gold spirited out of Africa every year through the United Arab Emirates, a gateway to markets in Europe, the United States and beyond.
It gives a rare picture of the scale of a hidden trade that is exposing workers to dangerous conditions and depriving African states of millions in customs revenues and taxes.
The value of the trade is thus not only in the costs as revenue but also in the limited options the counties have to engage the economic world in their transactions and also influence their political leverages to better advance a responsible and comfortable life to their citizenry which a core primary goal of governance in the first place.
The report was built on a study of the latest available figures recorded in Comtrade, a United Nations trade portal, for 2016. These showed there were substantial differences between the amount of gold that African states said they were exporting, and the much bigger amounts that arrived in the UAE.
“The nature of the often illegal business means getting a sense of how much gold these miners produce, and where it goes, is tough. Gold passes from pits to middlemen, much of it eluding officials … So we collected and analyzed the data,” said David Lewis, who reported on the story from Nairobi with Ryan McNeill and Zandi Shabalala from London.
The team scoured academic literature and spoke with trade economists to better understand how to interpret the often patchy data.
The figures were filled out by visits to some of the most remote corners of the continent where miners were swapping their pick-axes and shovels for diggers and crushers in a booming illicit industry.
Activists said accidents were frequent. In one week this February, more than 100 people died in three incidents at illegal mining operations in Zimbabwe, Guinea and Liberia.
Reuters contacted 23 mining companies with African operations and presented its findings to 14 African governments for comment. The scale of the problem was news to some of those officials. Informal mining is “an area that we have not properly figured out,” Togo’s director of mining development and controls, Nestor Kossi Adjehoun, said.
Perhaps the greatest loss and price of the trade today is the continuous trend that sells the endowment of the richest continent in the world for less than thirty pieces of silver as Judas did.
Kindly follow us on twitter:@AfricanVoice2
