‘Selling our gemstones without value addition is slavery’

What we do

We are basically a mining company. Emotan Global Ventures Limited focuses on the metal side – lead, gold and other minerals – and Piramen focuses on the gemstone side of mining. We have several gemstones like sapphire, ruby and aquamarine on several sites. Our project is to uncover as many gemstones as possible that we can find in Nigeria.

Value addition needed for solid minerals

Many of these minerals, when taken in their raw form, have little value.  When you sell in the raw form, the money you get is very little. So it’s almost like slave labour when you go and sell in its raw state, but the moment you add value by processing it a little, which is changing it by faceting, where we cut the stones into some of the gemstone shapes, we have a better share of the profit margin from them.

At the moment Nigeria, or most African countries, are getting less than one percent of the value they ought to get because they don’t add value to their mineral endowment.  So we are losing a lot of revenue as individuals and as a country because of that absence of value addition.

So, we need to close that gap and change the narrative because our people are just suffering and working for free. They suffer and mine the minerals which they sell at ridiculous prices. We can’t continue like that. The value of these stones is a lot more than we are getting from it.

So we want everybody to be educated in the fact that the stones are valuable and we can change the prices we get by adding value to them.

Gains from Nigeria Mining Week

It is amazing being part of a conference like this. First of all, everybody gets to meet each other, including the big players in the industry. You get to interact with the government and hear all the projects they are trying to do; because sometimes you don’t really know.

So at an event like the Nigeria Mining Week, we have time to interact with government and tell them our issues and problems. And from what I have gathered, there are a lot of initiatives they are doing to support miners, such as giving loans and grants.

Nigeria can become the mining destination of the world

I believe that Nigeria will always be a major player in the mining industry. In the past there was underground mining taking place, but now that everyone is coming up to make the industry more visible, we think that is going to be the beginning of the kind of influx needed to boost the sector.

Women can cope in the mining sector too

Women tend to be on the different side of mining. Some are into selling, some in the cutting and faceting of the stones; there are different stages in the sector.  When it comes to the rough work, there may be a lot more men there but there are women in the bushes too.