Nigeria’s Silent Recolonization: How Foreign Powers and Local Collaborators Are Bleeding Our Minerals. (If you can be patient to read this, you will know what’s going on in Ifelodun Local Government Area of Kwara State).
The night the attackers came to Oke-Ode, Kwara State, the villagers thought it was just another herder incursion. But as the bullets tore through mud walls and flames engulfed the harvest, it became clear this was no ordinary clash. “They told us to leave or die,” recalled Amos Ajibola, a farmer who fled with his family into the forest. “When we came back days later, strangers were already digging in the hills where we farmed.”
Stories like Ajibola’s are multiplying across Nigeria’s mineral-rich communities. Officials and media often dismiss them as “Fulani–Farmer clashes.” But beneath that narrative lies a disturbing truth: the violence is carefully targeted at communities sitting on gold, tin, lithium, and other strategic minerals. Once villagers are displaced, the land is quietly taken over by illegal miners tied to powerful cartels with foreign backers.
The New Masters: China and France
Security experts and local leaders increasingly point to a slow-motion recolonization of Nigeria, one driven not by treaties or flags, but by economic predators. China and France are the most frequently named, both with long track records of extracting African resources. France has never hidden its dependence on Niger’s uranium, while China has poured billions into Africa under its Belt and Road Initiative. In Nigeria, their interests intersect with a shadow economy of illegal mining.
“These are not random clashes,” said one Abuja-based security analyst who requested anonymity. “They are calculated displacements. The real battle is not over grazing routes, but mineral veins. And the buyers are waiting in Lagos, Dubai, and Beijing.”
Imported Terrorists, Local Collaborators
The system runs with brutal efficiency. Nigerian collaborators, often businessmen or politicians, first identify communities sitting on mineral deposits. They pass the information to their foreign backers. Armed groups, sometimes Fulani Ethnic Militias, sometimes mercenaries from Mali, Chad, or Niger, are then deployed to terrorize locals until they abandon their lands.
A conflict researcher with the Centre for Democracy and Development put it bluntly: “What the public sees is another farmer–herder clash. What is really happening is organized displacement for mining access.”
History Repeating Itself
This pattern echoes Africa’s darkest chapters. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, wars over coltan and cobalt have killed millions while enriching foreign corporations. France has kept a stranglehold over uranium mining in Niger for decades. Now, Nigeria’s lithium and gold deposits are drawing similar interest, and similar bloodshed.
The losses are staggering. Nigeria officially bleeds $9 billion annually from illegal mining. Zamfara alone has seen gold smuggled to fund arms purchases by terrorist groups. In Nasarawa and Kogi, truckloads of lithium vanish under the radar, shipped abroad without any benefit to the host communities.
Who Really Benefits?
The villagers do not. For them, the cost is death, displacement, and dispossession. In Kwara, Kogi, and Plateau, survivors recount losing their farmland, their homes, and their churches, while strangers move in with heavy machinery and armed escorts.
“This is not just corruption, it’s a national security crisis,” warned retired General Alexander Ogomudia in a 2024 interview. “When foreign-backed cartels fund militias to chase Nigerians from their land, it is nothing short of economic warfare.”
Yet government silence is deafening. In some states, officials are accused of protecting cartels. In others, fear of offending powerful embassies leads to paralysis. The result is impunity, as villagers are left to bury their dead while their wealth is siphoned abroad.
The Dangerous Silence
Perhaps most alarming is how easily Nigerians dismiss the allegations as “conspiracy theories.” But from Oke-Ode to Egbe to Isanlu, the same story repeats: gunmen attack, villagers flee, minerals are extracted. How many coincidences make a pattern?
The silence is not ignorance. It is complicity. Every day Abuja refuses to act, the looting of Nigeria’s future deepens.
A Call to Wake Up
Nigeria’s independence in 1960 was won with hope for sovereignty. Today, that sovereignty is under siege not by colonizers in uniform, but by foreign interests in suits, aided by local traitors and protected by mercenaries. China and France may not admit it, but Nigerians on the ground see the connection between their mineral wealth and their bloodshed.
Unless the federal government confronts this reality, tells the whole truth and stand firm, investigates transparently, and breaks the chains of collaboration, Nigeria’s mineral wealth will continue to build other nations’ industries while Nigerians bleed. The recolonization of Nigeria is not a distant threat. It is unfolding now, community by community, mine by mine.
