PRE AND POST COLONIAL ERA Sample Clauses

PRE AND POST COLONIAL ERA. Apart from the primitive mining of minerals for purely domestic needs in local communities, formal and organized mining activities were rare. Following the sighting of tin metals in a local iron market in 1879, the Colonial Government dispatched an expedition to trace its source. The expedition led to the rocks of the Xxx Plateau. This discovery led to a massive influx of foreign mining concerns and individuals to the area, where large – scale mining commenced at fever pitch levels in 1903. Several foreign companies and individuals such as Amalgamated Tin Mines (Nig Ltd), Gold and Base Metal Mines Ltd, Kaduna Prospectors, Ex-lands Ltd, Bisichi Tin Company Ltd, Jantar (Nig) Ltd, and individuals such as X.X. Xxxxx, XXX Xxxxxxxx and X.X. Xxxxxx, dominated the northern mining fields encompassing areas such as Plateau, Bauchi, Kano and Kaduna22 Niger and Kogi states23 These mining activities involved the exploitation of minerals such as tin, tantalite, columbite and gold. From the mining of a few tones of tin at the beginning, it reached a peak of 17,000 tones per annum in 1945 at the height of the Second World War. In Eastern Nigeria, as a result of the discovery of coal in 1916, massive exploitation ensued pioneered by the Colonial Government. From the point of view of the Colonial Government the most important mineral was coal as it was required for electricity generation and for the rail system. The production of this strategic mineral was made a Colonial Government monopoly. Mining of coal continued massively until 1958 when the locomotives running the rail system were dieselized24. Even at that, coal continued to play a vital role in providing fuel for the generation of power supply to major cities until hydropower and gas fired generating stations took over progressively beginning in 1968. From an annual production of 12,000 tones in 1916, production peaked up to one million tones in 1959. This underlined the strategic importance of the mineral both for the local economy then and for export purposes. A German corporation, Nigerian Bitumen Corporation commenced exploration work in and around Ijebu Ode and Okitipupa for Bitumen deposits also called tar sand between 1908 and 1914 but these activities had to be discontinued due to the outbreak of the 1st World War in 1914.25 An attempt at encouraging organized mining was undertaken by the Colonial Government when in 1903 and 1904 respectively it inaugurated a Minerals Survey of the Southern and Northern Nige...