Despite the bans in force, mercury remains essential to gold extraction, fostering a persistent black market. In a complex pattern, mercury is smuggled from Togo into the Sahel region and the gold mining areas of Burkina Faso, before being smuggled back into Togo. This clandestine operation is orchestrated by traders from Burkina Faso.
Mognonré, a village straddling the borders of Togo and Ghana in the central-eastern region of Burkina Faso, is home to a gold deposit that has also become a mercury trafficking centre. Mercury suppliers, wholesalers, small-scale buyers, managers of gold-buying outlets and small-scale miners are the main players in this network.
According to Ousmane Kéré, a miner in his fifties, the supply chain for the liquid metal begins with the supply companies. They arrive from Togo on motorbikes, bypassing the police and customs control services with mercury packaged in cans and/or bottles packed in wooden crates. Cyanide and other explosives in sticks are added to this merchandise.
They then travel to the Mognonré goldfield via various tracks. “Once at the site, they (editor’s note: the suppliers) head for the makeshift shops and shops owned by wholesalers and counter managers,” explains Ousmane.
According to Abdoul Salam Naaba, the representative of the Gnikpière gold miners’ cooperative in the province of Ioba, in the south-west of Burkina Faso, the use of mercury in Burkina Faso’s goldfields dates back to the early 2000s, at the gold mining site in the village of Mognonré.
Before the introduction of mercury, miners used acid to extract gold, a laborious process that produced a mediocre quality of precious metal. Thanks to the advice of Ghanaian miners, the secret of mercury was revealed to them, significantly improving their methods.
Since then, intermediaries have been supplying mercury originating either in Togo or Ghana from this village. These intermediaries remain unknown. When asked who they are, Abdoul Salam Naaba prefers not to comment. He will not reveal any names.
However, there is no doubt that the village of Mognonré is the clandestine entry point for mercury from Togo. Abdoulaye Ouédraogo, who runs a gold counter on the site, says that as well as Togo, Nigeria is also a source of supply.
The mercury, imported mainly from Asia and South America, transits through the port of Lomé in Togo before arriving at the gold sites in Burkina Faso via illegal channels.
By ratifying the Minamata Convention in 2017, a global treaty designed to protect human health and the environment from the negative effects of mercury, Togo has officially banned the sale, purchase and use of this liquid metal on its territory.
Burkina Faso, which also signed the convention in the same year, has banned the use of chemicals, particularly mercury, on gold-panning sites, according to Serge Alain Nébié of the Environmental Protection Department.
Officially, Burkina Faso has not imported mercury since 2018, as the Minister for the Environment, Water and Sanitation, Roger Baro, pointed out in his paper entitled “Burkina Faso’s experiences, best practices and lessons learned in the fight against the illegal mercury trade”, presented at a workshop organised by his department in June 2023. Except in the case of special import authorisation, according to a 2018 presidential decree, in which case the transit country (Togo) approves the request from the importer (Burkina Faso), which guarantees the protection of human health and the environment, and compliance with temporary storage of the product.
Under the terms of the agreement between the two countries, the mercury shipment is specifically accompanied throughout its overland transit from the port of Lomé to Burkina Faso. According to the Togolese Department of Mines and Geology, which we contacted, it is being escorted overland to the border by agents of Togo’s Joint Container Control Unit (Unité Mixte de Contrôle des Conteneurs – UMCC).
Despite these measures, mercury still finds its way illegally into gold mining sites. According to a customs source in Burkina Faso (a station chief), trafficking begins when cargo is transhipped in the port of Lomé.
According to this customs officer, with the complicity of certain people at the port, mercury and many other chemicals such as cyanide and explosive sticks used to dynamite rocks are loaded onto lorries along with other goods.
According to Barthélemy Kafando, a former driver turned truck mechanic, these goods vehicles stay in Lomé for a few days once they leave the port. They supply wholesale customers in the city with a small quantity of mercury.
These customers, in turn, repackage the liquid metal into five- to twenty-litre cans, which are then loaded like goods into the boot of second-hand cars bought by private individuals for transport to Burkina Faso.
During the journey, some of the mercury remains on Togolese soil, particularly in the northern part of the country at Dapaong and Cinkassé. Barthélemy Kafando adds: “From these towns, these mercury traffickers manage to supply the gold-mining sites in border villages in Burkina Faso, such as Mognonré.
As for the other part (the largest), the lorry mechanic confided, it is transported to Burkina Faso without passing customs controls. When contacted by letter for an explanation of this trafficking, the Burkina Faso Customs Department refused to comment despite repeated reminders. The Togolese Ministers of Security and Civil Protection, to whom the OCTRIDB (Office central de répression du trafic illicite des drogues et du blanchiment – Central Office for the Repression of Illicit Drug Trafficking and Money Laundering) reports, and of Mines, also failed to respond to our request.
According to Barthélemy Kafando, the mercury arriving from Togo is distributed to the country’s various artisanal mining operations from markets in Burkina towns such as Pouytenga (Centre-East region) and Ouagadougou (Centre region). “From the Pouytenga market, the mercury is distributed to gold panning sites in the Centre-East, Sahel and Eastern regions of Burkina Faso. As for the merchandise from the Ouagadougou market, it is mainly destined for the south-western and northern regions of the country”, explains the former driver.
According to a courier (whose name has been withheld for fear of reprisals) at the Sankar-Yaaré market in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, the liquid silver metal used to purify gold during extraction at the country’s gold mining sites is stored overnight in warehouses in and around the market.
Night storage
At the Sankar-Yaaré market, individuals posing as cereal sellers, with the interested complacency of members of the municipal police and market guards, are concealing these illegal goods. “Behind the mountains of sacks of cereals are actually containers of mercury and other chemical substances”, says the courier at the Sankar-Yaaré market. Despite our reminder phone call and our request for a stamped interview from Ouagadougou town hall, the municipal police did not respond to our request.
Several accounts gathered from shopkeepers in Burkina Faso’s capital suggest that the fire that broke out in January 2023 in the Sankar-Yaaré market may have been linked to the clandestine storage of explosives, cyanide and mercury. However, no investigation has yet confirmed this hypothesis.
But Yamba Sawadogo, one of the traders, insists that thorough forensic investigations could reveal the presence of these dangerous products carefully hidden in the clandestine warehouses on the outskirts of the market.
On the night of Monday 11 to Tuesday 12 September 2023, a reporter from our team went to one of the shops on the south side of the market. After waiting for about an hour, he perched on a nearby motorbike and saw a white van, registration number 11 KH 61… pull up in front of a warehouse at 9.16pm.
A few minutes later, five individuals began unloading blue drums with black lids, hermetically sealed with cylindrical metal. On the pretext of buying an empty drum to store water, the reporter was told by one of the employees, who looked nervous, that “there are no empty drums here”. “These are chemicals for the gold panning sites”, he added. Shopkeeper Yamba Sawadogo insists that it is indeed mercury, because he once noticed that when unloading, the contents of an improperly sealed drum accidentally spilled out.
Roch Donatien Nagalo, Secretary General of the National Trade Union of Burkina Faso (Syndicat national des commerçants du Burkina – SYNACOM-B), points out that the storage of these chemical substances in the market is nothing new. “Despite the warnings issued to all traders before the fire, some players in the system have continued to take part in these illegal activities”, says Mr Nagalo, who is calling on the authorities to intervene to put an end to these practices and to support the reconstruction of the Sankar-Yaaré market.
An alarming figure for gold mining
Serge Alain Nébié, an officer with the Department of Environmental Prevention, says that to produce 1g of gold, Burkina Faso’s artisanal miners currently use 1.57g of mercury. Referring to the national action plan “for the reduction and even elimination of mercury in artisanal and small-scale gold mining in accordance with the Minamata Convention on Mercury 2020-2029”, he confided that some 78 tonnes of mercury are used annually on gold mining sites.
According to this courier at the Sankar-Yaaré market, the greatest demand for mercury comes from the south-western region of Burkina, because of its high gold production capacity.
In 2017, in Burkina Faso, a joint study by the National Institute of Statistics and Demography (Institut national de la statistique et de la démographie – INSD) and the Ministries of Mines and Territorial Administration was carried out as part of the National Survey of the Gold Panning Sector (Enquête nationale sur le secteur de l’orpaillage – ENSO).
According to this latest study, the South-West region of Burkina Faso plays a key role in the national gold production chain, with an estimated annual production of 9.5 tonnes of gold from artisanal and small-scale mining operations (Exploitations minières artisanales et à petite échelle – EMAPE).
Intense gold production at artisanal sites in south-west Burkina Faso has aroused the interest of gold miners in mercury, a crucial element in gold extraction.
According to Raphaël Tapsoba, President of the Association of artisanal miners of the Bougouriba province in the south-west region of Burkina Faso, “gold cannot be extracted efficiently from the current gold panning sites without the use of mercury”.
“Despite the ban, we are forced to continue using it because we have no viable alternatives,” he explains. He explains that the gold lies deep in the ground in the form of dispersed particles, requiring the use of mercury to amalgamate them.
With a view to putting in place a national strategic plan to raise awareness of the need to reduce and eliminate mercury in gold mining and amalgamation, the government set up the National Agency for the Supervision of Artisanal and Semi-Mechanised Mining (Agence nationale d’encadrement des exploitations minières artisanales et semi-mécanisées – ANEEMAS) in 2015. Unfortunately, according to a worker at the agency who requested anonymity, the desired objective has not been achieved.
On 9 August 2023, the Burkina Faso government transformed ANEEMAS into the National precious substances company (Société nationale des substances précieuses – SONASP). Its mission is to regulate the production and marketing of gold.
The supervision and monitoring of artisanal and semi-mechanised mining activities is the responsibility of the Department of Mines and Geology, through the Department of Artisanal and Semi-Mechanised Mining (Direction de l’Exploitation minière artisanale et semi-mécanisée – DEMAS). When contacted, this department referred us to SONASP, which has yet to respond to our requests.
Despite this arrangement, the mercury managed to slip through the net. From Ouagadougou, it is smuggled back to Lomé via traders in Burkina Faso.
Reverse route
Kokou ElormAmegadze, Acting Executive Director of the Togolese section of the NGO Friends of the Earth, talks about the predominant role of Burkinabe traders in the gold industry. In his view, these traders, being heavily involved in gold mining, could be smuggling mercury into Togo, where it is used for a variety of purposes.
According to the conclusions of the study carried out in 2021 on the mercury inventory as part of the National Action Plan for Artisanal Small-Scale Gold Mining (Plan national d’action d’Exploitation Minière Artisanale à Petite Echelle de l’or – PAN EMAPE) project in Togo in 2021, it was established that mercury is commonly used in the remelting process by jewellers in Togo. However, PAN EMAPE-Togo 2021 notes that “the gold used by jewellers comes directly from gold panners and traders in neighbouring countries”.
Kayi Ajavon, the Togolese Focal Point for the Minamata Convention, believes that mercury trafficking runs parallel to the illicit flow of gold. She says that gold and mercury are often associated.
According to her, gold wholesalers, who may be of different nationalities (Togolese or Burkinabè), generally supply the mercury to the gold miners so that they can process the extracted ore on the spot, with a view to its future marketing. This coordination involves setting up a collection system orchestrated by traders acting as intermediaries with the gold miners.
Ms Ajavon points out that some gold miners are themselves becoming traders, working directly with gold wholesalers. She stresses the crucial role of traders from neighbouring countries such as Burkina Faso, who are often responsible for supplying mercury to gold miners.
According to her, “it’s thanks to awareness-raising that there have been a few rare cases of denunciations”; she says that she and her team were alerted in April 2023 to the case of a trader who was using mercury to process gold.
A reminder that education and awareness remain the most powerful weapons in the fight against mercury trafficking and environmental protection.
Survey conducted by Paténéma Oumar OUEDRAOGO (Burkina Faso) and Pierre-Claver KUVO (Togo), with the support of the Norbert Zongo Unit for Investigative Journalism in West Africa (CENOZO).
