Kian Smith Trade & Co. (Kian Smith Refinery)

Kian Smith Trade & Co. is the Nigerian indigenous gold-refinery venture that broke ground in 2018 on a 4,000 kg/year LBMA-standard gold refinery at Ikeja, Lagos — the first formally licensed gold refinery in Nigeria — and remains the institutional centre of any plausible formalisation of Nigeria's artisanal-and-small-scale gold-mining sector.

The century the refinery closes is real and documentable. Organised gold mining in Nigeria began in 1913, when colonial prospectors confirmed alluvial gold along the Schist Belt running through what are today Niger, Kaduna, Zamfara, Kebbi, Kwara, Osun and Oyo States — at Maru, Anka, Birnin Gwari, Kwakuti, Iperindo and Ilesa. Output peaked between 1933 and 1943 at roughly 1.4 tonnes total over the decade, mined by a handful of colonial concessionaires (Nigerian Goldfields Ltd and others) using African labour. The Second World War pulled men and machinery out of the goldfields for tin at Jos and for the war economy; the colonial mines were abandoned in the late 1940s and never re-opened at scale. Toyin Falola's 1992 study 'An Ounce is Enough' documents how the colonial state in Western Nigeria criminalised African gold trading rather than license a domestic refining industry, so what gold continued to come out of Ilesa and Iperindo left the country as unrefined doré through Lagos or as smuggled dust through Cotonou and Lomé.

For the next seventy years there was no Nigerian refinery. From the 1950s to the 2010s every gram of Nigerian gold that reached a bar — whether mined by the residual Ilesa workings, by the post-1980 artisanal rush in Zamfara, Niger and Kebbi, or by the lead-poisoning-scale ASGM boom that killed more than 400 children in Zamfara in 2010 — was either smuggled out raw (the UAE, Togo and Dubai re-export statistics consistently exceeded the entire declared Nigerian production), or shipped as doré to refiners in Switzerland, South Africa (Rand Refinery), the UAE (Kaloti, Emirates Gold) and India. Nigeria captured none of the refining margin, none of the assay fees, none of the by-product silver, and none of the LBMA-standard bar premium. The Ministry of Mines and Steel Development's own 2012 exploration brochure conceded that the country had no downstream gold capacity whatsoever.

Kian Smith was incorporated in 2011 by Nere Emiko, a Nigerian commodities trader, with the explicit objective of building that missing midstream. The federal gold-refining licence — the first ever issued by the Federal Government of Nigeria — was granted in October 2018 and announced by Minister of Budget and National Planning Senator Udoma Udo Udoma at the 24th Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja as a flagship deliverable of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) Focus Labs. Foundation was laid at Ikeja, Lagos in November 2018; the refinery was designed for a starting throughput of 3 tonnes/month of 99.99% gold and 1 tonne/month of 99.99% silver, with a full build-out target of 12 tonnes/year of LBMA Good Delivery gold. Kian Smith signed a technical-cooperation memorandum with the World Gold Council the same year.

The refinery is the downstream anchor of the Presidential Artisanal Gold Mining Development Initiative (PAGMI), launched in 2019 by the Buhari administration under the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development, which for the first time gave artisanal miners a legal route to sell ore into a Nigerian refining chain and saw the Central Bank of Nigeria take delivery of the first locally-refined gold bars into the country's external reserves in July 2020. Kian Smith's sister brands — SANU Coin (investment-grade minted coin) and ANKA Metals (mine-gate purchasing in Zamfara) — close the value chain end to end. Whether Nigeria can hold the formalisation gains against the smuggling networks that still move the bulk of Zamfara, Osun and Niger State production through Lomé and Dubai is the open question; what is no longer open is that Nigerian gold can, for the first time since 1913, be refined to international Good Delivery standard inside Nigeria.