Gold seekers dig deep for bullion dreams as hundreds try their luck

NIAMEY, Niger - Arriving on motorcycles and donkeys, in cars, or even on foot, hundreds of people have flocked to a site in southern Niger hoping to strike gold.

The news spread like wildfire: gold had apparently been discovered deep in Kafa-Koira, just south of the country's capital Niamey.

"I came to try my luck," Kadri Issia told AFP, with a pickax slung over his shoulder. He comes from Dan-Zama, about 10 kilometers north of the site.

Not far from an airport, a dried-up stream bed surrounded by thorny shrubs is teeming with fortune seekers. They use a rundown track winding through heavily-populated neighborhoods to reach the spot.

In only two days, the normally empty site became a buzzing scene with street vendors selling food, fresh water, bags, ropes and digging tools to throngs of people.

Minibuses and "Kabou-Kabou" motorcycle taxis shuttle people in from the center of town.

Policemen were even dispatched to secure the site.

"I woke up on Monday morning to discover crowds of people around my house," said resident Issaka Abdou.

More than 1,000 mostly young people use pickaxes, crowbars, buckets and machetes to chip away at the banks of the dry stream bed around a hundred meters long. They work under a scorching sun and the threat of landslides in search of gold deposits.

Zakari Issa was one of the first to arrive.

"I have been digging for two days but still haven't seen any gold," says the 42-year-old as he shouts up from a hole around two meters deep.

At the other end of the site, two large men hit rocks with a crowbar.

"If we find gold, I will buy myself a motorcycle," says a third man, handing out tea and cigarettes.

"I found some!" a 50-year-old suddenly shouts out and quickly slips a tiny piece of yellow-colored stone into his pocket.

It might be gold, or it might be iron pyrite, commonly known as fool's gold, a geologist says. Novices often get the minerals mixed up because of their similarity.

Artisanal gold mining sites are common in Niger, where gold is extracted on an industrial scale in western parts of the country near Burkina Faso.

Thousands of people from Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal have been scouring mining sites in the region since the 1990s.

In February, the government shut down another site in the desert in the northeastern Djado region which was discovered in 2014 and drew more than 20,000 people from Niger, Chad, Libya and Sudan, according to local officials.

Authorities said they closed the Djado site for security reasons, citing terrorism and armed robbery on the frontier between Chad and Libya.

The government promised to reopen it but also granted an exploration license for the site to the government-owned mining company.