Emotan Josephine Aburime-Shine is a Nigerian mining entrepreneur who is passionately dedicated to developing solutions to fix the problem of needlessly exporting all the raw materials from her country to developed countries. The entrepreneur has set up companies to mine and also process Nigeria’s raw materials to increase their value on the export market.
Emotan recounted to Billionaires Africa that she became a director at her mother’s frozen fish company at a young age. She went there to help out during the holidays, which inspired her to be an entrepreneur; and becoming a mother at 21 stirred up her ambition to be great.
She began to cultivate relationships with international suppliers while living in the United Kingdom, and attributes that to most of the important connections her family business, Vesa Group, has today. She was already a recording artist by age 16 but did not have enough time to commit to her music career as she was focused on building her family business and her young family.
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Emotan moved back to Nigeria in 2015-2016 and came in contact with people in Nigeria’s mining industry. The young leader explained that she pursued mining by securing a license first because she only wanted to buy and hold Nigerian gemstones as an investment. However, as time went on, she discovered that the mining sector was severely lacking in development.
“As I dug deeper, I saw just how badly Nigeria was being robbed of her resource wealth, particularly from unscrupulous foreign businessmen who come in Nigeria, mine our resources, and smuggle them out of the country without remitting taxes to the Nigerian government or improving the communities they steal so blatantly from,” she said, adding that she felt mining was a calling from God to step in – a call she chose to answer.
After that decision, she registered two mining companies – Emotan Global Ventures, to explore gold on-site in Abuja, and Piramen Ventures to focus on Gemstone mining, processing, and trading. She also decided that her companies would set out to discover mining sites and document them, and also offer proper training to the local communities on how best to recognize the materials within their communities, sensitize them on the value of the materials to reduce exploitation, and teach them safe mining practices.
The mining guru has acquired a significant collection of mining rights and licenses in Nigeria for both companies, and greatly invested in many small-scale mining operations across Nigeria. Emotan Ventures owns various metal deposits including gold, zinc, and copper – producing small amounts of minerals at the moment.
In 2022, Mining Review Africa named her as number 3 among the Top 10 Leaders Mining in Africa and lauded her addition to Nigeria’s mining sector.
Emotan names the issue of security as her biggest challenge, as it affects the type of employees she employs for the sites. She noted that it also affects proper management and the kind of partnerships and foreign investors one can attract. She also mentioned transportation costs, bad roads, and poor trading infrastructure as some of the other challenges she has to deal with.
The mining pacesetter said being a woman had not hindered anything she has accomplished, and disclosed that her experiences have generally been great due to her strong business background and general philosophy. She boasted that her determination allowed her to set marks and find solutions to challenges that may come her way.
Emotan Josephine Aburime- Shine believes that it is best to set clear targets and goals, and recommends that research should be done before making commitments. According to her “Learning your way up is the best advice … as the learning and growing never ends.”
