When There Is No Playbook: Building Community Relations in Nigeria’s First Legal Large-Scale Gold Mine

Madhuri Sarkar Amoda

Before Segilola, there was no model to follow. Nigeria’s extractive sector has a community relations story, but it largely belongs to oil and gas, and it was not the best. Decades of environmental degradation in the Niger Delta, displacement without redress and communities treated as obstacles rather than partners left behind a legacy of deep, justified mistrust between extractive companies and the people whose land they operated on. These failures did not stay in the Niger Delta. They travelled north, south, east, west, into the consciousness of every Nigerian community that has ever watched a company arrive with promises and leave with resources.

When Segilola Resources Operating Limited (SROL) began developing the Segilola Gold Mine in Osun State, we were walking into that history. We were also walking into a legal vacuum. Nigeria’s large-scale gold mining sector, for all practical purposes, did not exist in the formal, regulated sense before us. There was no industry association we could benchmark against, sector-specific community relations framework developed by peers or local precedent to borrow from.

We had to build the architecture ourselves, in real time, on live ground and what followed was one of the most instructive professional experiences of my career. Here is what I learned.

The Oil and Gas Shadow Is Real. Acknowledge It.

One of the first things I understood was that we were not just introducing a new company to a community. We were introducing a new industry, against the backdrop of one that didn’t have a good reputation. Communities in Nigeria do not distinguish cleanly between “oil” and “gold,” between offshore and open-pit. What they know is that large foreign-linked extractive operations have historically arrived, extracted and left damage behind.

We had to be honest about that history rather than dismissive of it. Acknowledging the Niger Delta context openly, naming the trust deficit that preceded us, was not a liability. It was the beginning of credibility. Communities do not trust companies that pretend they are entering a blank space. They trust companies that demonstrate they understand the landscape they are entering.

Cultural Governance Is Not a Soft Issue. It Is an Operational One.

One of the most consequential decisions we made early was to integrate traditional governance structures into our operations, not as ceremonial formality but as functional architecture.

In Yoruba communities, traditional rulers are not figureheads. They are living institutions with authority, legitimacy, and reach that no corporate campaign can replicate. Excluding them or treating them as signatories to be managed would have been a fundamental error.

We brought community and traditional leaders into processes where their involvement made a material difference. One example: community employment. Mining projects often struggle to meet local employment quotas because the hiring process is managed entirely internally, creating suspicion about who gets in and why. We structured the recruitment process to include community leaders directly. They participated. They vouched for it. And because of that trust and visibility, we not only met our community employment targets, we exceeded them.

That is not a soft outcome. That is an operational result, achieved through cultural intelligence.

Marginalized Groups Must Have a Seat at the Table, Not Just a Mention in the Report.

When we were establishing our Community Development Agreement (CDA) committees, we made a deliberate choice that I consider one of the most important decisions of the framework’s design: we insisted that the women’s leader and the youth leader were seated at the table alongside the traditional and community leaders.

This was not automatic. In many community governance structures, these voices are present in practice but absent in formal decision-making. Women carry the weight of community life, particularly in agricultural communities affected by mine development. Young people bear the long-term consequences of decisions made today. If they are not in the room, the framework is incomplete regardless of how well-documented it is.

Their inclusion brought something no consultation process can manufacture: a diversity of lived experience informing what the community actually needed. Representation is not a checkbox. It is the difference between a community agreement that holds and one that erodes.

Build for the Long Term, Even When Short-Term Pressure Is Loudest.

The pressure in extractive projects is always toward speed. Production timelines, investor milestones, regulatory deadlines. Sometimes, community relations can feel like the thing that slows everything down. However, it is actually the thing that keeps everything moving.

Communities that feel heard, respected, and genuinely partnered with do not disrupt operations. They protect them. The trust we built through visible, consistent, high-quality community engagement has been one of the most significant contributors to operational continuity at Segilola. That is not incidental but structural.

When you build community relations as a genuine function, not a reputational shield, the returns are durable.

What I Would Tell Anyone Starting From Scratch

If you are building a community relations framework in a sector or geography where no template exists, here is the honest version of the advice:

You will not get it right immediately. The framework will be revised. Relationships will be tested. Some things you design carefully will fail, and some things you improvise will work better than anything you planned.

What matters is that you enter with genuine intent, cultural humility, and the discipline to keep listening even when operations are demanding your attention elsewhere.

We did not build a perfect community relations framework at Segilola. We built one that is honest, adaptive, and rooted in real relationships with real people. That, I have come to believe, is what sustainable looks like in practice. What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear your stories.

.Madhuri Sarkar Amoda is the Community and Stakeholder Development Manager at Segilola Resources Operating Limited, operators of Nigeria’s first legal large-scale gold mine.