The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) confirmed on April 8 that two Chinese citizens working at a gold mine in southwestern Nigeria were kidnapped on April 5. The incident took place in Nigeria’s Osun State. According to China’s Global Times, a local police spokesperson said in a statement that a group of criminals attacked the local gold mine and abducted two Chinese citizens Zhao Jian, 33, and Wen, 50, employed as security guards at the gold mine. MoFA spokesperson Zhao Lijian also said that China was not considering reducing its presence in Nigeria due to the recent kidnappings. “We have a number of projects and Chinese funded enterprises in Nigeria, even though the local security situation has never been ideal. We will not resort to evacuation because of some occasional individual cases.” Two other Chinese workers were kidnapped in Osun state on March 31, and rescued by police on April 6 – the day after the attack on the gold mine. In February, three Chinese workers were abducted from a gold mine in Osun state when the Chinese workers’ police escort was killed in the attack.

(Comment: The China Global Investment Tracker, run by the American Enterprise Institute, states that Chinese companies had cumulatively invested over $40 billion in Nigeria as of 2020, with the vast majority of that going to either transportation infrastructure ($17.1 billion) or energy projects ($16.5 billion, mostly in the oil sector specifically). Data from the China-Africa Research Initiative Johns Hopkins University SAIS put the number of Chinese workers in Nigeria at 12,199 as of the end of 2019.)