Jide has spent more than thirty years doing this work the slow way — on foot, with a hammer and a hand lens, in the pits and riverbeds where Nigeria's minerals actually come out of the ground.

He started out around Ife, learning to tell a good pegmatite from a barren one before anyone had heard of lithium as a business. Since then the work has taken him to Nasarawa's tourmaline fields, the Oyo belts, and almost every mineral corner of the country.

Over those years he has mapped ground for explorers, graded parcels for buyers who couldn't travel, sat with communities to agree terms, and advised investors who needed someone to tell them the truth about a site. That habit — checking it on the ground before saying it out loud, is where the name Ground-Truth comes from.

"The rock doesn't lie. If you take the time to read it, it tells you exactly what it is worth."