Watch it! You may be handing your child over to a trafficker! – The Sun Nigeria

By Funke Busari

Over time, most young Nigerians with promising careers have fallen victims of human traffickers. Many a time, it has taken the intervention of government agencies to rescue survivors from the jaws of death and life of regret. But many have not been so fortunate. Not a few have died from every form of inhuman treatment both locally and abroad.

A case in point was when there was a media report of how Nigerians were sold and resold into slavery in Libya.

All these would have been prevented but for the glamour attached to travelling abroad or leaving so-called local communities for greener pastures.

Sadly, the perpetrators are sometimes close relations or acquaintances.

Ese Glory Edomwony also known as Mama G: is a survivor of human trafficking. But she herself then turned to a human trafficker.

Mama G, was initially rescued from suspected human traffickers in Seme. Sometimes in 2022, the 24-year-old woman was sentenced to a one-year jail term with an option to pay a N300,000 fine in Edo State for engaging in acts of trafficking in persons of a 14-year-old girl (names withheld).

Speaking to Saturday Sun, Mr. Nduka Nwanwenne, Commander, Benin Zonal Command of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons and other related matters (NAPTIP),  said Mama G was charged to court in charge No: B/NAPTIP/9C/2022, before Justice Irele lfeje of Court 3, Criminal Division of the Edo State High Court Benin City.

She met her waterloo when she recruited a survivor for her sister, called Lovette in Burkina Faso who wanted an innocent girl-child to become a prostitute. The young girl was not willing to do her bidding. As a result, the minor was severally beaten, starved and enslaved.

The girl, a virgin at the time she was lured to Burkina Faso, was forced into prostitution. She then lost her virginity to a predator.

Mama G's case was a clear violation of the law, but it is possible to unknowingly violate the law in the cause of helping the family or seeking a better life for a child.

Stories abound in and out of the shores of Nigeria on how relatives with exploitative intentions approach less privileged parents in the name of striking a deal to take care of their children or wards while they work for them and compensate with some sort of advantages.

The incident involving a nursing mother, Mrs. Gift Nonye Ukatu explained the reasons why parents or guardian should exercise more caution.

Mrs. Gift Nonye Ukatu is already serving a-13-year jail term for harbouring two girls under the age of 13 as domestic workers. Ukatu was found guilty of a six-count charge of harbouring two girls that are under 12 years old and using them for forced labour, domestic work and treating them as slaves contrary to Sections 22 (a), 23 (1) (a) and 25 (a) of the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act, 2015.

Ukatu brought one of the girls from Akwa-Ibom State to Lagos under the guise of assisting with her education. She had earlier promised her parents to turn her life around but that turned out to be false. She was not only mistreating her but also perpetrating illegality against another 12-year-old daughter of a soldier at the time of the incident in 2017.

The survivor's father brought the child to Ukatu in Lagos from Borno, with high expectations that his daughter would be free from the maltreatment being meted out to her by her stepmother. But he got more than what he bargained for. The little girl fell into the wrong hands, dashing his hope of a better life for his daughter.

This brought to the fore the pitfalls to avoid when seeking a better life or greener pastures for one's children.

This highlights the dangers and demerits in giving out a child to a friend or relative to be taken abroad or to a city.

Mr. Arinze Orakue, NAPTIP, Director of Intelligence Training and Manpower Development gave insight to what a trafficked person faces in the hands of their captors or slave master at the sidelines of an anti-human trafficking training held in Lagos recently.

According to him, parents should not let off their guard with which they have been protecting the child from infancy till date. He added that human traffickers are on the prowl because of the economic advantages from the illegal trade. “Your involvement to allow your child to be taken ‘captive' or held hostage makes your child vulnerable to all manners of degrading exploitation,” he stated.

According to Orakue, human trafficking often begins “when a person is recruited, transported, transferred, harboured or the person is received by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.”

In its intervention in Lagos, NAPTIP, the agency at the forefront of reducing the menace via prevention, protection and prosecution, highlighted the dangers inherent in human trafficking.

Of particular reference is when families were caught in familial trafficking, which is a hidden process of exchanging a family member for goods, substances, rent, services, money, or status within the community, all in the name of sourcing domestic help from a relative.

The agency sounded a note of warning that giving child out as a domestic worker in exchange for a socio-economic advantage is one among the offences bordering on violence against persons or human trafficking.

This trend disposes vulnerable persons, especially the minors, even adults to physical, mental, psychological and emotional abuses.

NAPTIP, headed by Professor Fatima Waziri-Azi added that victims are either forced to work as prostitutes against their wish or have their skin, liver, pancreas, kidney or other internal organs harvested.

Mr. Orakue told this reporter that the agency responds to rehabilitation of victims of crime, reports of victims of abuse and exploitation as a result of human trafficking, which he described as violence against persons for the purpose of sex.

He said the fight against human trafficking is improving because the agency has been able to secure convictions over the last 20 years of its operation.

On the desperation to travel abroad, he gave this advice: “I tell people that the streets of Europe are not paved with gold. There are poor people living in other countries and that is where our people dream they want to go because of the movies they watch. That is not real, because they are make-believe.”

He noted that the agency has been building the acceptance of Nigerians that human trafficking is not a mere fairy tale.