RIGHTS: Nigeria Seeks Help to End Human Trafficking

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Apr 24 2002 (IPS) - Nigeria has begun talks with neighbours, which serve as transit routes, to end human trafficking to Europe.

Mohammed Shata, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Internal Affairs, and Abdulkadir Mesdoua, the Algerian ambassador, met in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria this month, to seek ways to stop traffickers who use Algeria as transit route to Europe.

Mesdoua called for closer co-operation between the two countries to tackle the trafficking of Nigerians to Europe.

“The Algerian immigration authorities have been spending a lot of resources in repatriating Nigerians caught in the illicit trade and wish to appeal to the Nigerian government to assist us in that direction,” Mesdoua said.

Last week, 12 teenage girls were arrested at Lagos’s Murtala Muhammed Airport, while on their way to Europe. The police paraded the girls, whose ages range between 15 and 18 along with one of their alleged sponsors.

Hezekiah Dimka, of the Murtala Muhammed Airport police unit, said the teenagers were making travel arrangements to Europe, via Morocco, when they were arrested.

Two of the teenagers, he said, were arrested at the airport and the trail led to a hotel near the airport, where the other 10 girls were held up, pending their departure time. Their sponsor, a woman, was later arrested in Benin, capital of the Midwestern State of Edo.

Edo State has the highest number of Nigerian women trafficked to Europe, according to media reports published in the West African country.

“The sponsor confessed that she heads a syndicate and that she has a lady based in Morocco whom she usually transports the girls to. She also confessed that she was deported from Germany in 2001 and from Italy, after her ordeal in Germany. That shows that she has been in the business for a very long time,” said Dimka.

He said: “We will make sure that we stop this embarrassment people cause to Nigeria.”

Last month, millions of television viewers were stunned when Sunday Afolabi, Minister of Internal Affairs, paraded three men who specialised in trafficking Nigerian girls and boys across the Sahara desert to Europe. Twelve of their victims, rescued in renewed efforts by the government to stem the menace, were also paraded along them.

Emeka Ohiri, one of the traffickers, confessed to stunned viewers: “We charge 1,000 dollars per female and 700 dollars per male we traffic across the desert through Algeria onward to Italy”.

The teenagers, Afolabi said, were promised jobs in Libya, Italy and Israel as waitresses, hairdressers and fashion designers, among others.

The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) arrested the traffickers and the-would-be sex workers in northern Nigeria while attempting to travel to Libya, Israel and Italy. The minister commended the immigration officials for checking the growing human trafficking, especially in women and children, through its intensified border patrol.

Items recovered from the arrested human traffickers were eight Nigerian passports, forged ECOWAS travel documents, Jamaican passports and driver’s licenses, eight Nigerian immigration control stamps, fake rubber stamps of some embassies and photographs of strangers.

Describing human trafficking as modern-day slavery and a serious social problem, Afolabi called on the 16-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) especially Niger, Benin and Chad, not to allow Nigerians travel across their countries without valid travel documents.

More than 50,000 Nigerian girls are engaged as sex workers in Europe and Asia. And more than 3,000 women trafficked abroad have been deported to Nigeria in the past three years, according to official statistics.

“We are also carrying out enlightenment programmes to educate parents on the dangers of the illicit trade in human beings,” says a government official.

Sunday Adeniji, Nigeria’s Chief Immigration Officer, says: “We have fashioned out a proactive strategy to arrest human traffickers as well as rescue those being taken away for the illicit trade in human beings.”

To ease their plight, a number of human rights groups have opened centres to rehabilitate Nigerian women deported from Europe.

“We are not only rehabilitating the victims, we are also empowering them financially because poverty is the root cause of this inhuman act,” says Eki Igbinedion, founder of Idia Renaissance Project, a non-governmental organisation, based in Benin.