At least one million Nigerian children are sold into internal and external slavery annually, according to experts who say this has put the country on an odious list of the world’s eight worst abusers of the rights of children.
Professor Sola Ehindero, one of the nations’s leading experts on human trafficking, from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, and a consultant to the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP), says the situation has spiralled out of control and is now poised to derail the national economy.
“People have under-estimated the magnitude of trafficking,” a worried Professor Ehindero warned the nation in an interview with Next on Sunday, saying that no fewer than five million children in the country are today prone to be trafficked within and outside the country.
Ehindero said “Studies carried out in the Northern Region shows that about 10 million children are exploited by traffickers under the Almajiri system” and that in Kano alone, “we have about three million children, while in Lagos, there are about one million children who are vulnerable to being exploited by traffickers.”
Ehindero’s records are matched by other findings that speak of an alarming growth in the rate of child slavery in Nigeria. The current findings of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre, in the United Kingdom, indicate that Nigeria is now only second to China in the trafficking of children into the United Kingdom.
The study was produced on behalf of the Home Office and the U.K. Border and Immigration Agency.
Ms. Dagmar Thomas, the Country Representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes, UNODC, also said in Benin recently, that Nigeria has now fully joined the odd league of Thailand, China, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine, recently tagged by the UNODC report as the worst nations on the earth which still traffic persons in the form of slavery.
NEXT on Sunday made several unsuccessful attempts to obtain a backing UN statement on this. Joy Ezeilo, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons especially Women and Children, was involved in a tasking Conference and said she ‘was not in the right frame of mind to make any official statement’.
Child trafficking, as a form of human trafficking, is designated a crime against humanity by the United Nations, and involves the act of “recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them.”
Ijeoma Uduak, the Head of the Public Enlightenment unit of NAPTIP-Uyo Zonal office, says Akwa Ibom now ranks second to Edo in Child Trafficking within Nigeria. “The kind of trafficking that exists depends on the region or state.
For example, children from Akwa Ibom are trafficked for sexual exploitation and to be maids but children from Kano are trafficked to beg on the streets,” she says.
For as little as $15, a child can be bought by a trafficker, and the UN puts the worldwide value in trafficking in the region between $7 and $10 billion. It ranks third to drug and arms as a global money spinner.
Official NAPTIP position is that the high profit margin, and the low risks involved in trafficking are fuelling the illicit trade, which complements the view of the United Nations that the leniency of penalties, compared to the penalties for other forms of organised crime, such as drug-related crimes, have made trafficking a major activity for organised crime networks.