'Child Trafficking . . . Babies'

" ... Generally, foreign nationals work as temporary guides across borders or provide shelters and safe houses along the routes or harbour victims traveling by land. This seemingly innocuous transaction has taken such dimensions that Nigeriatoday has been dubbed an endemic country in the trafficking of human beings.

In a citation index drawn up by UNODC, Nigeria ranks as "very high" as an origin country, and together with Cote D'Ivoire and South Africa, they are frequently cited as destinations for victims trafficked from African countries, bringing with it negative portrayals and odium internationally.

Perhaps, this propelled government to enact the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Law Enforcement and Administration Act, 2003, which also created the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons and Other Related Matters (NAPTIP).  As a result, Nigeria is the first African country to enact such a law and establish a specific agency to implement it. Since its establishment, NAPTIP, in collaboration with other law enforcement agencies, international agencies like UNICEF, the Italian and Belgian governments, have collaborated towards reducing the incidence of this illicit phenomenon. According to NAPTIP, an estimated 4.5 million persons are trafficked internationally, while about  10,000 are trafficked from Nigeria annually.

Before now, many people never knew that Trafficking in Persons (TIP) and Forced Labour (FL) constituted an offence. Reactions hitherto have vacillated between ignorance and indifference. Executive Secretary of NAPTIP, Mrs. Caroline Ndaguba said it has been difficult obtaining accurate statistics on the trafficking situation in Africa because of the nature of the illicit trade. Quoting an earlier report from UNICEF on the phenomenon, she said that four per cent of repatriated victims of international trafficking in Nigeria are children. The female/male ratio is seven to three. "Internal trafficking in Nigeria was also reported to be forced labour (32 per cent), domestic labour (31 per cent) and prostitution (30 per cent)," she said. Inadequate as the statistics may be, Ndaguba said they illustrated the magnitude of human trafficking in Nigeria and efforts that need to be made to combat the illicit trade.

The agency's interventions have been in prosecuting traffickers, rehabilitating victims, collaborating with nations and agencies to fight the scourge and generally creating awareness in the public about this new menace. NAPTIP however, disagreed that poverty is not the reason and can never be the reason for human trafficking, but greed. ... "

 

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