Child slavery rife in Nigeria
2007-12-12 15:02
Abeokuta - Irenee, a skinny Beninese girl of 15, points to three mounds of earth: the graves of her friends who died of exhaustion here in the gravel quarries of Abeokuta, in south-western Nigeria.
The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) said about 5 000 children from neighbouring Benin were labouring here, eight hours a day, six days a week.
In the sweltering heat and in the lashing rain, Irenee crushes chunks of granite rock, naked to the waist, her skin coated in a thick layer of grime.
Failure to produce her quota, whatever the weather conditions, brought with it the risk of being beaten up.
School was just a word. Bed was a spot in the bush, where she and her young co-workers curled up and slept as best they could under the stars.
In September 2003, when she was just 11, Irenee and 260 other children were freed by the Nigerian police and sent home, after a dispute between two rival trafficking gangs.
Parents sell kids for money
But their parents sold them again to traffickers and they ended up back in Abeokuta, some 100km north of Lagos. She said: "I came back in November 2005 with my little brother Paul. Eighteen of us came and three have died."
The idea was that the child was sold into bonded labour for a fixed term - normally two or three years. At the end of the term, he got a bicycle and $100 or $200. If he completed three terms, his master might build a new hut for the child's family.
Sometimes children came home with a decent sum of money in their pockets and became masters themselves, sending small boys to work across the border, either in the quarries or in cocoa or sugarcane plantations.
Many of the families who sold their children into slavery were unapologetic.
"How do you expect me to keep 37 children here when I have no income?" shrugged Luc Gbogbohoundada, an octogenarian with eight wives.
Za-Kpota 'child-trafficking capital'
Gbogbohoundada lived in Za-Kpota, a village across the border in Benin about 150km from Abeokuta. Za-Kpota was notorious as the child-trafficking capital of the region.
It accounted for 70% of all cases reported in Benin, a small underdeveloped west African state of only eight million, compared to neighbouring Nigeria's 135 million.
"When they brought our children back, the government said we would get financial help. That was four years ago and we haven't seen a cent yet," the old man grumbled.
He took great pride in his wives and his children, aged, he says, from babies to 55, despite his avowed inability to feed them.
Ironically, it was a local tradition here for the older brother who made good to come back to the village to take his younger siblings or nephews away to educate them - that had been distorted into child trafficking, locals said.
In the dusty red streets of the village, which turned into rivers of red mud during the rains, dozens of children ran around. Other children, and adults, came back from cultivating maize, groundnuts and cotton.
The land here could no longer support the huge families that had sprung up from generations of polygamous marriages.
In spite of the children who brought home bicycles and money to smarten up huts Za'Kpota looks just as wretched as any other poor village.