'Lucky' child slaves survive
2003-10-24 14:03
Onigongon, Nigeria - Lured from home by the promise of a bicycle, Wasiu Goyikon entered a life of hard labour at nine - smashing stones into gravel in Nigeria's sweltering granite quarries.
Nearby, boys as young as four struggled with rocks and hammers. Always, the boys were worked to exhaustion; sometimes, they were worked to death.
The rescue of 190 scarred and beaten child workers - none older than 15 - from Nigeria's quarries, and the arrests of six smugglers who allegedly put them there, comes as part of an unprecedented West Africa challenge to child-trafficking.
But, at about R1.40 a day, in a land where poverty offers few options, Wasiu has a job he wants.
'What choice do we have?'
"The next time I go home, I will bring my younger brother back to work here," Wasiu, now 15, told reporters, sweating as he swung a hammer. "What choice do we have?"
At that salary, Wasiu and two friends shovel and smash enough gravel to fill the dump truck that is their daily quota. Each day's load is sold for $50 - more than 100 times their combined wages.
Wasiu is one of the lucky ones: He got his bike. He survived. And at the end of his last contract, he received his wages for years at hard labour: $146.
Since September, Nigerian police have arrested six alleged smugglers, including accused kingpin Gilbert Zinjo, for allegedly trafficking children into the pits from across the border in Benin, one of the world's poorest countries.
Zinjo's ring signed up the children with payments to their parents of as little as $30. They promised the boys gifts that seldom materialised, according to investigators, charities and the children.
The children rescued from the pits around Abeokuta - hometown of President Olusegun Obasanjo - told of 13 boys succumbing to disease, hunger and overwork in the three months before their deliverance.
A Benin man who describes himself as on a mission against child labour in Nigeria played a key role in their rescue.
Dauda Ewenje and a dozen supporters calling themselves his "strike force" took video images of boys only a few years past toddler stage being forced to work in open pit mines and manioc fields.
In August and September, the group - working with a sympathetic police officer - strong-armed 190 boys "kicking and screaming" from traffickers and whisked the youngsters away in vans. Some children initially thought they were being kidnapped by rival traffickers.
The rescues - the largest such operation in memory in West Africa - come under an August accord by Benin and Nigeria to fight cross-border crime, including child-trafficking.
Nigerian police spokesperson Chris Olakpe acknowledged "thousands of trafficked children are being subjected to slave labour in different parts of the country."
"But we're moving faster than the criminals," Olakpe insisted.
AP writer Dulue Mbachu in Lagos contributed to this report.
- AP