The shocking abduction, and no return, of the 300 Nigerian schoolgirls has entered its fourth month. Fears for the fate of the girls have been escalating since they were the stars of a viral video released by their captors, the extremist group Boko Haram, just a few weeks after they were taken. The minute-long clip panned in, then out, of a dry field in an undisclosed location. The girls sat fearfully, huddled together in long grey burkas which covered their hair, but not their faces. It remains the only proof the girls may still be alive.
Thus began the social media-driven ‘#BringBackOurGirls’ campaign. Despite its many controversies and false starts, it offered some international solidarity for not just the girls taken from Chibok but for other trafficked women around world. The global outrage highlighted the urgent need to fight for the rights of countless women lured from their homes, hideously exploited – and never returned.
Worries have begun to mount, especially after Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau’s admission that he was going to sell his female captives, that the girls may have been separated, pooled into smaller groups, then trafficked as sex slaves to Europe, Asia or other African destinations. This, of course, is one of the many working theories on what might have happened to the girls. Nothing is confirmed.
Several weeks ago, unconfirmed reports from Associated Press flooded international news cycles claiming Boko Haram had struck once more. Allegedly the group kidnapped another 60 girls from villages close to Chibok along with a host of young boys.
All these incidents have turned the global attention to human trafficking – a multi-billion dollar international industry which operates in a hidden network of alleys and dimly-lit apartments, where women’s lives are traded alongside money, illegal drugs and weapons.
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Going Undercover To Report
Tobore Ovuorie, an investigative journalist with Nigeria’s Premium Times, says six out of 10 people trafficked to the West are Nigerian. She has spent the bulk of her career studying the human trafficking trade and even lost a friend because of the industry. Last year, with support from an Amsterdam newspaper, Ovuorie went undercover for seven months to find out how the African trafficking syndicates worked.
Posing as a sex worker, Ovuorie saw, first hand, the terrible realities of the trafficking world. There were the orgies, a seemingly endless supply of controlled drugs and bags full of hard currency. First Ovuorie was taken to a ‘boot camp’, which all the girls had to endure before being moved to Italy. It was there that she saw an even darker side of the business. Two of the women she was with were beheaded in front her. Ovuorie claims that the group that owned them also sold human organs on the black market.
“It was the worst moment of my investigation,” she says.
Eventually, Ovuorie escaped the syndicate at the Nigeria-Benin border. She says that she walked away from the experience, “bruised and beaten, but still alive”. She has since written about her time with the traffickers although some passionate skeptics have questioned the credibility of her account.
But that was the least of her worries.
“When I returned to write the story, I feared reprisal from the syndicates and I fear I will have to watch my back for the rest of my life. Forgive and forget isn’t written in the dictionaries of these monsters,” she wrote in an email.
Despite the controversy around it, Ovuorie says she does not regret telling her story.
“It was worth it. Human trafficking is increasing in Nigeria.”
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Lured For Work, Food, Even Love
A majority of human trafficking activity is far more insidious and calculated than the tactics of Boko Haram. In South Africa, the Durban-based anti-trafficking group, Umgeni Community Empowerment Centre (UCEC), understands this well. Their counselors have rescued scores of underaged girls soliciting on city streets especially within the local red light strip, Mahatma Gandhi Street. The girls come from a mix of backgrounds, some born in Durban while some were brought in from cities further afield like Harare, Dar es Salaam and Maputo.
It may be a different context from northern Nigeria but the impact is just as devastating. Far removed from the higher echelons of piling statistical reports and complicated legislation, counselors, like the ones at UCEC, deal with the gritty, often terrifying realities of the trafficking netherworld. The women they help are mostly drug addicts and emotionally-scarred. Trust is a rare commodity amongst these women and going home, full of shame, is never an option.
Joy Conradie, a UCEC counsellor, says these women are unwittingly drawn into the trafficking world by promises of work, money, food, clothing and, in some cases, love.
“The targeted victim is spotted, be it in a club or simply getting onto a taxi,” she says, “the traffickers will make contact and they are very charming and highly manipulative.”
Conradie says the women are usually force-fed drugs and once they become addicts, the “free party ends and the nightmare begins”. The traffickers then demand payment for the drugs. The trafficked women, now addicts and destitute, are trapped by the debt. Left with little choice, they are forced into prostitution to pay their dues. Often, refusing to sell their bodies leads to them being “beaten, raped, threatened and isolated until she gives in”. This, unfortunately, is only a single scenario. Trafficked women across the world face a diversity of abuses.
“The girls are often moved from city to city and even across borders,” Conradie claims, adding the youngest victim they have helped was just 12 years old. The irony of this kind of sexual slavery is that it is largely driven by a desperation to escape poverty which traffickers exploit with offers of jobs that don’t exist.
Conradie says it is not just poverty that allows trafficking syndicates to flourish. A lack of education and awareness within the communities where victims are sourced also contributes to the trafficking cycle. But the lack of economic options also exacerbates the situation.
“We also come across sheer desperation in child-headed households, where an older teenage girl will prostitute herself in order to feed her younger siblings,” says Conradie.
To combat human trafficking, she says, more safe houses need to be provided for victims, as well as far stricter border controls, skilled rapid response teams to investigate human trafficking cases, and comprehensive intelligence gathering to understand where and how trafficking outfits operate.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) said in May that forced labor in the private economy draws in around $150 billion in illegal profits each year. Two thirds of this figure comes directly from the sex trade.
The organization’s Director-General, Guy Ryder, said that this added “a new urgency [for] efforts to eradicate [this] fundamentally evil, but hugely profitable practice, as soon as possible”. The report also claimed that there are approximately 21 million people bound by forced labor and trafficking around the world.
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Legislation to fight trafficking syndicates has been, slowly but surely, implemented across Africa and the world. In South Africa, every province has an assigned Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force. However, their power is limited. The global nature of human trafficking implies not a local, but international solution.

She’s Not For Sale

Good things happen. Bad things happen. Ugly stuff also happens. That’s life. Life inside Nigeria today has become a sour mix of the bad and ugly overshadowing the good.
The mind-boggling scale of the latest ugly incident was a daring assault on the conscience and sensibilities of Africa’s largest nation by population. It was a bold question mark on the quality of governance in Nigeria. In the dead of night, on April 14, 276 teenage girls were abducted from their boarding school, the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State in north-eastern Nigeria.
As of going to press, well over a month after the abductions, most of the girls were yet to regain their freedom. About 40 have reportedly escaped.
The anti-establishment Islamist Boko Haram sect claimed responsibility for the dastardly act. In a video released to the media, the leader of the sect, Abubakar Shekau, vowed to sell the girls in the market and marry them off if his cohorts are not released from prison.
For days after the girls’ disappearance, Nigeria’s civil society, military and political elites were engulfed in a blame game. Propaganda was the order of the day, as it took nearly three weeks after the abductions before President Goodluck Jonathan issued a statement. The Nigerian leader’s credibility has suffered massive global and domestic erosion, says Opeyemi Agbaje, a public affairs commentator.
“His administration was left looking callous, insensitive and detached from reality.”
The outrage and protests from all corners of the world have been overwhelming for the Nigerian authorities.
“Facts are that regardless of afterthoughts that we are now being served by federal government, the institutional response to the fate of the girls was indifference,” says Oby Ezekwesili, a former vice president of the World Bank’s Africa division and former education minister in Nigeria.
Ezekwesili has been the most vocal member of the political cognoscenti leading the protests from the frontlines.
“It was only after our social media campaign migrated to street marches &#8211; Chibok women on April 29 and #BringBackOurGirls on the 30th – that we saw motion. Our pressure on the federal government to act… seems to irritate government,” Ezekwesili says.
Nigeria was the top item on global news bulletins for most of April and May – sharing the top spot with the coverage of the South Korean ferry mishap and the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms were abuzz with the #BringBackOurGirls and #ChibokGirls campaigns. The hash tags recorded over one million retweets within a couple of days in May.
On the ground, Bring Back Our Girls solidarity rallies were held in cities across the world, calling on the Nigerian authorities to fish out the girls from the Sambisa forests where they were purportedly being held captive by the militants.
A game reserve once renowned for its wildlife, the 60,000 square kilometer Sambisa forest, straddles parts of north-eastern Nigeria, bordering Chad and Niger. Sambisa village itself is flanked on the east by Gwozo town &#8211; another notorious hide out for Boko Haram insurgents &#8211; and the Mandara Mountains which form a natural barrier between Nigeria and Cameroon.
The online and offline protests galvanized international interest in Nigeria, transforming what was a local war against terror into a global crusade. Amnesty International and UNICEF backed the campaigns. Presidents, politicians, statesmen (and women) and celebrities including United States (US) first lady Michelle Obama and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while musicians Wyclef Jean and Chris Brown also added their voice to the campaign. Actors Sean Penn, Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake and Bradley Cooper also threw their weight behind the campaign with the hashtag: #RealMenDontBuyGirls.
The tragedy of Chibok has been a public relations nightmare for Africa’s recently crowned largest economy. It was a bad time to be dealing with a militant gang with possible links to Al Qaeda-friendly groups in Mali, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Abuja had been eagerly preparing to host the world’s most influential business and political leaders at the 24th World Economic Forum on Africa in May. The forum was meant to be Nigeria’s coming out party. It was however overshadowed by the global angst.
“This is not the time for us to fight or play blame games, because this is really what the terrorists want, they want us to be divided… but if we stand together and fight this together, then terror will lose… world leaders have shown through their massive attendance at this forum that they we will not allow terrorists to dictate our agenda,” finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told reporters on the sidelines of the forum.
Government instructed schools as well as public and private offices in Abuja to close shop during the forum. Foreigners attending therefore saw a different country. They saw a near empty, sober Abuja devoid of its usual political tension, cosmopolitan communities and light traffic.
“Hosting the forum was part of a campaign to open the Nigerian economy to investors… By shutting down Abuja, the president has succeeded in telling the global community that Nigeria is not a good place to do business; that government can cripple their investments at will and without any care in this world,” Kenneth Ugbechie, publisher of the Nigeria Political Economist magazine wrote.
The United Nations (UN), African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have condemned the Chibok incident, urging Nigerian authorities to rescue the girls alive. Analysts say that the government must also begin to revamp the local and national ecosystem responsible for breeding insurgency – the dire social and economic conditions prevalent in most parts of northern Nigeria. Leading nations including the US, Britain, France and China have also offered to help the Nigerian government with security intelligence and technological support.
Beyond the urge to keep impressing upon international investors to look beyond Nigeria’s economic and political pains, it is clear that insurgent activities have had a negative impact on the country’s image and reputation. Amnesty International say that Boko Haram is responsible for more than 1,500 deaths in Nigeria this year alone.
The UN estimates that 300,000 people have been displaced by the militant group’s activities since May, 2009 when the extremist beast first bared its fangs.
<h4>Politics of Doubt and Disbelief</h4>
Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo believes that ambivalence and the political shenanigans of the Nigerian state is responsible for the inability of the authorities to react with alacrity to the kidnapping of the Chibok girls. In a television appearance, he said President Goodluck Jonathan had not truly believed that the girls had been abducted, hence his hesitation to order a rescue operation. 
“The president did not believe that those girls were abducted for almost 18 days,” Obasanjo said. 
“If the president got the information within 12 hours of the act and he reacted immediately, I believe those girls would have been rescued within 24 hours, maximum 48 hours. The president had doubts; ‘Is this true or is it a ploy by some people who don’t want me to be president again?’ I don’t believe he has performed to the expectations of many Nigerians, not just me.”

Tag: Chibok

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

She’s Not For Sale

The Shame Of The Bad And Ugly