Tales of Abuja’s underage sex workers
Young girls are trafficked to Abuja from different parts of the country for exploitative commercial sex work, most times by relatives or friends.
A recent raid on a brothel in Kubwa, an Abuja satellite town, by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), in collaboration with the police, rescued 11 juvenile girls.
“It is not my dream to be in that place because it is not the best place I wish to be, but circumstances brought me here, and in order to continue to survive, I had to stay and hustle,” one of the victims now under NAPTIP custody said.
She said she had been in the brothel for the past nine months.
She added that her aunt who brought her to Abuja gave her to a family in Zuba to work as a housemaid, but that the work was too much for her, and that for the eight months she served in the house, she was not paid.
“The man was paying my wages to my aunt and that was why I ran away from the place. My aunt and her family are now out of Nigeria. From there, I went to a place in the same Zuba and continued to work,” she said.
When asked the type of work she did in Zuba, she said prostitution, explaining that that was the only thing left for her to do.
“One night the police came to our place and arrested everybody, including our customers. I later ran away to Nyanya from where I came to this Kubwa,” she said.
She added that she was not happy engaging in prostitution because “I don’t want to steal.”
Another 17-year-old victim said it was hardship that brought her to the brothel.
“I needed to do something because I lost my parents and there is nobody to help me,” she said.
Asked if that was the only job she could do, she questioned back, “Tell me any other job you want me to do. Will you give me money to start business? Answer me so that I can make up my mind. My situation was very bad when I came to Abuja. I had nowhere to stay, no food to eat and nothing to do at all. So I met a girl who told me to come and stay with her and she was the one that introduced me to this work.
“I came to that place about seven months ago. I was first living at Masaka before I came to the brothel,” she explained.
One of the brothels, Thales Guest House, located at Pipeline Area in Kubwa, was sealed off after the raid.
The raid, reportedly, followed an intelligence report about the place being used for underage and exploitative prostitution.
Surveillance was mounted by NAPTIP which led to the arrest of four suspects: Onyinyechi Osuoha (32), Nkechi Chukwuma (37), Sandra Chi (32) and Favour James (27).
Despite advocacy by different agencies, many young girls keep falling prey to traffickers as a result of ignorance on their part and their parents.
As the fight against trafficking and other related offences continue, NAPTIP said it was bent on ridding the nation of issues relating to such crime.
The Director General of NAPTIP, Dame Julie OkahDonli, said the agency carried out many raids recently and that the one on Kubwa was not the biggest.
“We actually had a raid somewhere on the outskirts of Abuja not too long ago, but this was also a major raid in the sense that we were able to apprehend four female suspects who are believed to have trafficked girls between the ages of 14 and 17 for the purpose of prostitution.
“We were able to rescue 11 girls who are with us undergoing rehabilitation. We are definitely going to prosecute the offenders. This is an act that contravenes Section 15, A-B, Section 16, 1-2, Section 1, B, of the Trafficking in Person’s Prohibition and Administration Act of 2015,” she said.
The DG added that investigation revealed that the girls were trafficked to Abuja from various parts of the country under various modes of deceit.
“Some of them have been operating like slaves for the past two or three years. Investigation is ongoing and we can assure you that they would be prosecuted diligently,” she said.
She lamented that the punitive measure was light thereby making people to keep engaging in human trafficking.
She, however, said, “Very soon, when it gets to the National Assembly, we hope it would be expedited due to the seriousness of the crime.”
She also said they were embarking on advocacy whereby they expected everybody: the media, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), private and public organisations and the general public to partner with NAPTIP in the fight against trafficking in persons.
On a visit to Thales Guest House, it was discovered to be one of the popular relaxation spots in Kubwa. The brothel, which is a cluster of bungalows, is situated in Kubwa Village, one of the densely populated areas in Kubwa. Its proximity to the Kubwa Village Market and the Gbazango Road attracts fun seekers.
“The guest house is one of the ‘happening places’ in Kubwa, it accommodates and sells alcohol and commercial sex workers are in abundance,” Mohammed Sadiq, a resident, said.
Another resident, Usman Tahiru, said the guest house had been there for more than 20 years, adding that he grew up in the area knowing the guest house to be a place for prostitution, but said it was recently that he started noticing that there were underage girls among the prostitutes.
Usman said the closure of the place led to serenity and sanity in the area, and added that aside the noise pollution the guest house produced, the activities of prostitutes leads to increase in crime rate in the area.
“The residents have commended government for sealing up the brothel,” Tahiru said and stressed that the area is now calm and residents went about their businesses without fear of harassment from the police or hoodlums.
He added that due to the kind of people that patronised the hotel, the police, who carried out indiscriminate raids, usually arrested many innocent people.
Another resident, Ibrahim Dahiru, said since the guest house was sealed, nobody entered the premises, and added that the residents now rested better at night as they were without fear of arrest or hoodlums.