Human Trafficking: Ex-Immigration CG, Varsity Don Implore FG To Address Unemployment, Poverty

The former Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), Muhammad Babandede, has called on the federal government to take concrete steps towards providing jobs for the youths and reducing poverty rate in the country so as to end human trafficking.

Babandede made the call at a national stakeholders consultative forum with religious leaders to combat and prevent human trafficking and unsafe migration in Nigeria organised by Women’s Aid Collective (WACOL) in Abuja yesterday.

According to the former NIS boss,

arresting offenders alone will not stop the menace, saying the conditions pushing Nigerians out of the country were getting worse by the days hence they should be looked into.

He said Nigeria would not make significant progress as indicated in the U.S. Department of State’s classification of the nation as a Tier 2 country in the 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report if the root causes of human trafficking -poverty and unemployment are not addressed since law enforcement action alone cannot work.

Countries ranked Tier 2 are those whose governments “do not fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection.”

Babandede said, “When there is a river flowing, if you block the flow of the river, you know it won’t stop flowing. You need to block while at the same time going back to the root of it. I think we are only doing the blockage. We are not looking at the root cause of the problem. Law enforcement action, caregiving, and preaching are all secondary jobs.

“The major issue is the conditions that pushed people away and as long as that conditions don’t change, people will continue to move. So the conditions which push Nigerians out are still getting worse, life is getting more difficult, jobs are difficult to get. So the push factors are greater than what you are doing to prevent it.

“I think we need to do more than just law enforcement actions, campaigns because we need to improve the life of the people to ensure that people have jobs and people can look inward rather than outside. Law enforcement like arrest, arrest cannot solve the problem. You need to educate the people so that they don’t take this dangerous journey.

“You have some people spend as much as one million naira to travel, because the cost of a ticket is very important. If you have one million naira and have good guidance in Nigeria, you can get a lot of money. You can become another multi-millionaire. So we need to use the clerics to talk to the people who have direct contact with them. I think it’s a good strategy”, Babandede noted.

On her part, the executive director of WACOL, Professor Joy Ezeilo,

called on the government to address the root causes of unsafe migration, adding that National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) should be better equipped to tackle the menace.

Ezeilo, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons and Dean, Faculty of Law at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka

noted that Nigeria was a source, transit, and destination country for the trafficking of women and girls for forced labour and sexual exploitation.