HUMAN TRAFFICKERS ARE MURDERERS

Fabian Amadi urges all stakeholders to unite against human traffickers

To some people, the above title may appear like an exaggeration of fact and it could polarize public opinion if a suggestion is made for penalizing those who traffic in persons with the same position of the law to criminals who kill with guns.  I am not a lawyer so I lack their competence in such a debate but I can freely anchor an opinion on the human conscience.

There are people who allow their conscience to rebuke them for getting things wrong and others whose attention is so much on selfishness that no voice can dissuade them. I denounce human traffickers as murderers for merchandising the lives of others. If we are objectively honest, that business is real cannibalism. Here are notes for classifying those in the wicked practice as killers.

Anyone that trades in human beings is a dream killer because every normal person always had dreams right from childhood. With time, how to make money or more of it may expand into the mix and generate the ambience for greedy people to craftily locate their targets in life arena. That is the stock -in- trade of human traffickers who package their dragnet to enmesh people either briefly informed or afflicted with avarice.

 They convince unsuspecting listeners that the streets of Europe are overlaid with gold and that anyone walking on them is at liberty to break out some or pick up as much as needed in ready quantum. The listener begins to query his or her existing dream.

 In most cases however, the only dreams that remain alive are those of family members back home who continue to expect their own share of the secretly bloated and celebrated largess. It is only unfortunate that they are disconnected from their relation because at a particular intersection of the journey, the victim’s phone is confiscated by the syndicate. Stories abound of twists in the tales that as family members remain hopeful, their relation are never ever seen again.

Human traffickers “kill” government plans for their compatriots as so much funds running into billions of dollars yearly are carved for or diverted to fighting the crime. Yet the criminal practice does not get abated but spirals. A former president of USA, President Barack Obama summarized the illicit business succinctly thus: “When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery. When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family — girls my daughters’ age — runs away from home, or is lured by the false promises of a better life, and then imprisoned in a brothel and tortured if she resists — that’s slavery. It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world.”

The dangerous consortiums also “kill” what God loves dearly. The book of Genesis Chapter one has in each of the following verses 10, 12, 18, 21 and 25, where God described His various creations as good. In Verse 27 He created man in His own image and likeness, and for that reason, God in verse 31, changed His use of words from ordinary “good” to “very good”.  God’s perception of “very good” must be heavier than our understanding of “excellence”. This should be remarkable and anybody that tampers with or converts God’s valuable to business or merchandise should be culpable.

If it seems like I am pontificating, let me get a bail out from the same former American President: “…For we know that every life saved — in the words of that great Proclamation — is ‘an act of justice’; worthy of ‘the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God’.”

What I consider necessary is to unleash a collaborative world-wide onslaught against the crime, which means that all hands must be on deck. Legislation must be maximized with enforcement on its heels and unrelentingly mustering every available resource.

 A former American First lady and Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton said it more clearly:

“Traffickers must be brought to justice. And we can’t just blame international organized crime and rely on law enforcement to pursue them. It is everyone’s responsibility. Businesses that knowingly profit or exhibit reckless disregard about their supply chains, governments that turn a blind eye or do not devote serious resources to addressing the problem, all of us have to speak out and act forcefully.”

There is a fact to bear in mind, you may be secured where you live, but you have friends and relations who may be preys to the human traffickers, a situation you cannot control and may regret with time.

Necessity demands therefore that we report the activities and hideouts of the evil people wherever found so that they can be traced, pulled out and dumped into where they should be residing – the prison yard.

 I have this metaphoric story for a conclusion:

While playing with his friends, a boy started throwing stones into a nearby market. One of his friends warned that those stones could hit somebody, but the wanton boy replied, “I don’t care”. After a while some people in the market chased after the boys but they ran away.

By the evening, the boy that threw stones sat at the dining table waiting for his supper. As his mother appeared from the kitchen, he noticed that she had a bandage covering her head and one of her eyes. He asked to know why and his mother narrated:

I went to the market today to buy the ingredients for preparing this supper, a stone hit my eye. It was thrown by a naughty boy who escaped into the bush with his friends as some people in the market started chasing them.

The boy lost appetite immediately. Tears flowed from his eyes followed by a wailing that attracted their neighbours.

 Who had earlier said “I don’t care”?  Be warned!

 Amadi is Creative Consultant,

Febis Multi-Concepts, Lagos