ENDING ALL FORMS OF SLAVERY   

All major stakeholders must do more to stem the shameful practice

On a day set aside by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNSECO) for the remembrance of the Slave Trade and its abolition, it is important for stakeholders in Nigeria to examine how this scourge is still being perpetrated within. According to The Slavery Convention of the League of Nations adopted in 1926, slavery refers to “the situation of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, and/or abuse of power.” By this definition, someone does not have to be in chains and ferried across the Atlantic Ocean or Sahara Desert to be a slave. They become slaves when transaction is made with them in the community they live. The reality today is that many Nigerians fall into this category. Our country is host to the highest number of enslaved people in sub-Saharan Africa. The breakdown of that sum shows that majority of the affected persons are forced into domestic, industrial, and commercial labour, marriages or are simply given out to relations under innocuous circumstances.  

A journal paper, ‘Gender and modern-day slavery in Nigeria: A critical analysis of baby factory and terrorism’ in ‘ScienceDirect’ last year drew global attention to one of the social issues hardly discussed by the authorities in Nigeria. While the malaise of modern slavery cuts across gender, the report concludes that in Nigeria, “the disproportionate economic and power relations (such as inequalities, poverty, social exclusion, exploitations, and obnoxious cultural practices)” has engendered a situation in which women “serve as economic-slaves, sex-slaves, procreation-slaves, and money-ritual-slaves.”  

The article confirms recent estimates by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) which placed Nigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo high on the list of countries where modern slavery is still prevalent. Not surprisingly, the Nigerian profile reflects the severity of the scourge across Africa. Various relevant organisations have identified the continent as home to the largest prevalence of slavery on earth, with more than seven per cent of every 1000 people as victims, according to the 2017 ILO report. The situation has not changed.    

What makes the Nigerian condition more worrisome is its ignoble recognition as one of the world’s leading culprits in three critical areas of source, transit, and destination as well as the continued abductions of women and girls by insurgents and bandits, especially in the North. For the past two decades, Europe and North Africa have continued to benefit from the growing incidence of emigration among Nigerians in search of the proverbial greener pastures. But instead of actualising their dreams, many of them end up being sexually exploited – one of the most widespread forms of present-day captivity – or trapped in other ways.  

Unfortunately, not even stories of the tortuous and precarious journeys through the Sahara to Libya and then, less frequently to Europe have been able to dissuade our young men and women from gambling with their lives. Consequently, many of them have caused themselves harm, brought sorrow to their relations and tarnished the international image of our country. For insurgents and bandits, their targets have always been women and girls who are usually deployed as sex slaves.    

The abundant presence of these evils in Nigeria today requires bold, well-designed, and executed government interventions which could hopefully serve as catalysts for more productive involvement of the private sector in this campaign. Only concerted, collaborative efforts aimed at empowering the populace and restoring the dignity of the citizenry can effectively curb the current manifestations of servitude that is akin to modern slavery.