Kidnapping, theft and trading in northern children, by Abu Shekara
Last September, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), paraded on television, eight children who were seized from Kano and other Northern states by abductors and trafficked to the South–South and South–East through an interstate child trafficking syndicate.
In the incident, a member of the syndicate admitted to selling 21 children to one Nkechi Odlyne, who allegedly sold seven of them to one Christopher Ogugua Nwoye, proprietor of Happy Home Orphanage in Asaba, at N450,000 each. NAPTIP disclosed that three of the children were from Gombe, while one had been claimed by a Kano mother as her missing daughter, Aisha Buhari.
The agency revealed that the minors aged between two and ten years, were discovered in an orphanage allegedly run by a senior executive of the Association of Orphanage Operators in Nigeria, where more than 70 children, including 15 fresh babies were inmates.
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In January 2025, NAPTIP
in Birnin Kebbi, capital of Kebbi State in Northwest Nigeria, said it had rescued 19 children trafficked from Zuru area of State to Calabar, Cross River State.While presenting nine out of the children, whose parents had been identified to the State Governor, Nasir Idris, the State Commander of NAPTIP, Musbau Iya Kaura, said the agency rescued the minors from syndicates that specialized in child trafficking in Calabar.
Identifying six persons, including a female lecturer in Calabar, amongst suspects arrested and charged to court in connection with the crime,
the Commander added that the Calabar syndicates paid between N280,000 and N450,000 per abducted child.
The abduction of most children from the North to the South did not start recently in Nigeria. In October 2022
NAPTIP in Akwa Ibom State smashed a kosyndicate, specialised in seizing minors and selling them to willing buyers. The zonal head of the agency, Tina Ugwu, revealed that about a dozen minors of ages from three to nine were rescued from abductors in a camp along Calabar-Itu Road.
For a couple of years now, both conventional and online media have carried reports of incidents of abductions of children from cities and towns in Northern Nigeria to locations in the South. Many of these abductions are often verified by government anti-trafficking and security agencies.
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Majority of the victims are Muslim, who are seized by abductors from the Southern part of the country and taken to holding centres in Southern communities, where they are over time, raised under new identities and religious belief. Those recovered are often re-christened and taught a new religion to replace the beliefs of their folks and in most cases employed as domestic servants or possibly used for more sinister purposes.
While governmental and non-gover mental agencies battle the perpetrators of these nefarious acts, there has not been any deliberate effort to fathom the exact motives of the bizarre development, much less ascertain whether the occurrences are just a form of random crime or the manifestation of a deliberate agenda. But Northern Nigeria is engrossed in a more pervasive security crises, of which its Muslim population are being collectively stigmatised as perpetrators, instead of the victims they too are.
The incidents of abduction may seem disconnected but the one-way trafficking of the victims from the North to the South depicts a pattern that demands a closer scrutiny. The number of kidnapped minors discovered in the cases solved by NAPTIP, which are undoubtedly only the tip of the iceberg, suggests that a huge population of children are being rustled like cattle, in a burgeoning industry that even the agency has admitted is run by syndicates.
This population “theft” coupled with the massacre of whole communities through insurgency and banditry is inexorably decimating the number people in the Muslim North. And especially considering that it is targeting the youngest segment of the society, it poses another longer term danger for the future of this part of the country and its people.
Southern Nigeria would have since reached these conclusions if the situation was the other way round. The matter would have assumed national dimension and attracted global attention. Northerners, both Muslims and Christians, would be collectively branded as child abductors and find venturing into Southern towns and cities even more perilous, as each case gains extensive media hype.
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A case in point is that of Ese Oruru, the 14 year old girl who eloped to Kano from Bayelsa State with the teen ager, Yunusa Dahiru In 2015. As the Southern media and activists like Dr Obiageli Ezekwesiki, joined forces and with the cooperation of the Kano Emirate Council, the matter transformed into a case of abduction, forced marriage and forced conversion to Islam, which ended in Dahiru going to jail.
Unlike the South, the Muslim North have neither the capacity nor commitment to stand up to worse criminal infringements on their safety and dignity by strangers, who carry far more dastardly acts in their communities. In Northern Nigeria, the likes of Ezekwesili or Sunday Igboho do not exist to advocate for indigenes or guard the people against perceived injustice or physical threats posed by venturers into the land.
Meanwhile, the North is embroiled in internal acrimonies. Externally sponsored insecurity is causing the disintegration of the Hausa-Fulani, ethnic group, a stock forged by a century of matrimonial connection, social integration and adherence to the same religious belief. The resultant identity dispute stemming from this is fired by a narrative based on ancient history that is being promoted by sponsored agents of subterranean interests.
Like a piece of a puzzle fitting into place, the coinciding of these events serves as a clue to unraveling the myriad of crises ravaging the entire Northern Nigeria, which are more and more being exposed to be a strategy of dismantling and weakening this geopolitical unit. Child abductors, bandits, insurgents and promoters of the Christian genocide narrative are actors in this orchestrated gambit, who are synchronising efforts towards realising the desired outcome.
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Coming to terms and dealing with the reality of this destructive agenda with openness and sincerity is the only means by which the North can survive as the monolithic entity it used to be. If however matters have so degenerated as to make that impracticable, the North must embrace structural separation between its two major religious groups, as the sole remaining option, with or without regard to what may occur in the rest of the country.
Abu Shekara, a former Deputy Editor of
Leadership Newspaper, lives in Arkila, Sokoto.
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