Some time ago, 26 coffins bearing the remains of some Nigerian women lay in state in a seashore at a cemetery in southern Italy where a bishop and Imam led prayers for all the female victims. According to an online news portal, INFORMATION NIGERIA, the Mediterranean Sea claimed the lives of 60 other lives in the fateful accident off Libya 15 days earlier, but those bodies sank. Young people who died at sea for nothing but a piece of bread.
Nearly 3,000 men, women and children have died attempting the perilous crossing since the beginning of the year. According to the United Nations, 50 per cent of young Nigerian women arriving Italy are already in the clutches of prostitution workers, of quickly falling under their control”. While working on this article, I stumbled on an exclusive online report titled, “People for sale: Where lives are auctioned for $400.” The report stated inter alia: “…Not a used car, a piece of land, or an item of furniture. Not merchandise at all, but two human beings”. The report went further to state that “one of the unidentified men being sold in the grainy cell phone video obtained by the CNN is a Nigerian who appears to be in his twenties and is wearing a pale shirt and sweatpants; he has been offered up for sale as one of a group of ‘big strong boys for farm work’ according to the auctioneer, who remains off camera. Only his hand – resting proprietarily on the man’s shoulder – is visible in the brief clip”.
And in order to verify the authenticity of the video, the CNN reporters were said to have travelled to Libya to investigate further. Carrying concealed cameras into a property outside the capital of Tripoli in October 2017, the CNN reporters witnessed a dozen people go “under the hammer” in the space of six or seven minutes.
And what is the major reason for this modern-day slave trade being practised by the human traffickers/smugglers?
This same CNN exclusive report provided the answer to the question. According to the report, each year, tens of thousands of people pour across Libyan borders. They are refugees fleeing conflicts or economic migrants in search of better opportunities in Europe. Most sell everything they own to finance the journey through Libya to the coast and the gateway to the Mediterranean. But a recent clampdown by the Libyan coastguard meant fewer boats were making it to the sea, leaving the smugglers with a backlog of would-be passengers on their hands. So, the smugglers become masters while the migrants and refugees become slaves.
And this is the fate that has been befalling a lot of Black Africans including many Nigerians who had been embarking on the ill-fated voyages to Europe from Libya through the Mediterranean Sea in recent years. Some of them who couldn’t make it to Italy and the other European countries due to lack of adequate means of water transport ended up being sold into slavery in Libya and Saudi Arabia. And those who managed to cross over the death zone to Europe found themselves practising prostitution (willingly or unwillingly). And in extreme cases, some of them ended up on the slaughter slabs of smugglers/human traffickers who specialise in killing their victims for the main purpose of harvesting their vital organs for sale to hospitals that need such vital organs for sale for the use of their patients!
This group of wicked smugglers are called human parts dealers whose activities and mode of operation have been extensively covered in our previous articles in this newspaper.
The articles were published when Yemi Osinbajo was the Acting President while President Muhammadu Buhari was away on a prolonged medical vacation in London. But, no action was taken by the Presidency. Maybe, the publication of the articles on how Nigerian youths were being tricked into modern-day slavery and prostitution with some of them ending up in abattoirs of human parts dealers was not brought to the notice of Osinbajo then. Maybe, in his capacity as the Acting President then, if Osinbajo had gone through the said articles, which were widely circulated, he would probably have acted promptly to prevent the recent unfortunate fate that befell the 26 female Nigerians in their attempt to migrate from Libya to Europe through the overcrowded boat that buried them in the Mediterranean Sea.
While the recent action taken by the Presidency in constituting a high-level probe panel to investigate the untimely death of these young Nigerians is welcome, it may be an exercise in futility if the Federal Government fails to address the remote and the immediate causes of mass emigration of Nigerian youths into the Europe through the Mediterranean Sea despite the attendant risks. And these causes have been identified and addressed in our previous articles. In a nutshell, we did point out in the said articles how Nigerian youths, among other Black Africans were being sold into slavery in Saudi Arabia while those who managed to escape to Asian countries like China ended up in the hands of body parts dealers who allegedly murdered them and harvested their vital organs for sale.
We therefore appeal to the Federal Government to put the necessary machinery in place to rescue Nigerians, especially the vulnerable youths, from the captivity they found themselves in these affected foreign lands as soon as possible in the short run. In the long run, the government should recover more looted funds with a view to improving the standards of living of more Nigerians, creating a favourable economic climate at home and creating more job opportunities.
We commiserate with the bereaved families of those young ladies who probably may be unaware of the cruel fate that has befallen their loved ones in search of the so-called greener pastures.
Gbemiga Olakunle, Abuja, gbemigaolakunle@yahoo.co.uk
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