NAPTIP takes anti-trafficking campaign to Edo schools

By Ozioruva Aliu

BENIN CITY – DETERMINED to dissuade young people and potential victims, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) has taken the campaign against trafficking to some public schools in Edo State where they also inaugurated an anti-trafficking club among the students with a mandate to continue the campaign trafficking to their fellow students.

Speaking at the Niger College in Benin City, the Zonal Commander, NAPTIP Zonal Command, Benin City, Barr. Sam Offiah urged the students not to fall into the hands of traffickers who would lure them with non-existing promises all in a bid to enslave them.

He said some traffickers lure their victims with promises like they would travel by flight and jobs waiting for them abroad only for the victims to find themselves traveling by road mostly through the desert and those who make it abroad find themselves working in farm plantations as labourers in inhuman conditions.

Offiah said the NAPTIP was out to ensure those anomalies do not happen to them so that they can be good old students of their schools.

“If you are trafficked, you may not be there when your classmates are meeting.

“When you are trafficked, your organs, your body parts may be taken; your lungs, your kidney, your eye cone, your sight, your eyes, they can pluck it or they cut off your kidney and sell it and when they do that, the person will die and when you die, you will not be among the old Students association of this school.

“We don’t want any of you to be trafficked. We want you to graduate here, go to university, study the profession of your choice then you also become a functional member of our society.

“What is expected from you is to stay back in school, read your notes, pass your exams, then you graduate. A person that is trafficked is a person that is used as a product.

“They will use you and exploit you, they can exploit you sexually. If you’re a young girl, they may ask you to go and prostitute and when you prostitute, they will take your money that you made out of it. Another form of trafficking working is domestic servitude. They can take you to the city centers and they make you work from morning till 12am and you wake up by 3am to start working for the next day.

“They tell you that if you go abroad, you will work in an industry, or you work in a cosmetic shop, or you work in a factory, or you work in a big company. Then when you go there, they will take you to a farm where you work, where your intelligence will be exploited and you work there.”

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