Nigerian journalist rescues 4 refugee children from human trafficker

Four teenage girls, who were on their way to Cameroon having been trafficked from a refugee settlement in southern Nigeria, were rescued last weekend by Nigerian journalist Philip Obaji in the town of Ikom, near the border with Cameroon.

The four girls, who are between the ages of 13 and 15, are refugees from Cameroon who fled the fighting between government forces and English-speaking separatists in the southwest of Central African nation to Adagom community in Nigeria’s southeastern Cross River State, where thousands of Anglophone Cameroonians are taking refuge.

A male trafficker had transported the girls in a black Volkswagen Golf saloon car from Adagom to Ikom (about 91km south of Adagom) and was about to refuel his vehicle in a gas station when Obaji accosted him.

“I had seen him (the trafficker) in Adagom earlier in the day talking to one girl after the other around the refugee settlement, so I suspected he was up to something,” said Obaji.

“I was watching him from afar without him knowing. When I saw him driving out of Adagom with girls inside the car, I decided to follow them with my own car.”

According to Obaji, when the journalist met the trafficker and the girls at the gas station, he requested to know who the man was and where he was taking the girls to.

“He was initially silent and when he later spoke, he said the girls were his relatives whom he was taking back to Cameroon and then said I had no right to question him,” said Obaji. “When I threatened to call the police, he quickly ordered the girls out of the car and drove off.”

The journalist, who is currently the sub-Saharan Africa correspondent for The Daily Beast, said he quickly arranged for a commercial vehicle to take the girls back to the Adagom refugee settlement, where they were trafficked from.

One of victims—a 15-year-old girl who gave her name as Peace—said she and the other girls were told they were being taken to the Cameroonian border town of Ekok to work in a farm and would be brought back to Adagom after work is completed later at night. She said the girls were told not to inform any member of their families.

“He said if we told anyone, they may delay us or even stop us from going,” said Peace. “He promised he was going to pay 20,000 naira to each of us if we agreed to do the work.”

This is not the first time Cameroonian refugees would be trafficked from Adagom. Obaji—an award-winning reporter who focuses a lot on human trafficking—had previously reported how a trafficker used Facebook to advertise and market girls in the refugee settlement.

The journalist, who founded Up Against Trafficking to combat human trafficking in refugee amd IDP camps, is known for his efforts to portray human trafficking as an overlooked consequence of war and for rescuing dozens of uprooted people from human traffickers.