Sex Traffickers Target Teenage Girls in Nigeria’s IDP Camp

On a breezy evening in early January 2021, six teens — five girls and one boy — walked briskly behind Madame Joy as she led the way to a motor park to catch a night bus due to depart from Makurdi — the capital of Nigeria’s northern state of Benue — for Kaima in Kwara state, in the western part of the country. Anyone observing the group would assume that they were off to school as each child clutched a backpack containing clothes and a few essentials.

Barely 72 hours earlier, Madame Joy hardly knew any of them by their names. She visited several camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Benue, selling the promise of job opportunities for “pretty girls” in her grocery stores in Kwara state, which, she said, would then assist their families back home. She found the youths at an IDP camp in Daudu.

Her real name is Nguamo Joy. By day, she poses as the owner of a pub in Kaima, which serves as the base for her sex trafficking operations. Daudu camp officials were allegedly recruited by Joy to help convince the children’s families that they would be safe and able to send money home in a matter of months.

According to a 2017 report by the International Labor Organization (ILO), human trafficking earns roughly $150 billion a year for traffickers — a lucrative venture for people like Madame Joy. Women and girls in IDP camps are especially vulnerable, lured by the shiny assurances of gainful employment as domestic workers, waitresses, or hotel maids.

The five girls were eventually trafficked; the boy would serve as a barman in their new destination.

The harsh reality

Aondohember Mneater was in secondary school when herdsmen invaded her village in 2018, in an attack that reportedly killed more than 83 people. She narrowly escaped death then, and relocated to the Daudu camp with her family.

The day Mneater, now 20, left with Madame Joy, she recalls hauling her backpack onto the back of the bus with vigor and excitement, grateful to her new guardian for taking her away from the squalor of the camp.

“I was so happy that my goodbye to my mother was a brief one,” Mneater told me. She speaks barely-passable English and switches to her native Tiv to communicate effectively. “At the time, I thought I was signing up for a good life. I practically jumped out with my bag.”

But when she arrived in Kaima, there was no cashier job waiting for her. Instead, she was forced into a tiny room in what seemed like a hostel at the back of her benefactress’ pub, where other ladies also lived.

Mneater said Madame Joy assigned them rooms and offered the new arrivals packs of spaghetti and cornflour meal to prepare and eat before she left to run errands that afternoon.

When Joy returned several hours later, Mneater said, she called the girls together and handed out nylon sacks with g-string panties, bras, packs of condoms, and “skimpy” attire. “She said to put it on and get ready for business.”

The girls were to charge a minimum fee of N500($1.22) per client. “For Fulani or Hausa men, charge N1,000 ($2.44), but for men from other tribes, you charge N500,” she said. Fulani or Hausa men, Mneater said, were billed higher because they were believed to take performance-enhancing drugs to prolong sessions.

“A full day of service outside the brothel costs N3,000 ($7.32).”

The only way any of them would be able to leave was if they repaid Madame Joy for their transport costs, the sum of N14,000 ($34). Debt bondage is a standard method used by traffickers, who often coerce victims into signing a moral remittance contract with them to finance their journey.

Mneater said she was the only one that kept a phone on her. When Madame Joy left the premises that evening, she placed a distressed phone call to an acquaintance—Sunday Felix Akperega, an officer of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in Benue. It had only been 19 hours since their arrival.

Within an hour, an officer from the Kwara NSCDC was dispatched to the brothel to facilitate their release.

By midnight, Madame Joy was arrested, and she and the teens boarded the next bus leaving Kwara back to Benue state. Upon arrival the next evening, officers of the National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Person (NAPTIP), an agency charged with combating human trafficking in Nigeria, took custody of Joy at the bus station.

Joy has since been released on bail, pending trial.

A disturbing trend

While Nigeria is a signatory to the Transnational Organized Crime Convention (TOC), which prohibits all acts of trafficking — with its own law criminalizing Madame Joy’s operations — sex trafficking remains prevalent in the country. Between 2019 and 2020 alone, Nigeria recorded 1,881 cases of trafficking.

According to sources familiar with Madame Joy’s operations (who asked to remain anonymous for their safety), most of the trafficked women and girls are from Benue, a claim Mneater supports. Women and displaced persons in conflict-rift states like Benue are at greater risk of being trafficked, said Barrister Ruth Evon-Benson Idahosa, executive director of Pathfinders Justice Initiative, an international organization working to prevent sex slavery and sexual violence.

“This is a common trend we have seen in situations of conflict due to insecurity,” she said. “Their bodies are used as pawns.”

Betrayal close to home

Mbayi Bridget, Mneater’s mother, told me that two IDP delegates of the camp had introduced Madame Joy to her as an “honest businesswoman”: Torgega Geoffery, a former chairman representing the IDPs at Daudu, and Ugber Emmanuel—Mneater’s uncle. Since her brother was involved in the arrangement, Bridget acquiesced to letting her daughter go.

“Madame Joy told him the nature of work the girls would be doing in Kaima, but he accepted money and sent the girls anyway,” said Bridget. “He chose my daughter to be defiled and preserved his. I thought he had good intentions for me.”

Aondoaver Tsenougu, staff at the Benue State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) — the agency that manages the affairs of IDP camps in the state — said that the actions of the IDP representatives were without the agency’s knowledge, claiming that SEMA only became aware of the case after the women were rescued and brought in for questioning by NAPTIP.

“It was during interrogation that we found out Madame Joy paid Emmanuel N16,000 ($39) before the girls left the camp,” he said. The money was a stipulated amount required by tradition when parents want to send their children forth from home—money, Tsenougu said, that is used to buy food and drinks to celebrate with neighbors.

“It is a way they mark new beginnings for the kids. That was the only money the parents said they received.”

Tsenougu told me that IDP camp officials allegedly collected an extra payment of N100,000($243) from Madame Joy in exchange for pitching a “life-changing chance” to the youths’ parents, and claiming that the trafficker would pay a monthly fee of N20,000($49) directly to the family of each girl.

It is unknown what deal was offered to the boy’s family, who declined to comment on this story.

Both Geoffery and Emmanuel denied knowing that Madame Joy was a sex trafficker and refuted allegations of collecting bribes from her.

“I was not in the camp when the woman visited,” Geoffery said. “We have never met until this incident.”

Mneater’s uncle, Emmanuel, admitted that he took N16,000 on behalf of the parents but claimed that it was the only cash he received from Joy. He also claimed they had run a background check on her, and that she passed all criteria.

“No one forced the parents to release their girls,” said Emmanuel. “Madame Joy met with the girls’ parents twice. We asked Madame Joy to come with her husband before we released their children to her. I didn’t know she wanted the girls for prostitution. I did not force them to go.”

A man referred to as Uche, whom Madame Joy presented as her husband to the families at Daudu, manages the One Naija pub and collects a monthly lodging fee of N4,000($9.76) from the trafficked women and girls; Joy’s role is to supply them for business.

Sources familiar with the operation said that Joy runs other brothels in the surrounding towns within the same local government as where One Naija is situated.

Unpublished data obtained from the Benue command of NAPTIP showed that between July 2013 to September 2021, the agency recorded 453 cases of trafficking in Benue. But, this data does not document the number of internally displaced women and girls, much less those trafficked across state borders or outside the country.

Madame Joy’s business, one source said, may extend even beyond the Nigerian border into the Republic of Benin, which borders Kaima.

Idahosa, who is also aBring Back Our Girls organizer, said that until the government begins to prioritize and humanize displaced women and girls, “we will not see the kind of impact we need to make sure these groups are safe.”

Surviving every day

Emmanuel and Tsenougu have since been relieved of their duties and sent out of the camp.

Emmanuel Shior, SEMA’s executive secretary, did not provide comment on the case. But Gloria Ivieren Bai, Benue NAPTIP’s zonal commander, said that Joy would appear in court for the first hearing slated for February 21.

Joy herself could not be reached for comment. Her number failed to connect, but TrueCaller, a caller identification app, confirmed her phone number.

Meanwhile, Mneater is currently employed to tend to the surrounding farms at Daudu, where she’s paid a weekly wage of less than N2000 ($9). Still, the pay is better than nothing.

It has been almost one year since she came home, but the trauma of her ordeal lingers. But, she told me, she is willing to try again to look for opportunities outside the camp, if she can find “honest” work. “My family needs help.”

Mneater says she counts herself among the lucky ones. “This is better than prostitution.”

*Images are used with permission of persons who appear.