Child farming and marketing in Nigeria

Jide Ojo

Vocabulary.com, an online dictionary, describes farming as the act or process of working the ground, planting seeds and growing edible plants. You can also describe raising animals for milk or meat as farming. However, will it be inappropriate to classify breeding children for sale as farming? Are you shocked that there are some mindless animals in human skins who, under different guises and ruses, arrange for young boys to impregnate teenage girls and then sell off those children to prospective buyers when they were born?

Things are indeed happening in Nigeria. An online magazine named Wide Angle in a November 11, 2008 news report titled Nigerian Babies Bred for Sale reported thus: “police in the city of Enugu in south-eastern Nigeria raided a maternity hospital suspected to be a ‘baby farm.’ The authorities were tipped off by a pregnant teenage girl who managed to escape from the clinic, where she was being held hostage along with seven other pregnant women awaiting delivery. Several of their captors were arrested, but the suspected leaders of the child-trafficking ring remain at large.”

The report went further “This is the latest in dozens of investigations over the past few years that have revealed a network of Nigerian clinics and orphanages involved in breeding babies for sale. The most high-profile raid occurred in June of this year (2008) when 20 teenage girls were rescued from a hospital reported to be engaged in the illegal trafficking of infants. The doctor in charge, who is now facing trial, insists he was running a foster home to help unmarried pregnant girls give their babies up for adoption. But the women report they were lured to his clinic by offers to help them abort their unwanted pregnancies, then locked up until they gave birth. The young women were paid the equivalent of about $170 to give up their babies; the infants were in turn sold to childless couples for anywhere between $2,500 and $3,800 each.”

A September 30, 2019 story in the Cable News Network reported that 19 pregnant teens and women were rescued as Nigerian police busted a suspected child trafficking ring planning to sell babies. The victims, ranging in age from 15 to 28, were found in different locations in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial nerve centre, in a police raid in September 2019. Two women accused of operating the homes, where the victims were found, were arrested on suspicion of selling babies and investigators are searching for a prime suspect in the case, Lagos police spokesman then, Bala Elkana, said. According to police, the traffickers were selling male babies for N500,000 (around $1,378) and female babies for N300,000 ($827). Police said the rescued victims will be handed over to Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency and relevant authorities for rehabilitation. Authorities in Nigeria regularly bust baby trafficking rings, commonly called “baby factories.” In 2018, the government said more than 162 children were rescued in several raids on illegal orphanages in the city.

February 24, 2021 report in Premium Times has it that the police in Ebonyi State detained a woman believed to be a commercial sex worker for allegedly trying to sell her baby for N40,000. The woman identified as Victoria Chukwube, 32, said she wanted to sell the child to raise money to start a business of selling drinks. Just last Monday, February 21, 2022, a 28-year-old woman, Justina Yakubu of Mararaba-Mubi of Adamawa State, was  arrested and arraigned for selling her baby for N120,000. She was said to have lied to her lover, Jamilu Suleiman, who was the father of the baby, that the baby died. Yakubu and a nurse, Esther Romanus, were remanded in prison by the Chief Magistrate Court in Yola, the state capital, for alleged criminal conspiracy, buying or selling of person for immoral purpose.

It is very unfortunate that our moral decadence in Nigeria has fallen so low that children are no longer held in high esteem and have been turned to chattels that is being sold and bought. Yes, it is not peculiar to Nigeria or Africa as I watched a news story on CNN where a father sold her teenage daughter to a suitor for marriage in Afghanistan. However, the situation in Nigeria is reaching an epidemic level. There are too many fake orphanages and maternity centres whose main business is to breed or rear children for sale. Some unscrupulous nurses, who steals children from the hospitals and clinics where they work and sell them off to prospective buyers, are also part of the syndicate. This, to say the least is inhuman and ungodly!

Apart from the phenomenon of child farming and baby factories, other heinous crimes some parents commit against children include child trafficking leading to phenomenon of child labour, child soldiering, child pornography, child hawker and child beggar. There is also child marriage leading to teenage pregnancy and the contraction of vesico-vagina fistula especially during child birth.

Meanwhile, there is a 2004 Child Rights Act which says in Section 1 that:  ”In every action concerning a child, whether undertaken by an individual, public or private body, institutions or service, court of law, or administrative or legislative authority, the best interest of the child shall be the primary consideration.” Is this provision being upheld when children are trafficked or denied access to education, health care service or basic necessities of life—food, clothing and shelter?

It is very hypocritical of parents to neglect and exploit their children only to turn round and blame government for rising insecurity. The estimated 13 million out of school children definitely constitute clear and present danger to the rest of the society as it is from their fold that insurgents and bandits are recruited. Sexually or financially exploited children cannot grow up to be well behaved as they often develop into beasts with no milk of human kindness.  Many parents and guardians are also daily exposing children to x-rated films and lurid musicals. How would such children not become rapists, drug addicts and deviants?

Most shocking to me is this phenomenon of buying children instead of legally adopting them from government registered and controlled motherless homes or orphanages. It has been discovered that many couples or women who decided to buy children also try to fool neighbours, family members and friends with fake pregnancies. It is often when there is blood donation and transfusion issues or paternity disputes leading to DNA tests that such crimes are exposed.

Children are God’s heritage and should be treasured. Selling off children to fend off poverty is a wrong-headed solution. Buying children in order to douse the humiliation of barrenness is likewise ill-advised and a misnomer. Such children are nothing but bastards that will taint the family lineage. Couples need to embrace child spacing and family planning methods. Birth control is very key to solving the problem of unwanted pregnancies and children. Those who run child farming and marketing or baby factories should know that it is not only an economic crime against humanity but also against God. They should therefore desist from such illegitimate and ignoble businesses.

– Tweet at me @jideojong