Simon Ateba/just back from Ouagadougou A trip to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, unravels the booming human trafficking business in the West African country It was 27 December, 2014, and we were ten in a rickety Peugeot 404, a family car meant for four persons and produced by French automobile manufacturer Peugeot from 1960 to 1975. There were eight adults, an infant and a girl who sat at her mother’s feet in the overcrowded vehicle. I was, along with my Nigerian guide, Ochuko Otoba, embarking on a trip many people before us had undertaken for many decades. We were leaving Saki in the western Nigerian State of Oyo, a dusty park filled with old but sturdy vehicles that take passengers daily all the way from Nigeria to Benin Republic, and even as far as Burkina Faso, a two-day journey. It was public holiday in Nigeria, two days after Christmas, and the roads were devoid of the usual chaotic traffic snarls. But we had travelled for almost three hours already from Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, to Saki, and were beginning to feel the pain. [caption id="attachment_19681" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Ochuko Otoba, President Lutra-Jeune[/caption] Leaving Ibadan at 8.59 a.m., we thought we would reach the Nigerian border with Benin Republic three hours later. But at 11.50 a.m., we were just arriving at Saki, three to four hours away from Kenu or Chikanda in Kwara State, Nigerian border towns with Benin Republic. Our old but strong driver tore through the dusty and untarred road and took us on a journey many people would wish not to embark on. We passed many towns, including Ilesha-Baruba in Kwara State, and went off the main road at Sinawu. From Sinawu, the road, which looked like a track, was untarred and the dust was in high supply all the way to Kenu in Baruten Local Government Area of Kwara State. Having left Saki at about 12.52 p.m., we reached Kenu border at 3.15 p.m. Our car was headed to Kabo in Benin Republic, but we got off at Kenu where a few officials of the Nigeria Immigration Service, NIS, sat on a table under a tree, monitoring travellers out of and into Nigeria. Looking at it, there seemed to be no need for an international passport to cross the border. An identity card was enough and in many cases, it was accompanied by a few naira notes. Before arriving in Kenu from Saki, we met some immigration officers along the way who suspected that two passengers in our vehicle were foreigners without proper documentation. The officers threatened to arrest them, but after much pleading, they collected N5,000 from them and gave them a laissez-passer, a paper that allowed them to exit the Nigerian territory. In Saki, we were told that a particular vehicle comes every Tuesday and Thursday to take passengers all the way to Burkina Faso. My guide had told me that the vehicle was owned by a Nigerian human trafficker living in Burkina Faso. At Kenu border, I asked immigration officers if they were aware of it and why was the border so porous. I also asked them about human trafficking, whether they were aware that many under-aged girls were smuggled out of Nigeria through their border post into Benin and then to Burkina Faso. They told me they do their work as best as they can and screen passengers and check all travel documents and detain suspects. Even with proper travel documents, they ask all the necessary questions to ensure that no one was being trafficked. The officers offered us two bottles of soft drinks and told us they were public officials who were not allowed to disclose their identities to the press. [caption id="attachment_19676" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •A view of Ouagadougou[/caption] As we were discussing with them, a truck full of passengers came from Benin and crossed into the Nigerian territory without being stopped. “They went to attend a wedding in Benin this morning, they are just returning from there,” a senior officer said. “There are a lot of intermarriages across this border town,” he added, “many people from there marry our people, and many of our men marry from there,” he said further as another truck full of passengers crossed into the Nigerian territory without being stopped. “It’s the same wedding they went to attend,” he said. We spent about 30 minutes at the border with them. In reality, calling it a border is an over statement as only the Nigerian flag and the few NIS officials constituted the border! It was an open, porous border that looked like a road from one Nigerian village to another. The closest international border from Kenu is called Chikanda. I asked the officials how far was Chikanda from Kenu. “About three to four hours away,” an official replied. Being at the Kenu border made us realise how difficult it is for the NIS officers there to do their job as they sat under a tree and had no office we could properly identify. We were told that there are many unmanned entry and exit points between Kenu and Chikanda. This was scary because human traffickers hardly travel by air. They also avoid conventional borders that may subject them to too much scrutiny. They look for, and eventually find, porous borders such as the ones between Kenu and Chikanda in Kwara State where they can sneak in or out undetected. Sometimes, they pass through borders that are manned by officials who understand their kind of business and profit from it. [caption id="attachment_19683" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Sawadogo Abdoulaye, Head of Cordination Nord-Sud[/caption] Between western Nigeria and Burkina Faso, there is only one country; the Republic of Benin. Ordinary road travellers from Nigeria prefer to enter Benin Republic through Seme Border in Lagos before proceeding to Burkina Faso. But human traffickers, as I discovered, take a longer, tortuous route to Kwara State and travel at odd hours when the few officers who could have challenged them have long gone to sleep. With the first leg of my journey over, I travelled back to Ibadan for another seven hours and arrived in the ancient city few minutes before midnight. I returned to Lagos the next day, 28 December, exhausted, but ready for the long journey to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso for the second leg of my journey. On 8 January, 2015, my voyage to Ouagadougou finally began. I left Lagos at 6 a.m., passed through Seme border and arrived in Cotonou, capital of Benin Republic, in the afternoon of the same day. [caption id="attachment_19686" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Trafficker’s house in Ouaga 2000[/caption] My guide, Otoba, joined me in the night. But we had to spend two nights in Cotonou because the bus to Ouagadougou had left that morning and the next one would be leaving on Saturday at about 3 o’clock in the morning. After two days in Cotonou, we finally left for Ouagadougou at about 3 a.m. on 10 January. We travelled for an entire day, and sixteen hours later at about 7 p.m., we reached Nadiagou, Burkina Faso border town. As we journeyed between Benin Republic and Burkina Faso, we met several immigration posts but the only requirements from the passengers were any identity card and some money to bribe officers. Money was collected at virtually all immigration posts and borders. About 2,000 Franc CFA (N700) was collected from each passenger at Porga border, a notorious border in the Atakora Department of Benin Republic, where extortion almost seemed to be official. Few minutes after, about 1,000 Franc CFA (N350) was collected from each passenger at Nadiagou border to cross into Burkina Faso, having exited Benin from Porga. Even after taking a first visa at Seme border to enter Benin Republic from Nigeria, immigration officers at Porga, Benin, demanded that I pay them 5,000 Franc CFA (about N1,700) to exit their country. I refused and they let me go, not without scolding and delaying me for being stubborn. At Nadiagou border, having exited Benin Republic, I was advised not to use my international passport to avoid taking a visa. Rather, the driver of our bus advised me, I should pay one thousand franc cfa to cross the Burkina Faso border. I insisted on collecting the visa, and I ended up paying 24,000 franc cfa (about N8,000) for transit visa valid only for three days while other passengers without passports paid only a thousand franc cfa and were let in. I was told that if I must stay in Burkina Faso for more than three days, I would need to spend over 90,000 franc cfa (N30,000) for a single entry visa. [caption id="attachment_19687" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Visit to Touwego cemetery where Elizabeth and Mary were buried[/caption] I was told that immigration officers prefer when travellers do not take visas because the money goes into their pockets while visa fees are documented and collected by the government. Officers tried to discourage me from collecting the visa but I insisted. I collected my visa and joined other travellers on the other side of the border. It was Saturday and Burkina customs officers had closed earlier that weekend. They would return the next day at about 9 a.m., we were told, to check luggage and goods in the luxury bus. About 44 passengers slept at the border in the bus while one passenger looked for a hotel around and joined us in the morning before the customs officers arrived at about 9 a.m. They did all their checks and allowed us to leave Nadiagou at 11.15 a.m. on 11 January. We embarked on another long journey of five hours. We passed through towns like Fada N’gourma and Zorgho before arriving Ouagadougou the same day at 4.05 p.m., more than 37 hours after leaving Cotonou. Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, and the administrative, communications, cultural and economic centre of the nation, is a beautiful city full of motorcycles. Virtually everyone in Ouaga, as the capital is also known, owns a motorcycle, from the shoemaker to the bank manager. Ouagadougou’s primary industries are food processing and textiles. It is host to an international airport and has rail links to Abidjan in Ivory Coast, and a paved highway to Niamey in Niger Republic. In all, the landlocked nation shares borders with six West African countries ( Benin, Ghana, Niger, Ivory Coast, Mali and Togo). It is those borders that have attracted human traffickers for decades, especially because from Mali, traffickers can proceed to the Sahara desert and Algeria, Morocco and then Spain or Italy by land and water. It is also those borders that give strength to lies told by Nigerian human traffickers who lure victims by promising them paradise in Europe via Burkina Faso. Human trafficking is a serious problem in Burkina Faso and the number of girls trafficked in the landlocked country is very alarming, said Ochuko Patrick Otoba, my Nigerian guide, who had told me about the phenomenon while in Lagos with two victims he had rescued from Burkina Faso and was returning them to Nigeria. As the President and Founder of the National Association for the Fight Against Trafficking of Young People in Burkina Faso, known in French as Association Nationale de Lute Contre le Traffic des Jeunes ( LUTRA-JEUNE), Otoba has fought a long, lonely battle to draw attention to the human trafficking crisis. “More than 12 teenage girls are trafficked from Nigeria alone to Burkina Faso on a weekly basis and are forced against their volition to engage in compulsory selling of their bodies to pay the trafficker huge sums of money as ransom for their liberty,” said Otoba, who has been fighting human trafficking in Burkina Faso for seven years without much support or acknowledgment. He spent some months in detention, he told me, for trying to rescue some Nigerian sex slaves and drawing the anger of the Nigerian community in Burkina Faso. “They told me a Nigerian cannot arrest a Nigerian trafficker in Burkina Faso. One day, after rescuing some victims and taking them to Nigeria, I returned to Burkina Faso and I was arrested and accused of being a trafficker myself,” he said. [caption id="attachment_19682" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Ouedraogo in front of his house in Somgande[/caption] The human trafficking network in West Africa uses Burkina Faso as a route to other West African countries such as Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, and upward to North Africa and Europe by road and sea. Burkina Faso subscribes to the definition of trafficking in the U.N. Trafficking Protocol but trafficking of young girls in the country is both internal and external. “In Burkina Faso, the government, with the support of its partners, is engaged in the long-term objective of eradicating child trafficking,” Otoba said. For Nigerian girls, it is a long journey. Girls are often lured from states like Edo, Delta and Cross River and taken to Lagos, then Saki in Oyo State, before proceeding to Kenu or Chikanda or any other porous exit point in Kwara State. From there, they are moved to Benin Republic and then to Burkina Faso with the help of traffickers and immigration officials only interested in money. From the moment they leave Lagos, they spend about three days on the road. The story is the same virtually everywhere in West Africa. The victims are promised jobs and better lives in Europe with a brief stop in Burkina Faso. But once in Ouagadougou, instead of proceeding to Mali and the Sahara desert to get to Spain or Italy, most girls are spread to the 45 provinces in Burkina Faso and used as sex slaves. Many girls end up in places like Bale, Banwa, Kossi, Mouhoun or Nayala. Others are moved to Sourou, Comoe, Leraba and Kadiogo while many end up sleeping with men in Boulgou, Koupelogo, Kouritenga or Bam. Many Nigerian girls are also found in Namentenga, Boulkiemde, Sanguine, Sissili and Ziro. Otoba put the number of Nigerian girls being held captive in Burkina Faso and working as sex slaves to at least 6,000. He said every province has between five and twelve local government areas known as communes, and in each of the councils, there is a minimum of twelve Nigerian girls working as sex slaves in the 45 provinces. But I wanted to see things for myself and not just listen to activists. On the cold night of 11 January, the same day I arrived, I visited Pharmacie de gare and Ali Baba in Sankariare area and came across many girls who spoke English. It was an incredible scene of a very large crowd of revellers with girls in mini skirts, tight trousers or vests standing on one side and many young men staring from the other side. They were so close to one another that it appeared as though a fight was about to break out. It all looked like a market location where selling and buying took place. “You can all hear them speak pidgin English. They are all Nigerian girls,” said Sawadogo Abdoulaye, a Burkinabe activist and Head of Cordination Nord-Sud, a human rights organisation that fights against human trafficking, especially trafficking of under-aged girls. We approached three girls. Two of them claimed to be from Edo and Delta States in Nigeria, while the other girl refused to disclose where she came from. She spoke little French with an English accent and said phrases like “Cheri coco tu veux?” (Sweetheart, do you want?”, showing her backside. [caption id="attachment_19689" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Ouedraogo bike[/caption] “You can see they are all very small girls. And for some of them, the breasts have not fully developed,” Sawadogo said in French. “And they are virtually all from Nigeria, very very small girls,” he lamented. We moved behind the streets to see where actual sex took place and saw girls with braided hair, black eyeliner, garish red lipstick and mini skirts, surrounded by tall guys who acted as body guards. We asked how much it cost for a sex romp. A girl who had just finished having sex with a patron and was rushing out to get another customer replied that it was a thousand franc cfa, about N350 or $2 for a quick session. “Twenty minutes,” she said, referring to the session duration. Sawadogo took us to other streets full of girls, many of them speaking broken French with some pidgin English. We went around town and ended up in a club with mirrors on the walls and different lights all over the room. One girl approached us, greeted us in French but with an English accent and left. Sawadogo called another girl. “Nigeria?” he asked, pronouncing Nigeria in French. The girl replied in the affirmative. He took us inside rooms at the back of the club where sex takes place every day and we entered very small and filthy rooms with little foams on the floor. “Can you see where they have sex,” he asked. “And there are many places like this one full of Nigerian girls. They seem to come in every week”. Otoba, my Nigerian guide and President of Lutra-Jeune, joined us with one other guy. We began discussing over drinks. “This is a poorer country,” I said, “why are Nigerian girls coming here when they can do this at home?”. Sawadogo had a ready answer for me: “Many parents do not know where Burkina Faso is. When some of them are told by the traffickers that they are taking their girls to Burkina Faso, they think they are taking them to Europe. “Others are told that they are taking them to Europe and would be given new passports in Burkina Faso.” He advised parents to inquire very well when someone promises to give a better life to their daughter in another country. “They should look at the map and see where they are taking their children. Anyway, they are not going to Europe. This is where they end up. They end up as sex workers who must pay their traffickers before they are set free,” he said. It had been a long day travelling and I was beginning to feel sleepy. I went back to my hotel room to prepare for the next day. In the afternoon of 12 January, Sawadogo, Otoba, their friend and I travelled to the outskirts of town where many Nigerian girls work as sex slaves. We arrived at a brothel called ‘Bar Dancing Petit Ouaga’ in Toudoubweogo village. The brothel is also known as Petit Ouaga (Little Ouaga). Virtually all the girls at Petit Ouaga spoke pidgin English. “All of them are from your country,” Sawadogo told me, referring to Nigeria. We called a very young girl to join us. Her name was Gift, she said, and she’s from Edo State in Nigeria and had travelled with someone for three days to get to Burkina Faso in April 2014. But, instead of coming straight to Ouagadougou, she travelled first to Dori where gold is being mined manually. Dori is about 271 kilometres from Ouagadougou. I asked her how old she was. She said she’s 18. But she looked far younger than that. Most girls who are trafficked are taught to say they are 18 years and above. She left for some minutes and Sawagodo explained that many young girls are being taken to Dori because there is a belief there that when you sleep with a virgin or a very young girl, you discover more gold. [caption id="attachment_19679" align="aligncenter" width="182"] •Gift: One of the victims[/caption] Gift returned some minutes later and I asked her how much it will cost me for a sex romp. She said a thousand franc cfa, about N350 or $2. I followed her to a room. It was another filthy room divided into two with a piece of clothe. It was divided that way because two girls could have sex at the same time with two men. Before I could sit on the small mattress, she handed a condom over to me and was already pulling off her clothes. She said I should hurry but I told her to wait a bit. “I will give you more money but I just want us to talk and be friends,” I said. “I want to be able to come here to take you out and away from this place,” I added. She told me she worked for someone and was yet to pay all her money to be set free and could not go out of the brothel. A cab brought her and other girls to the brothel every afternoon and came back to take them home at about midnight or one o’clock the following day. It was a routine she was now used to since she arrived Ouagadougou from Dori. I asked her if she did not want to come back to Nigeria, if she was happy with what she was doing. She said she was not happy and added that once she finishes paying, she would become independent and would make her own money. She refused to disclose how much she had been asked to pay, but Sawadogo said, they pay about 1.5 million franc cfa, about N500,000 or $2800. I spent some minutes with her in the room talking, asking her questions about the trafficker, but she would not say much. I paid her, collected her phone number and left. I joined the other guys who were having some drinks and eating some meat at a small bar in the brothel. By then, other Nigerian girls had joined them, most of them very young girls of about 16 years old. We were joined by “the middle man” for the girls, a very vibrant guy called Ouédraogo. He spoke freely about his business. He explained how human trafficking works. The girls are brought in by some people from Nigeria and handed over to a lady he called the main trafficker in Ouagadougou, a former prostitute who was trafficked to Burkina Faso from Nigeria many years ago, and is now helping traffick other girls while she remains a high class prostitute. The lady, whom I will later meet, then hands the girls over to middle men like Ouédraogo who find brothels for them for a percentage of the money they make by having sex with men. At the brothels, the girls are handed over to managers who ensure patrons pay and the girls are safe. [caption id="attachment_19688" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Ouedraogo and the trafficker[/caption] Last December, Ouédraogo was handed over six girls of between 14 and 16 years old by the Nigerian trafficker. “Just in December, she gave me six girls. Very young girls. She always gives me young girls because she knows she can trust me,” he said over drinks. I told him about Gift, the girl from Edo State. He said there were even younger ones. “There are even younger ones, when you sleep with them, it is very tight and they cry. I like it when they cry. I like it when it is very very tight, and most men like it like that. I can supply you with very young girls,” he said in French. He said he did not have the name of the trafficker but had her phone number and knew where she lived and could take me there. [caption id="attachment_19677" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Another victim at Petit Ouaga[/caption] He gave examples of very young girls who were brought into Burkina Faso as virgins and had to sleep with them first before passing them to the manager at Petit Ouaga brothel. I asked him if he knew the manager of the brothel and where he hailed from. “I don’t know his name but he is from Burkina Faso. You don’t need to know people’s names here. It’s a network. Just do your job, get paid and you are good. You don’t need to ask many questions, otherwise they will begin to suspect you,” he said. He said in four months he had handed over ten girls to Petit Ouaga alone, including the six girls he brought there in December. He used to deal with another brothel, he said, but the manager was not honest, so he left him four months ago. In four months, he said, he had bought a brand new motorcycle. “I bought the bike for 472,000 franc cfa (about N160,000),” he said. “That’s a lot of money,” I countered. “Can you make such an amount in four months?” He replied in the affirmative. It was getting late. I took my leave and scheduled an appointment with him the next day, 13 January. That day, on his motorcycle, I crisscrossed Ouagadougou with Ouédraogo. The Nigerian trafficker, he said, lived at Ouaga 2000, an upscale neighbourhood for wealthy people, including expatriates and tourists. Located in the southern fringe of Ouagadougou, Ouaga 2000 was originally built for the 1996 French Africa Summit. It is a very beautiful area with many lovely and expensive hotels, embassies, courthouses and other government buildings, including Kosyam Palace, the seat of the Burkinabe President. He called the trafficker on the phone and told her his friend from Paris in France had arrived Ouaga with plenty cash and would want to see her. “She’s a trafficker but she’s still a prostitute for wealthy clients,” he told me. She sometimes sleeps with big clients from Paris, London and other European countries. He asked her if he could bring me home. She said we should meet first at a restaurant nearby. But I told Ouédraogo to take me to her house first. “I like beautiful houses and I would like to see where she lives at Ouaga 2000,” I said. Her house, a beautiful bungalow, was surrounded by other beautiful houses and was located not far away from ‘Complexe Scolaire Naaba Yemde’, which was situated in Saaba at Ouaga 2000, Ouagadougou. “This is the kind of house I would like to have,” Ouédraogo told me. “I really want to know the people she knows so I can supply my own girls,” he said. “By the grace of God, I will make it. I will one day live in a house like this,” he said as we rushed to meet the trafficker. He told me he lost his father when he was two years old and his mother died when he was 19 years old. His elder brother, an architect, has been saying that he has already failed in life, but he will prove to him wrong, he said. “I will do all I can to also build something like this,” he said. [caption id="attachment_19680" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Kenu border in Kwara State[/caption] Not far from the trafficker’s house was another beautiful house Ouédraogo described as being owned by the trafficker’s friend. “Her best friend lives here,” he said, pointing at the beautiful house, bigger and more beautiful than the trafficker’s house. As we approached where the trafficker was, he warned me: “Do not speak English with her, if you do, she will become suspicious. She will also pretend not to speak English, but she does. She is Nigerian and she speaks English.” I agreed because I speak fluent French. We finally met the trafficker at a highbrow brothel with many girls under her. She gave me a name I could barely understand. Ouédraogo told her she should come and get the 14 year old girl who had been crying all day. I listened to their conversation patiently. A day earlier, Ouédraogo was invited to Petit Ouaga, where I had met him, by the manager to talk to the 14 year old girl. She had been fighting other girls and crying, he was told. I asked the trafficker if she could supply some young girls to me. She said that would not be a problem. After a conversation, a drink and some pictures, I left with Ouédraogo and scheduled an appointment with her the next day, 14 January. From the way it looked, it appeared as though, the trafficker’s friend in the other big and beautiful house, was a bigger trafficker. “She’s not just a prostitute. She’s still sleeps with big men at night and day time, but she’s also the one placing the girls,” Ouédraogo said of the trafficker. [caption id="attachment_19685" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •The burnt National Assembly in Ouagadougou[/caption] The next day, the trafficker was busy with some shopping in town and I used the opportunity to discover Ouédraogo’s house in Somgande area of Ouagadougou. He had been telling me about a house he had just built and I was curious to see it. With his motorcycle, we sped up and quickly arrived at Somgande, an area with mud houses. It appeared to me like the worst part of town. Before getting to his house, he showed me his brother’s house in Kossodo area, a beautiful area with lovely buildings. “I will one day build a bigger house,” Ouédraogo said as we passed by his brother’s house. Once I understand the business, I will have my own girls and build a bigger house in Ouaga 2,000,” he said. He told me his brothers had been inviting him to church, but he had refused to go because he can make it on his own. In his house, the pictures of Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s ex-president who was assassinated on 15 October, 1987, were everywhere. “He was a great man,” he said, “he was our leader.” Ouédraogo took me around Ouagadougou and we made a brief stop at the National Assembly that had been set ablaze two months earlier following nationwide protests that ousted long serving leader, Blaize Compaore, the man believed to have masterminded the killing of Sankara. “I was among those protesting,” he said. “We chased him away.” During the looting that followed, Ouédraogo got two bags of rice, he said. [caption id="attachment_19684" align="aligncenter" width="300"] •Sinawu-Kenu Road[/caption] I joined Sawadogo and Otoba on a visit to Touwego cemetery in Ouagadougou where two Nigerian girls had been buried two months earlier. “Elizabeth and Mary died about two months ago. They were from Calabar and were about 16 years old,” said Sawadogo. “Mary was raped and fell sick and died. Both used to sleep at Dapoya in Ouagadougou here.” Sawadogo said the Nigerian Embassy in Burkina Faso had not been helpful in supporting NGOs that combat human trafficking. “We need assistance to do this job. We need to create more awareness. We need to be able to rescue these girls and travel back with them to Nigeria and re-unite them with their families. Those who cannot go back, we need to be able to equip them here,” said Otoba, President of Lutra-Jeune in Ouagadougou since 2007. The next day, 15 January, Otoba took me to the car park on his motorcycle at 4 o’clock in the morning and I began the long journey back home. I arrived in bustling Lagos in the afternoon the next day, 16 January, after 28 hours on the road, totally exhausted. --This report was accomplished with the support of the Wole Soyinka Centre For Investigative Journalism and the Embassy of The Netherlands