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By Olufemi Ajasa
Her joy knew no bound. Her time had come, she reckoned when she ‘found the clue’. A mouth-watering job awaiting her in South Africa where she would literally dig gold. The jinx had been broken.
Her mother too also fell for the ploy through scintillating pictures of likely places her beloved daughter was going to work in the rainbow country.
Imagine! Soon the twenty-year-old Ekiti born Nigerian girl (name withheld) would be repatriating money home in dollars.
And another scenario, her younger sibling would sooner join her in South Africa to multiply the haul.
But first things first – the usual preparation rituals, sourcing money for passport ticket, feeding allowance.
And all this meant the poor family going to borrow and selling their properties to make up. Anyhow, all this was good as nothing in view of the finest expectations to come from the foreign land job.
But too soon all the dreams died. Firstly instead of a luxurious flight to South Africa, it turned a tortuous three-day road journey to land in Mali, a neighboring West African country and immediately into sex slavery.
The story of this young victim is just one of a many yet untold.
Hear her:
“When we got to Mali, we were handed condoms as work tools on our very first day at work: a beer parlour with several cubicle-like rooms,” says the victim who named one Mustapha as the man who sold her as a sex slave in Mali.
The suspect, Mustapha is said to be well known in the business of luring girls underage girls from Nigeria into prostitution in other countries in West Africa.
In a phone conversation, the terrified victim, who preferred to speak in Yoruba, her native language, and Pidgin English, revealed all the awful details of how she and many young girls were deceived, taken away from Nigeria, and sold as sex slaves far away in Mali.
In a phone conversation, the terrified victim, who preferred to speak in Yoruba, her native language, and Pidgin English, revealed all the awful details of how she and many young girls were deceived, taken away from Nigeria, and sold as sex slaves far away in Mali.
Journey to the Job
It seemed like an answered prayer whenever the victims meet Mustapha who talks them into believing they would effortlessly build castles by travelling out of Nigeria to South Africa to take up high paying jobs either as salesgirl, hotel attendants or female footballers.
Mustapha’s deals are always appearing so sweet that his victims feel it wouldn’t cost them a dime to embark on this life-changing journey to the ‘high-paying’ jobs abroad.
“It was around February 2016, my family couldn’t make ends meet and I was seriously looking for a job.
“My mom and dad are divorced and we the children have been struggling to cope with the meagre proceeds mum gets from selling fruits.” She said, narrating her ordeal.
“So a friend of mine, Samuel, in Ado-Ekiti where I lived at the time, told me there is a guy looking for a female worker.
I later learnt that the person was looking for more than one person (three girls, I was told).
“I collected the employer’s number from Samuel and later called him [Mustapha]. He told us that some of us would work as salesgirls in a big supermarket in South Africa, while he assured others they would secure a football club where they could build a football career.
“Mustapha met my mum and assured her of all the good plans he had for us. After showing my mother several pictures of big supermarkets in South Africa where we would be taking up the jobs, he was able to convince her and she agreed with the travel plans.
We soon set out for the journey. But shortly, things started to go awry. Plans began to change. On getting to Lagos, we were all shocked when we realised that we would be traveling by road and not by flight as earlier promised.
They conveyed us in a 14-seater bus. The journey lasted three days after which we arrived in Mali.”
The victim said they survived the journey by buying drinks to keep their body and soul. “Some of us developed horrible sicknesses as we lacked access to good food for days, we were just drinking beverages
and only had a major stop at Togo.”
***Fodio Camps***
TheNewsGuru.com was able to obtain visual footages of some of the camps where Mustapha and some of his cohorts supposedly operate.
Our finding shows they live in Fodio, a camp where gold is mined; it is located 10 hours from Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. They hardly do their business in cities to avoid prying eyes.
So they live in villages and camps. They have another camp, Papara close to Tengrela, it is three
hours away from Fodio and an hour to Mali.
The Job
“When we got to Mali, we were shocked when Mustapha started auctioning us to people [mostly ladies], at that point there was no turning back, our phones, identity cards, passports and other documents that we used to cross the borders were all seized,” the victim narrated.
“He sold me to one Madam Prisca for N250,000, who runs a beer parlour, I joined other seven new girls at Madam Prisca’s place and when we asked what our job was about, we did not get clear brief.
To our dismay, Madam Prisca distributed ‘condoms’ to us and told us to go and take our bath saying our job will be to entice men who come to patronise the beer joint and we were told that we will be set free once we can earn them 1.5m CFA [Equivalent of 750, 000 naira] Madam Prisca’s beer parlour was a hell of some sort as described by the victim.
Her shop had several rooms attached to it, where men can select any girl of their choice just to ease themselves of tensions obviously after high consumption of alcohol.
At first, the girls [victims] resented the offer to become sex slaves but later humbled to oblige to the wishes of their lords after receiving severe torture, drug inducement and partaking in several rites conducted by their fetish priests.
“They are very diabolic, they will prepare a charm/potion for us and the moment we ate it we lost our consciousness. About eight of us were sharing a room.
“They scraped our hair, [pubic, underarm included] for their fetish cause. There is a particular priest that helps Prisca slaughter, fowl, which will be prepared with other concoctions and we were all compelled to eat it.”
Recalling one of the very sordid days she learnt how deep the danger she was in, the victim said, “You dare not think about escape or do anything that negates their orders.
There was a day Prisca’s priest claimed he saw a vision about two girls planning to escape – when the girls were singled out by the priest, they were beaten mercilessly, it was close to death.
“Here, death is not strange, there are so many who lost their lives while on this trip, some fell terribly ill and were ignored as bad-buy.
The Escape
After working for over a year with Prisca, the victim said she was able to contribute about 1.1m CFA to her lord but was never at ease with the everyday danger related to the job.
She said she had several quiet prayers begging God for a saving grace but the time never came.
I was saying the same prayer one particular evening and I got the conviction to run away. I took my bible, left all the belongings I had at Prisca’s place and ran endlessly without looking back.
“I was scared they could still find me, and the punishment is grave. They have a way of catching those who attempt to escape.
They do this with the help of their policemen, in some instances they lie to the policemen you have stolen their money, say, 2 million CFA and once you are caught there is little you can say to defend yourself because you have no papers or identity.
So when they report you, the policemen will arrest you and you will probably be returned or jailed depending on the process and agreement reached.
So most times, because you don’t have documents, the police will suspect you the more and not them.
She said on escaping Madam Prisca’s place, she had to travel to Cote d’Ivoire, where she is at present hibernating and preparing her journey back
to Nigeria.
Meanwhile, TheNewsGuru attempted to reach Mustapha for comments, but his telephone number was engaged throughout the timeline of filing this report and he is yet to also answer some of the questions sent to him through his known social media handle was still unreachable as of press time.
The response of Mustapha, when provided, will be published in this medium alongside other details uncaptured in this report.