Ragged, exhausted and scarred, 74 children apparently sold into bondage were on their way home on Thursday after being rescued from Nigerian granite quarries.
The children, some just four years old, told aid workers at least 13 of their companions had died and been buried in shallow graves after succumbing to beatings, hunger, illness and exposure in the pits near the south-western Nigerian city of Abeokuta.
”We would break the stones and the men would come take them away in trucks,” one skinny and heavily scratched boy told reporters.
Trafficked from the neighbouring country of Benin, the group represents a tiny proportion of the estimated 6 000 child labourers indentured in Nigeria.
A Benin government official said the children, most of them boys, would be given food, clothes, medical treatment and a chance to rest at the country’s port city of Cotonou before being interviewed by social workers.
Their return marked the latest crackdown by governments and aid agencies on west Africa’s thriving cross-border trade in child labour.
Those not breaking stones with mallets often end up harvesting cocoa, mending fishing nets, cleaning houses or working as sex slaves, with Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Gabon the most common destinations.
Benin is one of west Africa’s most peaceful and stable countries, but extreme poverty means child labourers are invariably bought from their families rather than abducted.
Some parents exchange their offspring for the money offered by traffickers, and in the hope of remittances. Others do it thinking it is the best chance for children to learn a trade and escape poverty. Either way, it is illegal.
Families can receive as little as $41 (R290), said Philippe Duamelle of the UN children’s fund in Cotonou, but the price tends to climb as a child is passed down the trafficking chain.
This group of children was rescued after Abeokuta residents tipped of a local charity worker about the harsh conditions at the granite pits. The Nigerian police investigated and intervened several weeks ago.
The charity worker, Kemi Olumefun, said some of the children had been working there four years, others just a few months.
They told her that disobedience and attempts to escape were punished by beatings, but it was malnutrition and disease that had killed their companions.
Olumefun said: ”You can imagine a seven-year-old boy being compelled to crush a lorry-load of gravel. They were poorly fed and in the process, some of them fell sick and died.” They earned 25p a day, she added.
An accord signed by Nigeria and Benin in August agreeing to curtail child trafficking facilitated the children’s return to their home country on Wednesday night. A team of officials from Benin travelled to Nigeria yesterday to search for thousands of other suspected child labourers.
The first rescue under the accord took place in September, when 116 children were plucked from granite quarries.
The same month 1 200 Ghanaian children sold as labourers in the fishery on Lake Volta were reunited with their families by the humanitarian group International Organisation for Migration.
”It’s difficult to quantify the extent of the problem since it is a clandestine phenomenon, but there is a growing recognition by governments in the region that this is a serious issue,” said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, a spokesperson for the organisation in Geneva. ”The rescue of these 74 children is very good news indeed.” – Guardian Unlimited Â