INVESTIGATION… Child marriages, human trafficking overtake Benue IDP camps
Fresh from a visit to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps in Benue state, Investigative journalist, Patrick Egwu tells the heart-wrenching stories of how children disappear at random and young girls, not even old enough to take care of themselves, are married off by parents due to lack of food, clean water, adequate care and other relief materials.
Since Agnes Apsu’s child, Naomi turned three, she had dreamt and planned for a good future for her – to go to school and succeed, and live a better life than hers. This is not happening again. Naomi, now 10, lives as a wife with a man old enough to be her grandfather.

When Naomi turned 10, she was already an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) – living at a resettlement camp with her mother and other siblings following the invasion of their villages by semi-nomadic herdsmen from the Fulani ethnic group.

Apsu, 48, who has eight children with her deceased husband, said she married off her daughter because she couldn’t bear the situation in the camp anymore – no access to basic needs such as food, clean water, medicine, soap or sleeping materials. For her, she would rather give out her daughter to someone who would take care of her than allow her suffer or starve to death.


“I allowed her to marry him because there is nothing here,” Agnes said, sitting comfortably on a bamboo armless chair in front her corner in the camp, her hands gently placed on her jaws.

“We don’t have food, clothes, soap or sleeping materials. What we need mostly is food,” she told me, drawing her son, Robert, 6, closer to her.

To survive and feed her family, Apsu collects firewood from a nearby bush with her young son. After collecting the woods, she heaps them on her head and head back to the camp. Once in the camp, she starts breaking the woods so she can sell and get some cash to take care of her basic needs. But, Apsu doesn’t make enough sales as her fellow IDPs in the camp face similar condition as her.

“I sell firewood but there is nobody to buy it from me because they don’t have money,” she said referring to her fellow displaced persons in the camp. “I go to the bush to get firewood and break them when I come back but look at them over there,” she continued, pointing to the direction where she had packed the woods she got the previous day.

Full details: https://www.ripplesnigeria.com/investigation-child-marriages-human-trafficking-overtake-benue-idp-camps/