Agaju Madugba, Katsina
The 31 indigenes of Katsina State who were sold into slavery in Burkina Faso have confessed that they were tricked into embarking on the journey with a promise of lucrative jobs outside the shores of Nigeria.
A certain Alhaji Usman, now at large, according to security sources, is said to have facilitated the scheme, pledging to give each of them the sum of N1 million as soon as they arrived their destination which turned out to be a phantom land of opportunities.
“Alhaji Usman told us that he had already secured lucrative jobs for us outside the country,” Aminu Abdullahi, from Kankara and one of the victims, had stated Tuesday night, on their return to Katsina. He said that their journey started from Kankara in Kankara local government area, to Cotonou, in Benin Republic where the apparent slave merchant handed them over to an unnamed collaborator, a woman, who took them on the second lap of the journey, to Gouaua, a town said to be about 150 kilometres from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.
For Abdullahi and his colleagues, the fantasy over N1 million and lucrative jobs melted into the thin desert air of Burkina Faso when the next morning, they were herded to one of the “labour sites,” where they were handed diggers, shovels and giant hoes, and there they began work on the rocky terrain to construct lines for telecommunication companies to lay their cables underground.
Reports indicate that “modern day slavery” actually thrives in Burkina Faso, a former French colony located in the Sahel region of West Africa. With an estimated population of about 20,244,000 (2018), a figure far below the combined population of Nigeria’s Kano, Kaduna and Katsina states. A recent BBC report describes Burkina Faso as, “a poor country even by West African standards.”
And, with human merchandise reportedly exchanging hands through various middlemen in parts of northern Nigeria, Benin Republic, Republic of Niger and Chad, the slave merchants lure their unsuspecting victims who may be indeed willing to flee their communities due to real and perceived hostility.
But a number of them eventually find themselves in slave camps and were being subjected to various levels of degrading treatment that may earn promoters of the legendary transatlantic slave trade, medals for compassionate handling of slaves.
According to Abdullahi, “they stopped giving us any form of food in Cotonou and the starvation continued when we arrived Burkina Faso where they locked all of us in two rooms and the next morning, they marched us to the labour site.
“We were treated like animals and slaves and subjected to do hard labour without wages. It was at this point we realised that we were sold to a slave-holder. Whenever she (slave-holder) realised that we had found neighbours who could speak Hausa, she hurriedly evacuated us to another neighborhood where the people there speak French and their native languages only.
“Some of us became very sick but were refused medical attention of any kind and this further confirmed our suspicion that we may have been sold as slaves in that country.
“Our saving grace came through the intervention of a man we met at a labour site after three weeks in Goaua. The man could speak Hausa and when we explained our predicament to him, he told us that we were under the custody of a slave-holder. That was when we made efforts to establish contact with the Hausa community in Goaua. After a couple of days, the Chief of the Hausa community in Ouagadougou was informed of our predicament, then he informed the Nigerian Ambassador in Burkina Faso who rescued us.
“None of us really knows much about Alhaji Usman, but we want government to trace him. Some of us saw him loading a few bags of money in his car in Cotonou just before he drove off and left us with the woman. He even planted two of his accomplices among us who tracked development and informed him. When we were traced by the Burkinabe authorities, the two accomplices fled. So, we are now 29. We want justice in this matter.”
The Katsina State government had earlier explained that the Nigerian Ambassador to Burkina Faso, Hajiya Rahmatu Ahmed, facilitated the release of the victims, in collaboration with leadership of the Hausa community local security in that country.
“On receiving the information, Governor Masari dispatched the Special Adviser on Drugs, Narcotics and Human Trafficking, Alhaji Hamza Borodo, with a 30-seater luxury bus to go to Ouagadougou and bring back the victims,” a Government House statement noted.
Receiving the returnees last Tuesday, Masari hinted that government will rehabilitate them, after what he described as necessary security checks. He said, “we are here to receive the indigenes of Katsina State who were sold into slavery in Burkina Faso. Although, we already know the name of the person who did it but we don’t know the face yet. We are still trying to put a face to the name. We thank the Nigerian Ambassador in Burkina Faso for taking the initiative to rescue the victims. What has surprised me is that there is an elderly man among them and I wonder what kind of job such an old man can do for anybody in far away Burkina Faso.”