NAIJAFEED

Monday, August 26, 2024

Pro-Iran militants kill 2 Nigerian police officers

An attack Sunday by an outlawed pro-Iran Nigerian Shiite group killed at least two law enforcement officers, police said, with three more found unconscious in the capital Abuja.

The capital's police force confirmed "an unprovoked attack by the proscribed Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN)... on some personnel of the Nigeria Police Force," said a statement by police spokesperson Josephine Adeh.

During the attack on a police checkpoint, "two police personnel were killed, three [were] left unconscious in the hospital, and three police patrol vehicles [were] set ablaze," Adeh added.

Inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the late 1970s, the IMN still maintains close ties with Tehran.

It has long been at loggerheads with Nigeria's secular authorities and was banned in 2019.

Sunday's attackers carried out their assault wielding machetes, knives and improvised explosive devices, according to the police.

With several arrests made, Abuja's police commissioner, Benneth C. Igweh, condemned the "unprovoked attack," vowing to bring the perpetrators to justice.

"The situation is presently under control and normalcy restored," the police statement added.

In July 2021, after more than five years in prison, IMN leader Ibrahim Zakzaky and his wife were released by a court in Kaduna, in the north of the country.

A Shiite cleric, Zakzaky has repeatedly called for an Iranian-style Islamic revolution in Nigeria — where the Muslim population is predominantly Sunni.

AFP

Police say 20 abducted Nigerian medical students freed

Twenty Nigerian medical students who were kidnapped on their way to a convention have been freed more than a week after their abduction, police said.

Gunmen seized the students on August 15 as they travelled to a conference in Benue State, in the centre of the country, and later demanded a ransom.

“We confirm the release on Friday of our brothers and sisters and some other Nigerians who have been in captivity in Ntunkon forest, Benue State,” Nigerian police spokesman Olumuyiwa Adejobi said on Saturday.

State police said in a statement that they had “confirmed the release of the 20 students from the University of Maiduguri and University of Jos”.

The students were freed “without any ransom paid”. The group was “rescued tactically and professionally”, according to Adejobi.

The country’s police chief had this week deployed a “tactical squad” in Benue State as part of efforts to find the latest victims of a rising wave of abductions in Africa’s most populous country.

Fortune Olaye, secretary-general of the Nigerian Medical Students’ Association (NIMSA), also confirmed the release to the AFP news agency. “We’ve spoken to them on the phone. They are safe,” Olaye said.

The students were abducted while on the road in a convoy of two buses near the town of Otukpo, less than 150km (93 miles) from Enugu, which often witnesses attacks and kidnappings.

Armed gangs have been kidnapping villagers, students and motorists for ransom in northern Nigeria, with security forces unable to end the practice.

Thousands of people are abducted for ransom in Nigeria each year, though there are few reliable statistics as many cases are not reported. Cases of kidnapping have increased significantly due to a severe economic crisis which is pushing more people towards crime.

The Nigerian consultancy, SBM Intelligence, said it had recorded 4,777 kidnappings in the country between President Bola Ahmed Tinubu taking power in May 2023 and January 2024.

Al Jazeera

13-year-old Nigerian girls trapped as sex workers in Ivory Coast

The first French phrases Nigerian teenager Sara* learned when she arrived in the city of Bouaké were “Alors baiser” and “c’est douce”, to initiate sexual activity and then to fake pleasure during the act.

The daughter of her mother’s best friend had told her she was going to the Ivorian city to sell body lotion. Instead, an older woman – a “madam” – who had paid for her travel without her knowledge sent her to brothels in the city every night.

Sara says she is paid between 3,000–5,000 Central African Francs (CFA) – between £3.90 and £6.50 – for every man she sleeps with for a “short-time” and 25,000 CFA for an overnight stay. The money is split three ways between the brothel, Sara and the madam.

Three months after arriving in Bouaké, Sara is still waiting to earn enough to pay off debts of 2.5m CFA to the madam for travel, clothes, sustenance and bribes paid to agents, and return to Nigeria.

“She [the madam] took my Nigerian sim card when I came here, so I couldn’t call my people at home for the first month,” says Sara, who now goes by the name of Sugar and refused to give her real age.

Trafficking is a major crisis in Nigeria, with between 750,000 and 1 million people forced into begging, prostitution, domestic servitude, armed conflict and labour exploitation.

Some of those are being trafficked out of the country. Sara is one of thousands of Nigerian female sex workers scattered across towns and cities in Ivory Coast, according to Nigerian officials who spoke to the Guardian.

The girls and women are mostly trafficked by agents who are taking advantage of record unemployment in Nigeria and operate under the guise of offering better paid work. Ten years ago, the Nigerian naira was triple the value of the CFA; today N1 equals 0.38 CFA.

Due to its stable economy and prostitution being legal, although soliciting sex is not, Ivory Coast has become an attractive destination for sex work. Some victims go on to become madams who source other girls, to recoup money they spent and to regain their own freedom.

Across Nigeria, recruiting agents go into rural communities or post in jobseekers’ groups on Facebook, talking ambiguously about hustles that yield plenty of rewards and sending photographs of girls and women they have recruited to known madams.

They coach recruits to tell immigration officials, who are sometimes aware of what is happening or simply don’t care enough to carry out proper scrutiny, that they are crossing the border to go to the nearby market in Cotonou, an auxiliary port for Nigeria.

Many recruits say agents, who have been known to be a relative, do not accompany them on the journey but pass their numbers to other agents who guide them across the porous borders. With no means of identification, they gain access by paying bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA, sometimes paid ahead to the driver by the agents.

Unlike Sara, most of the sex workers trafficked from Nigeria live deep in the Ivorian jungle, far from the eyes of the law.

In Tengréla, 7km (4.3 miles) from the Malian border, there are several artisanal miner’s camps used by men from Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea to earn money before returning to their countries. Nigerian sex workers aged from about 14 to 38 also stay here in small settlements of makeshift tents made of black nylon held together with sticks.

At the maquis – as the small bars are known in Francophone Africa – owned by madams in the settlements, both sets of immigrants fraternise, first publicly and then privately.

“There is an odd belief in some of the gold mining regions that sex helps you find gold, which in turn [fuels] demand for sex trafficking,” says one former Nigerian official who was previously stationed in Ivory Coast. “The cocoa [production] communities also have high sex demands to keep the men satisfied.”

The Guardian spoke to at least two dozen girls and women in the forest, some as young as 15. Some of them said they had been starved for refusing to work or beaten up by angry patrons. Many barely speak French and say they don’t know the country well enough to be able to escape.

Nigerian officials who have managed to repatriate girls trapped as sex workers say they have seen girls as young as 13 in the interior.

“A lot of the girls we found claim to be over 18 and doing sex work of their own free will, but most of the time from their physical appearance, you know they are not,” says the former Nigerian official. “Tests to determine their age, such as scanning a wisdom tooth, cost about 50,000 CFA so you have to talk to them, but if they are insistent, you let them go back.”

Ivory Coast has a law criminalising trafficking, but it is barely enforced, and the country has been criticised by the US state department for its failure to tackle the problem.

The escadron, a notorious Ivorian police unit, has burned down some of the settlements where traffickers operate, but new ones keep springing up, partly because security personnel who come into the jungle allegedly demand weekly bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA for each trafficked girl.

Adekoye Vincent, spokesperson for the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (Naptip) in Nigeria, declined to comment when questioned about girls trapped as sex workers in Ivory Coast. The Ivorian national police and gendarmerie did not respond to requests for comment.

For Sara, the wait to return home goes on. She was in junior secondary school in Port Harcourt, in Nigeria, before dropping out to travel to Ivory Coast. These days she is learning how to barter condoms for other items.

“I really don’t like the work I’m doing here. I miss my people at home,” she says.

* Names have been changed

By Eromo Egbejule, The Guardian

25,000 trafficked women, girls from Nigeria trapped in Malian mines

Friday, August 23, 2024

Nigeria ‘Loses’ Another $57m Jet To Chinese Firm In Canada

There appears to be no end in sight for Nigeria’s troubles as the nation is fast losing some of its prized assets to the Chinese Zhongshang Fucheng Industrial Investment Ltd, which has embarked on the successive seizures of Nigerian assets after it secured an order from a French court.

The Chinese firm secured an order to confiscate Nigerian properties over an alleged breach of contractual agreement by Ogun State of Nigeria which stemmed from a failed free trade zone (FTZ) deal, and it has moved quickly to take over Nigeria’s assets in Europe and North America to collect up to $70 million from a 2021 arbitration verdict.

No sooner did the Chinese firm seized three Nigerian presidential jets in France last week, than it followed it up by confiscating two Nigerian guest houses in Liverpool UK on Wednesday. And on Thursday, the spate of seizures continued when the firm announced that it has finalised repossession of a luxury jet owned by Nigeria in Canada, LEADERSHIP gathered.

The investment group reportedly received a change of custodian paperwork for the Bombardier 6000 type BD-700-1A10 aircraft from Canadian authorities in Montreal, and has exerted ownership over the aircraft.

The firm had reportedly obtained a court judgement from a Canadian Court several months ago to enable it to seize the Nigerian jet.

“The court granted orders for Zhongshang to seize the plane earlier this year, but the change of custody from Nigeria to Zhongshang was only recently concluded,” someone familiar with Zhongshang’s activities said anonymously to discuss the matter. “Zhongshang will not stop seizing Nigeria’s assets worldwide until the last cent of the arbitration awards has been paid.”

Nigeria faces more threats of property seizures as some of its assets in Belgium and the US are up for grabs in the coming weeks.

Nigeria has mounted challenges against the court orders but it has not been successful in five countries. The country has, however, said it did no wrong. It is not certain whether this assertion can save the situation for the country.

LEADERSHIP had reported that after seizing the Nigerian guest houses in the UK, the Chinese firm took further steps to put the two residential structures in the UK it confiscated for sale on global online marketplace eBay for an estimated $2.2 million.

The Chinese firm last Wednesday announced that it has seized three presidential jets of Nigeria but later released one to be used to convey the Nigerian President, Bola Tinubu, for a trip to France this week. Despite saying it was open for negotiation with the Nigerian government, the firm has intensified efforts to confiscate Nigerian assets wherever it may find them.

The Chinese firm took possession of the Nigerian properties at number 15, Aigburth Hall Road, Liverpool and Beech Lodge, 49, Calderstones Road, Liverpool United Kingdom, in June 2024, years after Nigeria failed to settle an arbitration judgement handed down in 2021.

According to court documents, Zhongshang was awarded $55,675,000 plus interest of $9,400,000 and costs of £2,864,445 as of the date of the arbitration verdict on March 26, 2021. The firm said Ogun state violated a 2001 trade treaty between Nigeria and China when its rights to a free trade zone were rescinded in 2016.

LEADERSHIP had also reported that the company dragged Nigeria before the arbitration panel in the UK in 2018, alleging that Nigeria allowed its federal organs like the police, immigration and export processing authority to be deployed by Ogun State without due process. Court documents said two Zhongshang executives were expelled from Nigeria between mid and late 2016 after one of them had allegedly been detained and tortured by the police.

Losing its prized assets in quick succession is certainly a difficult situation for Nigeria at the moment. How the nation will recover the assets, according to experts, remains within the diplomatic strategy that the nation might adopt in the coming days and that is left to be seen.

By Innocent Odoh, Leadership

At least 10 farmers killed by gunmen in northern Nigeria

Gunmen in Nigeria killed at least 10 farmers on Wednesday in an attack on a village in the northern Niger state, residents said.

Armed gangs, known locally as bandits, have frequently raided communities in northwest Nigeria, kidnapping residents, farmers, students and motorists for ransom.

Residents told Reuters on Thursday that the gunmen had attacked some farmers in Allawa community of Shiroro local government area in Niger late the previous day.

"The farmers were trapped and 10 killed yesterday evening in their respective farms," said Hassan Abubakar.

Another resident, Indamishe Auwal, who helped remove the corpses, lamented the incident and the general insecurity in the area.

"Shiroro is bleeding. Our people are suffering and bandits have taken over our farmlands," Auwal said.

Niger state police spokesperson Wasiu Abiodun didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

By Ahmed Kingimi, Reuters