The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps has nabbed a gang responsible for prostituting children of 12, 13, 14 and 15 years at a hostel in Gombe.
The cartel was arrested on Monday night at about 2 am in the Gombe Metropolis at the Galaxy Hotel, Tunfure, where the girls had been lodged for weeks after leaving home under the pretext of going to school.
The Gombe State Commandant of the Civil Defence Corps, Mr. Waziri Baba-Goni, said the gang leaders had been arraigned and the proprietor of the hotel had also been invited for questioning regarding the issue of lodging minors, who are given out to customers who request for such under-aged children.
Mr. Baba-Goni said the gang was responsible for luring young girls, who leave their homes to go to school, only to divert to some of the designated hotels or private homes, using phones to call them and lure them to such places.
He said one of the gang members, a 14-year-old, was already 4 months pregnant.
According to Mr. Baba-Goni, the Civil Defence Corps has been on top of the situation, by ensuring constant arrests and detention of the perpetrators.
He said the organisation had so far arrested over one hundred minors, but that some of them would not be charged to court, hence their parents have been summoned to the Civil Defence Office.
Mr. Baba-Goni said some of the children were married, while some were in the process of getting married when they were arrested and brought to the detention centre of the Civil Defence Corps.
The 14-year-old Rahama, who stays in Billiri with her parent, said she had finished her junior secondary school and told her parents she was coming to Gombe, where she met the driver who got her pregnant.
She was away from home for over three weeks and was arrested at the hotel where they were lodging for more than the birthday party they went for lasted.
Rahama said the man that had gotten her pregnant was a driver she met in the car coming to Gombe, but had now refused to own up, because after she informed him of the pregnancy, he had switched off his phone and had remained unreachable.
For Uslam, she left home two weeks ago and none of her relatives knew her whereabouts, because went to stay with her friend somewhere in town, before she was invited for the birthday party, where an issue of the stolen phone exposed them and led to their arrest.
So were the stories of Fati and Maryam, who also left home some weeks ago without informing their parents where they were going.
One of the mothers, who was summoned by the Civil Defence Corps, said she had been searching for her daughter for about three weeks, only to be called to come to the Civil Defence Head Quarters, where she saw her daughter.
Mr. Mohammed is one of the parents also called to come and identify his daughter at the Civil Defence Headquarters.
With tears in his eyes, he said his daughter had already gone wayward and they had to be searching for her frequently.
“This past two weeks we have been searching for her. I blamed the mother because she was often seen with a neighbours friend, but she had recently gone beyond their neighbourhood, because she was no longer found in that area. Not until recently when Albani came to my house with the picture of my daughter, which I identified. With that he said I had been invited to their office, where we have now found our daughters,” said Mr. Mohammed.
He lamented that the level of decadence among the minors had gone beyond what the adults knew, saying only prayers and the determination of the security agencies would bring about the needed turn-around for the children and families.
“No matter how strong the surveillance you keep over them, it requires only one opening for them to sneak out and it will take you weeks to search and find them. I was even told that they now take illicit drinks. I got very sad immediately he told me what was going on,” Mr. Mohammed said.
The Gombe State Commandant of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, as well as the parents who spoke with Voice of Nigeria, called for intensified prayers, counselling and admonition by parents and religious leaders, as well as preaching on the need for parents to pay proper attention to the whereabouts of their children and desists from subjecting them to child labour.
“You deprived the child of going to school and becoming somebody in the future. You now send him to be hawking you see them picking rubbish on the street, bola, at the end of the day they will not go to school,” said Mr. Baba-Goni.
He said parents had a greater role in rising up children as future productive people and providing them with the best security than the government, whose role was to build schools for the children to attend.
Mr. Baba-Goni commended the collaborative efforts between the Civil Defence and other security agencies in Gombe State, which had been yielding positive results from the joint patrol they undertake from time to time.
