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| Titi Atiku Abubakar |
Chief Titi Atiku Abubakar, wife of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Network Against Child Trafficking, Abuse and Labour (NACTAL), did not mince words in Abuja on Thursday. Speaking at the public presentation of NACTAL’s review of the United States Department of State’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, she declared that Nigerian girls are “becoming a nuisance in overseas countries.”
The comment was not casual rhetoric. It cut to the core of why international partners fund anti-trafficking work in Nigeria: not pure altruism, but a calculated desire to keep vulnerable young women from arriving in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere as irregular migrants who strain social services, fuel public backlash, and complicate immigration politics.
“You see, why our partners are actually helping us? Because they want our girls to stay at home. Our girls are becoming nuisance in overseas countries.
So that is why these partners are helping us,” Atiku said. She added that the support extends to both Nigerian institutions and the girls themselves, with the goal that they “stay at home and do whatever they want to do in their homes, in their country.”
Her frankness, rooted in decades of activism, forces a harder conversation about the intersection of human trafficking, economic desperation, and the limits of foreign assistance.
A Pioneer’s Perspective Forged in Experience
Titi Atiku is no latecomer to this fight. In the late 1980s, while studying in Italy, she witnessed Nigerian women trapped in street prostitution networks. That experience shaped her founding of the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF) in 1999. WOTCLEF helped midwife both the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and NACTAL itself — a network that today counts roughly 286 to 289 civil society organisations as members, which Atiku describes as “foot soldiers” on the front lines.
Her organisation’s early advocacy contributed to Nigeria’s landmark Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Law Enforcement and Administration Act. Few Nigerian public figures have sustained this work across successive governments with comparable consistency.
At the Abuja event, she used that authority to call for broader collaboration. NACTAL alone cannot defeat trafficking, abuse, and child labour, she stressed. “So we must bring everybody on board to help in this fight.”
What the 2025 TIP Report Actually Said — and What NACTAL Says It Missed
Nigeria has remained on Tier 2 of the TIP Report for years: a ranking for countries that do not fully meet the minimum standards for eliminating trafficking but are making significant efforts. The 2025 report (and the subsequent 2026 edition covering the period April 2025–March 2026) documented measurable gains in enforcement. Authorities investigated 1,341 trafficking cases involving 1,367 suspects, prosecuted 94 suspects, and secured 97 convictions — up sharply from 744 investigations, 71 prosecutions, and 49 convictions the previous year.
Funding for victim services rose to 233 million naira, and prevention funding increased to 245 million naira. The government identified about 2,004 victims and coordinated the repatriation of 428 Nigerians exploited abroad. state.gov
Yet NACTAL’s review, presented by immediate past president Abdulganiu Abubakar (also regional representative of the West African Coalition Against Trafficking in Persons and Smuggling of Migrants), argued that the report underrepresented Nigerian contributions. Development partners had helped refurbish about 10 NAPTIP shelters and supported policy work and victim assistance. More than 289 NACTAL member organisations and Nigeria’s role in regional West African initiatives received insufficient credit, Abubakar said.
He was candid about remaining weaknesses: inadequate funding, weak political will, and shortcomings in prosecuting high-profile cases.
“The government of Nigeria needs to do a lot in terms of funding. The political will and commitment should improve,” he stated. He also urged an enabling environment for civil society and recognition for investigative journalists who expose traffickers.
New NACTAL President Osita Osemene, a trafficking survivor himself, announced ambitious expansion plans: grow membership from roughly 286 organisations to 500 within three months and at least 1,000 within a year. He framed the struggle as a collective Nigerian responsibility rather than one dependent on foreign partners. Capacity-building for members would accompany the numerical growth so that interventions for victims improve in quality as well as reach.
The Deeper Context: Why So Many Nigerian Girls End Up Abroad
Nigeria is simultaneously a source, transit, and destination country for trafficking. Classic routes — through the Sahara to Libya and then the Mediterranean — have claimed thousands of lives and delivered many survivors into forced prostitution in Italy, Spain, and other European countries. More recently, Ghana has emerged as a major destination; the U.S. TIP Report identified Nigerians as the single largest group of trafficking victims there, often lured by false job offers and then forced into commercial sex to repay inflated debts.
Root drivers remain stubborn: high youth unemployment, poverty, insecurity in the North-East and North-West, weak education systems, and cultural factors that leave girls particularly vulnerable. “Baby factories,” organ harvesting, online scams that trap young people, and forced labour in domestic work or agriculture compound the problem. Armed groups such as Boko Haram and ISWAP continue to recruit and exploit children, according to successive TIP reports.
Atiku’s “nuisance” framing, while jarring, reflects a reality European and other host governments confront daily: irregular arrivals create political pressure, strain welfare systems, and sometimes generate crime or social friction. Partner support for prevention and repatriation programmes is therefore partly self-interested. The more effective Nigeria is at keeping its citizens at home with genuine opportunity, the less pressure falls on destination countries.
Yet this dynamic carries risks. Over-reliance on foreign funding can make programmes vulnerable to shifting donor priorities. It can also obscure the need for deeper structural reforms — job creation, security, education for girls, and credible prosecution of traffickers, including those with political connections.
Beyond the Headlines: What Real Progress Requires
NACTAL’s critique of the TIP Report highlights a perennial tension in global anti-trafficking work. International assessments rightly focus on government performance because states hold the monopoly on law enforcement and policy. But frontline civil society organisations often identify victims first, run shelters, provide psychosocial support, and reintegrate survivors long after official attention fades. When their data and impact are undercounted, the overall picture becomes incomplete and coordination suffers.
The drop in the number of victims assisted — from over 2,000 in one recent period to 675 in the next — underscores that enforcement gains alone do not equal protection. Shelters remain limited, especially for male victims, and services for those returned from armed groups have been criticised as inadequate or even re-traumatising.
Osemene’s expansion push and Atiku’s call for inclusive collaboration point toward a more resilient model: a denser network of local organisations that can operate even when donor cycles shift. Capacity building, better data sharing with NAPTIP, and sustained domestic funding are essential.
Titi Atiku’s blunt diagnosis forces an uncomfortable but necessary question. International partners are helping because they prefer Nigerian girls to remain Nigerian residents rather than become irregular migrants abroad. The challenge for Nigeria is to make that preference a genuine opportunity rather than a forced containment. That requires political will, resources, and a society willing to treat the protection of its young women as a national priority — not merely a problem to be managed for the comfort of distant capitals.
The fight against trafficking will not be won by reports alone, nor by foreign grants, nor even by the dedication of 286 civil society groups. It will be won when staying home becomes the rational, hopeful choice for the next generation of Nigerian girls.
Samuel O. Sulaimon is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Naijapiz. He covers News, Sports, Finance, Faiths, Education, Politics and Technology.
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