Human trafficking, threat to national security —Shehu Sani

THE fight against human trafficking and irregular migration in Nigeria deserves equal attention with the fight against corruption and insurgency, chairman, Senate Committee on Foreign and Local Debts, Senator Shehu Sani, has said.

He noted that human trafficking had become a great threat to national security and undermined the sovereignty of the Nigerian nation.

He spoke in Abuja during a courtesy visit on the Director-General of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Julie Okah-Donli.

He explained that human trafficking undermined the sovereignty of the country and had become a source of instability to the nation and must be well handled by the government and other international bodies.

He said: ‘’Nigerian youth are being trafficked to Italy enroute Niger Republic, Libya to Europe and so on. Some of them stopover in Libya where they are engaged in terrorist activities while those trafficked to Italy are involved in sex slavery.

“Each time tragedy occurs from human trafficking, it affects everyone of us because if an individual that is trafficked to Libya joins ISIS or Al-Qaida, after the training, such may come back to the country to perpetuate evil which is dangerous’’, he said.

Shehu Sani, who is also the vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, expressed disgust over the rate of deaths including Nigerians in the Mediterranean Sea in recent times as a result of failed and dangerous journeys to Europe by desperate individuals in search of greener pastures abroad.

“It is shameful that after 300 years of the abolition of slavery in the world, Africans are still dying in the sea in the name of human trafficking. It is also worrisome to note that unlike the days of old when Africans were forced to get on the boat, now, nobody forces us to get on the ship. It is also a shame that almost six decades of our political independence, we are still talking about this “, he lamented.

In her response, Okah-Donli decried insufficient funds allocated for her agency pointing out that what was given to NAPTIP was not commensurate to its huge tasks.

The NAPTIP Boss noted that the job of preventing human trafficking through awareness creation and prosecution required a lot of resources.

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