Plateau nabs 14, bust 10-year-old child labour syndicate

Plateau State Governor, Caleb Mutfwang. Photo Credit: Plateau Press

The Plateau State Government has arrested 14 persons, including three suspected traffickers, and rescued 11 victims in a major operation targeting an illegal motor park allegedly used for trafficking children and women to mining camps in Ibadan. The Special Adviser to Governor Caleb Mutfwang on Gender and Chairperson of the Plateau State Gender and Equal Opportunities Commission, Olivia Dazyam, disclosed this on Friday while briefing journalists at the Commission’s headquarters in Jos. She said the Commission acted on a tip-off from a Zawan community member in Jos South Local Government Area about an illegal park operating only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “Gentlemen of the press, we decided to call you this afternoon because of a challenging situation that we came across. A member of the Zawan community drew our attention to what, according to him, looked like an illegal motor park. He wanted to find out if we knew about the existence of that park, and he gave me the information that the park operates only on Thursdays and Tuesdays. Thursdays, they would convey passengers to a location in Ibadan… Tuesday, they will now bring back some people into that park and drop them there”, Dazyam said. She added that she and her team visited the site and found five vehicles loading passengers for what appeared to be a night journey. “I quickly wanted to find out about the legitimacy of that park. In the first instance, of course, it didn’t look like a park to start with, only a park to the extent that there were vehicles there and there were persons who looked like passengers. I didn’t like the sight of some of the people that I saw there. Some looked like miners, and I also saw young ladies there who were also about to travel”, she said. After confirming with the Commissioner for Transport and the Nigerian Union of Road Transport Workers that the park was illegal, security operatives were alerted. She noted further saying, “The attention of the security was quickly drawn to it, and as I speak now, the police are investigating. I felt that when we have things like this on our hands, we shouldn’t keep quiet. It would appear that, probably, as a result of the silence that we have kept about a lot of negative things happening to us, it has encouraged, in one way or another, the continuity of the abuses against us.” She expressed shock that the park had existed for nearly a decade. “I’m told that this is a park that has been operating for up to almost 10 years at Zawan Junction… I still have these expec