CHILD TRAFFICKING, ADOPTION AND OTHR RELATED OFFENCES IN NIGERIA- WHITHER LIES THE SOLUTION
The pace at which the Nigerian police arrest child traffickers and related offences are becoming a matter of concern in recent times. In spite of the arrest made by the police, the offenders are not in any way deterred by the arrest being made against them. From the look of things the offenders are still active in the trade.
The high level of poverty in the country is indeed a factor that encourages this business to thrive, creating die- hard criminals who are ready to be caught while trying rather than die of hunger doing nothing. The poverty that has ravaged the land affected all men from different walks of life, including the police who arrested them and later connive for their release. There are so many tales of childlessness by many rich men who may buy an unwanted child at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand Naira per child. Our culture as Africans don’t take childlessness with kid glove as the society looks down on couples without a child. This indeed has made the business of this child manufacturers or child traffickers to blossom in recent times.
Necessary agencies need to rise up to the challenge of poverty which is the main cause of many criminal activities in Nigeria. The new minister of finance Mrs Kemi Adeosun must provide a budget that will privilege the people so as to defeat the high poverty rate that we are experiencing presently in Nigeria.If that is accomplished, the regime in power needs to create a unified culture for all the clans which will yield us a moral value and an acceptable sense of decency within ourselves, the days of ethnocentricism is over where one Nigeria lord it over the other, so that Nigeria can uniformly have a worldwide acceptance of beneficial and malevolent.In conjunction with the National Orientation Agency, sensitizing the public against the vices of child trafficking will contribute immensely in reducing its occurrence in the society.
It is pertinent to state, however, that the adoption law in Nigeria must be addressed. The administrative bottleneck and procedures for adoption in Nigeria need to be looked into so that it will be easier to legally take a child rather go through the back doorway to execute same. It is understandable why the process is cumbersome because of the insincerity of many Nigerians for the adoption process, but a little modification in some difficult areas of the law will encourage more people to legally adopt. If this is achieved, it will drastically reduce this criminal act in the society whereby a reasonable number of people will legally adopt rather than to encourage this child manufacturers in the society.
