5,275 human trafficking reports received -NAPTIP

The National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons said it received 5,275 calls reporting human trafficking-related cases nationwide from September 2021 to August 2022.

The agency also added that it secured 36 convictions in nine months.

It noted that its partnership with the social media giant, Facebook, in September 2021 opened a new conduit that received at least 70,000 reports and cases of trafficking in 10 months.

In its performance report highlighting the one-year since its current Director-General, Dr Fatima Waziri-Azi, assumed office, the agency claimed that although thousands of trafficking cases exist nationwide, they were hardly reported due to poor reporting channels which could not protect victims from retribution.

NAPTIP explained that it secured at least 42 convictions within that period, with 36 of those in 2022 alone.
While noting that it filed 18 cases of human trafficking and 35 cases of violence against persons in court within that period, the report, however, did not say how many individuals were involved in the VAPP cases or their current stages of prosecution.

Over the years, NAPTIP’s number of convictions secured has not been commensurate with the number of traffickers arraigned in court.

According to PUNCH analysis, 237 out of the 3,457 human traffickers NAPTIP arraigned in court were prosecuted for various offenses in the seven years from 2015 to 2021.