Police/Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime, and Governance

Mobility and Morality in Nigeria's Anti-Trafficking Campaign

Stacey Vanderhurst

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501763557
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

Unmaking Migrants engages critical questions about preventing trafficking by preventing migration through a study of a shelter for trafficking victims in Lagos, Nigeria.

Over the past fifteen years, antitrafficking personnel have stopped thousands of women from traveling out of Nigeria and instead sent them to the federal counter-trafficking agency for investigation, protection, and rehabilitation. Government officials defend this form of intervention as preemptive, having intercepted the women before any abuses take place. Yet many of the women protest their detention, insist they were not being trafficked, and demand to be released.

As Stacey Vanderhurst argues, migration can be a freely made choice. Unmaking Migrants shows the moments leading up to the migration choice, and it shows how well-intentioned efforts to help women considering these paths often don't address their real needs at all.

1 CRISIS

When the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) passed the Palermo Protocol in December 2000, it consolidated a global mandate to end human trafficking. Participating governments around the world acted swiftly to comply with this mandate by legally prohibiting human trafficking and establishing the recommended prevention, protection, and prosecution programs. However, these states did not act in a vacuum. While referencing the Protocol as a common standard, every legislative action developed amongst specific legal, cultural, and moral frameworks for understanding and regulating migration, sex work, and sexual exploitation. For these reasons, the global proliferation of anti-trafficking laws after the Palermo Protocol cannot be understood strictly in top-down terms as a matter of replication or reproduction. By examining how the problem of migrant sex work was understood before the trafficking discourse came to dominate public policy, we can better understand the social dynamics of anti-trafficking programs that persisted across these frameworks.

In the decade before the Palermo Protocol was passed, migrant sex work was widely recognized as a problem in Nigeria, but it was not called trafficking and women were not seen as victims. The following national news story, published as the Palermo meetings were underway, was typical:

Up Against Sexport

Lagos—Nigerian professionals especially those in the health sciences, academia and other fields who departed the country in the wake of military misrule, left mostly because they felt undervalued. They also wanted more adventure and career fulfilment which the country could not provide at that time.

But more importantly, they had brains and whenever they arrived in a country, they just walked into the waiting hands of their expectant and obliging hosts. This, obviously was the greatest of Nigeria’s export.

But, the new Nigerian professionals who are already practising in various parts of the world are completely different from their forerunners. All they have are mere sexual skills and sometimes, good bodies.… Once settled, they begin to repatriate illicit sex proceeds for one pressing family project or the other.

The commercial sex exports attained an unprecedented notoriety during the military regimes of Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha partly because they did not really take the country’s image seriously. But since the return of democracy, a few states like Edo, which leads the pack of foreign-based prostitutes, is working very hard to see how young ladies will be discouraged from going abroad to work in brothels.¹

This excerpt features three essential pieces of the historical puzzle that would determine how the global anti-trafficking paradigm was taken up in Nigeria. First, Nigerians saw migrant sex workers as willful, independent agents. Second, the primary harm of this migration was the embarrassment it brought to Nigeria—creating a blight on the national image—and not the harm it caused the women themselves. And third, the recent democratic transition lent new weight to the question of reputation and created new opportunities to do something about it.

Social scientists use the term “moral panic” to describe how specific people or issues come to be understood as a threat to society in ways that exceed the actual problem at hand.² This chapter presents the public concern around Nigeria’s migrant sex workers as its own form of moral panic. That does not mean these problems were invented from nothing: significant numbers of Nigerian women did migrate to Europe throughout the decade. However, because these women were framed as a menace to the nation and their reform was the object of so much public scrutiny, they came to stand in for a range of other social anxieties around gender, citizenship, and nationhood that far surpassed the matter of migrant sex work alone.

These concerns focused specifically on women from the Edo ethnic group (also known as Bini), who are most associated with human trafficking and migration into sex work from Nigeria. Residing in a region just north of the oil-rich Niger Delta, Edo women are neither poorer nor richer than women from other parts of the country. So why would they constitute such a significant portion of this migration stream? Folk explanations abound, including societal decay, familial greed, and moral depravity. Many of these explanations reference the fall of the Benin kingdom, citing colonial destruction and occupation for the ongoing corruption of women’s value systems. In order to better understand this legacy, we need to consider the historical tensions that shaped the positions of Benin and Nigeria in global politics and rendered Edo women migrants as political problems. The moral authority of the state evolved from the sacking of the Kingdom of Great Benin, through the British occupation of Nigeria, and within the military dictatorships that followed. From this evolution, we can trace the gendered institutions of coercion and care that would eventually address Nigeria’s panic over migrant sex work.

Violent States and Benevolent Women

Originally known as Edo, Benin City has long been a hub of European contact in West Africa.³ It was the urban center of the expansive Benin Empire beginning in the eleventh century and was home to the Oba (ruler) of Benin, whose elaborately decorated palace sat in the core of a planned city.⁴ By the time the Portuguese arrived in 1485, the series of protective moats and walls surrounding the city were four times longer than the Great Wall of China. For centuries, the Obas of Benin welcomed contact with Portuguese, Dutch, and British envoys, controlling trade and maintaining the political independence of the kingdom. They cultivated exports in ivory, pepper, cloth, coral, and palm oil, charging significant levies to Europeans, and they profited significantly from participation in the transatlantic slave trade.

However, as the scramble to colonize Africa accelerated in the late nineteenth century, British traders grew impatient with Oba Ovonramwen’s control over local markets. In late 1896, British general James Phillips staged an invasion of the city to unseat the Oba, promising his superiors that the value of the palace art would defray the cost of the mission. The Oba’s army, however, surprised the invaders before they arrived in the city, killing hundreds and leaving only two survivors. Within days, the British organized “the Benin Punitive Expedition” and, on February 9, 1897, the military arrived to pillage the city and then burn it to the ground. Three thousand looted art pieces—known as the Benin Bronzes—remain in the British Museum and other American and European collections to this day.⁵ Many of these pieces depict European traders as attendants to the Oba, referencing a more cooperative era.

After the invasion, the Kingdom of Great Benin was annexed to the British Empire, justified as a necessary civilizing response to what had become known in Britain as the “Benin Massacre.” The Oba’s heirs were no longer recognized as heads of state but instead as traditional rulers and cultural custodians, a practice that continues today. Remnants of the city wall and protective moats also remain on the Benin City landscape, skirting public marketplaces and dense residential districts. Warrior chiefs who resisted the British are now memorialized in statues along the ring road that passes in front of the Oba’s rebuilt palace.

Nigeria spent nearly the entire twentieth century under colonial and military rule. It was granted independence from the British Empire in 1960, adopted a constitution declaring the First Republic in 1963, and operated as a democracy until 1966, when the government fell to a military coup and then civil war. A series of authoritarian regimes followed. Like the colonial occupation, each dictatorship asserted moral mandates for state violence, using security forces to impose their vision of social order, rather than the rule of law.⁶ These patterns are relevant to understanding how police, border agents, and limited social service programs would eventually be used to combat migrant sex work and trafficking in the decades to follow.

For example, Major-General Muhamadu Buhari led a military coup ending Nigeria’s Second Republic in 1983, premised on the need to reform not only the government but also the population itself. He initiated a concerted, dictatorial “War Against Indiscipline” to impose order on daily life in Nigeria. The wide-ranging campaign posted armed police to enforce bus queues in Lagos and imposed prison sentences on students who cheated on exams.⁷ Women were targeted by a number of these initiatives, including prohibitions on teenage pregnancy, adolescent delinquency, and other sexual behaviors. Some states ordered “free women” (a euphemism for sex workers) to marry or risk losing their jobs or homes.⁸ Buhari used explicit and spectacular forms of violence to enforce this agenda, common to the African “postcolony.”⁹ When he returned as head of state in 2015, this time as a democratically elected president, his success was widely credited to nostalgia for this aggressive social agenda.

In August 1985, Major General Ibrahim Babangida (known to most Nigerians by his initials IBB) staged a palace coup to unseat Buhari, installing a new regime that at least half-heartedly engaged international expectations for good governance. Historian Toyin Falola writes that “if Buhari was straightforward and sincere, Babangida was an evil genius—affable and cunning, he was a master of double-speak, deceit, and ambiguity.”¹⁰ IBB was president during the Western push for global economic reform implemented through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). These reforms required massive reductions in already limited social services in poor countries around the world, especially disadvantaging poor women and families. IBB implemented these austerity measures to maintain access to international finance but defended his policies as “SAP with a Nigerian face.”¹¹

As structural adjustment mandates reduced spending in state programs, foreign aid and development organizations looked to find local NGOs to fill the gap in social services. Rather lose the opportunity to pilfer these funds, Nigerian politicians resourcefully adapted to these new revenue streams, creating what became known as GONGOs: government-organized NGOs.¹² One early example of IBB’s quasi-governmental organizations was his wife Maryam Babangida’s initiative “Better Life for Rural Women” (BLP), founded in 1987. In practice, BLP did little to combat the hardships felt by women and the rural poor that were created by the radical reduction of state services under IBB.¹³ It was openly derided as a corrupt front for channeling money to politicians and for providing festive occasions for elite women to flaunt their fine cloth, earning the nicknames “Better Life for Rich Women” and “Bitter Life for Rural Women.”¹⁴ Still, the BLP exemplified an important shift in the logics of statecraft that underlined IBB’s regime. In contrast to Buhari’s ruthlessness, these programs pretended to serve Nigeria’s neediest women on behalf of IBB’s administration, staging spectacular displays of personal and institutional benevolence in the process. This model was so successful that, after BLP, every politician’s wife would go on to found organizations to serve women’s interests. Because they are more known in Nigeria for providing access to money and prestige than for their charity work, critics of the government call this phenomenon “First Ladies’ Syndrome.”¹⁵

In 1993, IBB hosted elections for a democratic transition but ultimately nullified the results in anticipation of another military coup. He was succeeded by General Sani Abacha who ruled ruthlessly with a flagrant disregard for human rights and the rule of law, generating international outcry at the execution of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Meanwhile, his wife Maryam Abacha founded her own women’s projects. Her “family” programming mainly promoted income-generating activities and credit schemes, but she declared them part of a “social crusade” for discipline and morality. These projects thus catered simultaneously to international financial markets eager to incorporate marginal communities while further relieving the government of responsibilities to provide a social safety net to the poor.¹⁶

These tensions between coercive and often violent uses of state power, on the one hand, and...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Crisis
• 2. Detention
• 3. Vulnerability Reduction
• 4. Risk Assessment
• 5. Sexual Ambition
• 6. God’s Plan
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index