A video circulating online shows two men accused of taking their employer’s young son with the intention of selling him — a betrayal made more painful by the fact that the suspects were people the family trusted enough to employ.
The Allegation
In the video, the two men are described as having stolen their boss’s son with plans to sell him for money. This account closely matches a case reported out of Ogoja, Cross River State, where Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) said three workers took their employer’s two-year-old son from his residence and attempted to move him to another location for sale. According to NAPTIP’s Cross River Head of Operations, Oba Joseph, the suspects claimed they had worked for their employer for about three months without being paid their wages, and told investigators they took the child partly as revenge and partly as a way of recovering what they were owed. The suspects were caught after a farmer who was suspicious of their explanation for moving with the child raised the alarm, leading to their arrest after they had already crossed about four communities. NAPTIP said it is still investigating the suspects’ true ages, since there was a discrepancy between what the community documented and what the suspects themselves claimed.
A Recurring Wound: Trafficking by People Close to the Victim
Cases where a trusted insider — an employee, relative, or family friend — is behind a child’s abduction are a recurring and especially painful pattern in Nigeria. In Plateau State this week, police arrested two people, including the child’s own mother, over an alleged staged kidnapping of a two-year-old boy, in which a ransom demand that started at ₦7 million was later raised to ₦15 million while the child was kept at one suspect’s residence. In an unrelated case earlier this year, two Pakistani nationals were arrested in Lagos after luring a fellow countryman with a fake job offer, only to kidnap him and demand a ₦50 million ransom from his boss. These cases share a common thread: the abductors are rarely strangers acting on pure opportunity, but people who had some existing access or relationship to the victim or their family, which is exactly what made the crime possible in the first place.
Why Trust Becomes a Weapon
Employees, especially those working closely inside a household or business, often know a family’s routines, finances, and vulnerabilities better than an outsider ever could. When that access is combined with grievances like unpaid wages, financial desperation, or a belief that the employer “owes” them, it can curdle into a justification for exploiting the very trust that gave them access in the first place.
Who Pays, and How Much
For the child and family involved, the trauma of a trusted employee turning abductor is severe, compounding the fear of the abduction itself with the deeper psychological injury of betrayal by someone inside the home. For employers more broadly, cases like this feed a growing wariness about who is let into domestic or business trust circles, which can, in turn, make honest workers face more suspicion than they deserve. Nationally, each case adds to Nigeria’s already serious child trafficking problem and puts more pressure on agencies like NAPTIP, which must investigate not just strangers, but the far more complicated cases involving employers, employees, and even family members.
Reducing the Risk
Legal and labour advocates point out that timely wage payment is one of the most basic protections against this kind of retaliatory crime, since unresolved grievances over unpaid work are a recurring motive in several recent cases. Families are also encouraged to properly vet anyone given regular access to their children, including checking references and formal documentation, rather than relying on informal trust built over a short period of employment. Community vigilance, like the farmer’s suspicion that led to the Ogoja arrests, remains one of the most effective tools for catching this kind of crime before real harm is done.
Where This Leaves Us
It’s a distressing thought that the greatest threat to a child can sometimes come from inside the home, from someone paid to be trusted. We believe cases like this call for two things at once: real accountability for employers who withhold wages and create the conditions for resentment to fester, and equally firm consequences for anyone who turns that grievance into a crime against a child who had no part in the dispute.
Published by Ejoh Caleb
