An Adamawa State man has been remanded in custody after allegedly confessing that he abducted his own niece and arranged to sell her for ₦7 million (about $4,500) to a stranger.
What happened?
Andrawus James, a middle-aged resident of Bai village in Fufore LGA, was arraigned before a Chief Magistrate’s Court in Yola on charges of abduction. According to the police account read in court, James approached an acquaintance, Mohamed Buba, and told him he wanted to get rich quickly and had decided to sell his niece; the two allegedly negotiated a price of ₦7 million and worked out how the teenager, identified only as Fatima, would be handed over.
James then contacted Fatima — who lives with her parents in a different part of Yola — and lied to her that he had found her a job in Abuja, warning her not to tell even her own parents. Instead of taking her to Abuja, he allegedly took her to Ganye, planning to hand her to a buyer who would then move her to the capital. Buba, however, had already alerted security agents, and James was arrested as soon as he arrived in Ganye. He has been remanded in a correctional facility while the state’s Department of Public Prosecution reviews the case.
Not an isolated case
Cases of family members exploiting children and young relatives for money are sadly not new in Nigeria. Human trafficking networks frequently rely on a family member or someone the victim trusts to lure them away, since strangers attempting the same thing would raise suspicion immediately. Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) has repeatedly flagged family-involved trafficking as one of the hardest patterns to detect and prosecute, precisely because the first “kidnapper” a victim resists is someone they were taught to trust.
Causes and effects
Poverty and the desperation for quick money remain the biggest drivers behind cases like this. Investigators say the promise of a job — a common trafficking tactic — is especially effective on teenagers and young adults in regions with high unemployment, where the idea of city work feels like an escape. The effect on individual victims can be lifelong: trauma, in some cases physical harm, and in the worst outcomes, the girl or boy never returns home at all.
Nationally, each case like this feeds into Nigeria’s reputation as a source country for human trafficking, complicating diplomatic and law-enforcement cooperation with destination countries and slowing efforts to improve how the world views Nigerian migration overall.
What can be done?
Awareness campaigns that specifically warn families and young people about “job offer” scams — especially ones that come with secrecy demands — can help close this gap. Community vigilance, like Buba’s decision to alert the police instead of staying silent, remains one of the most effective tools against trafficking. Stronger, faster prosecutions also send a signal that family ties offer no protection from the law.
Our Analysis
What makes this story especially disturbing is the betrayal at its centre — a girl was not tricked by a stranger, but by her own uncle, someone she likely had no reason to distrust. It’s a reminder that trafficking prevention can’t only focus on “strangers” as the threat. We believe families and communities need to talk openly about these tactics, because silence is exactly what predators, including ones within the family, count on.
Published by Ejoh Caleb
