A game of excuses

Girls of about 5 to 12 years are normally transported from the rural area by a house help broker to the city. Working women in search of such girls could be seen besieging the house of the broker, choosing those that satisfy their requirement and bargaining for the wages. In their new homes, the girl-child […]

Girls of about 5 to 12 years are normally transported from the rural area by a house help broker to the city. Working women in search of such girls could be seen besieging the house of the broker, choosing those that satisfy their requirement and bargaining for the wages.

In their new homes, the girl-child house helps are expected to perform most of the chores that keeps the home moving. They are the cooks, the cleaners, the nannies, the errand girls and sometimes they are sexually abuse by some members of the family.

At the end of the month, after performing their schedules, these vulnerable girls receive a token amount of N800 to the highest amount of N2000. The money goes to the broker, who, after taking her own share, would take the remaining one to the highly ambitious parents.

Investigation by Sunday Trust revealed that these underage girls are exposed to house chores that are too hard for their tender age. They normally wake up earlier than every member of the family and they are always the last to go to sleep in the night.

They work in such a restrained condition that they are not allowed free movement in the house; they are restricted from other social activities that the children of their employers enjoy. Sometimes these girls, after the onerous task they perform, they are poorly fed. They steal from the food prepared by them to kill the pangs of hunger.

Hauwa is a girl of about nine years old. She was brought to the city by a house help broker. Narrating her ordeal at the hand of her mistress, she said her routine commences from 4am everyday and ends after all the children had slept. “I get up before the call for dawn prayer to put water for morning wash on a stove. After that I start preparation for the breakfast. The next thing after breakfast is to tidy the whole house through sweeping and mopping,” she said.

She added, “From the morning till bed time I have one thing or the other to do. I cannot sleep till all the children had slept and all this that I was doing, I deserved no commendation from the woman.”

Narrating her own experience Uwani, 11, from Tsakuwa in Dawakin Kudu local government, said the house she had served in was a horrible place. She said anytime she remembered what she went through in that house, she shivered out of fear. “The woman was a devil in a human form. I worked all through, she showers abuse on me all through, I remained underfed everyday and I also suffered sexual abuse from her son who was always threatening me if I dare revealed it to anybody.

Uwani said she had to run away at last to her parents without even waiting to receive her money. She added that since she started working for the woman her madam had never laughed  or even crack a joke with her.

She said house help was a bad business; she advised parents, most especially, from the villages, to stop sending their children to the city in the name of sourcing money for them

Malama Zainab Ahmad, a civil servant said the nature of her work made her to look for a house help. She normally go out to work from 8am to 3pm. According to her she needed the house help to assist in taking care of the house, including taking care of the toddlers.

Zainab, however, denied overworking the house help. “I don’t over burden her with work. In fact she is better off in my house because I sew clothes for her; put her in Islamiyya School and she eats all that we eat. It is indeed a rare privilege because in her village she was not getting all these,” she said.

According to her, maltreating a house help was bad because house helps were contributing greatly to the sustenance of working women marriages. “I’m sure without the house helps many women might not be working. So if she can assist you in taking care of your house while you work outside, why must you maltreat her,” she queried.

Zainab, therefore, advised working women to show care and concern for their house helps, saying they should treat them as they would their daughters.

Malama Habiba Usman, a primary school teacher, said some of the problems being encountered by the house helps in their new homes were created by them.” Sometimes these girls would be given full freedom like any member of the family, but you may come to notice some bad behaviour to compel you to take some measures against them,” she noted.

She added that some of the house helps were so terrible that one has to be very careful and keep serious surveillance to be able to continue with them. She confessed that many working women were engaging house helps because they didn’t have alternatives, saying if government would reduce the work hours for the womenfolk, many would send off their house helps.

“They are just an additional burden; a necessary evil that working women are to live with. I pray that our government will assist us by cutting down our working hours so that we are not compelled to take house helps,” she prayed.

A house help broker who pleaded for anonymity said it was the parents of the children who begged her to come with them to the city so that they can work and earn money. She said it was not her fault. She said, tired of the problems associated with the business, she had abandoned it.

Commenting on the menace of child abuse and the effort his office was making towards fighting it, the Zonal Head, National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons and other Related matters (NAPTIP), Kano Zonal office Malam Ahmad M. Bello, said they had been making arrest of people caught abusing children, saying even recently they have arrested a woman with 36 children.

He explained that the law on human trafficking stipulated that any person that employs an under 18 as domestic help outside his family environment was liable to five years imprisonment.

Bello further noted that the law also stipulates that if you employ a child to do a work that is so tedious that it will adversely affect his physical, mental, spiritual and moral development, the person would be sent to jail for life. He added that his office hasd been collaborating with the police force, Hisbah and Adaidaita Sahu in fighting child abuse and human trafficking.