By Charles Dickson
On a bed at the female ward of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital laid a 15-year-old girl in an evidently bad state. Her face and head were bandaged, leaving slits through which only a bruised eye and swollen lips were visible. On her body were clearer signs of trauma, with burns running from her neck down to the lower parts of her body.
Around her bed wafted a foul smell, which a nurse who came to attend to her attributed to a septic wound in the girl’s skull.
A nurse who does not want to be named, because she is not authorised to speak on the matter, told the icirnigeria.org, that a group of people from the biggest Internally Displaced Persons, IDP, camp in Maiduguri dumped Lami (the surnames of all victims in this report are withheld to protect them) at the hospital.
“We have many of them. They’d been either raped in the camp or sold by those that should be protecting them in the camps,” the nurse said.
Approached by the reporter, Lami tried to speak, but her voice was muffled into a whisper as pains coursed through her body.
She said her parents were killed by Boko Haram insurgents in her village and she managed to reach Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, in an open truck that dropped people off at a camp for displaced persons.
In the course of moving from one camp to the other, she was separated from her younger brother.
“I do not know where he is,” she said through muffled sobs.
How did she end up in the hospital burnt and battered?
Lami said some government officials came to the camp and took many young girls away and later sold them as slaves. She ended up in the house of one Alhaji Aliyu, whose brother and wife abused her. While Aliyu’s brother repeatedly raped her, his wife weighed in with physical abuse.
“One day, some people came to the camp and said that they were taking us to a better place. That was how I got to Alhaji Aliyu’s house and it was there, every day, his brother forcefully slept with me.
“After that, he would beat me and one of Alhaji’s wives too would always beat me.
One day she attacked me with a knife. That was how I got the wound in my skull,” she recounted.
Lami’s case, depressingly, is not an isolated one. Hundreds of girls are now being trafficked from some of the IDP camps in the Northeast set up to cater for people displaced by the insurgency, especially unregistered ones.
It was learnt that because many of the camps cannot accommodate all the people displaced from their homes by Boko Haram attacks, many IDPs end up in makeshift unofficial camps close to the officially designated ones or in nearby villages.
The people in the makeshift camps are not officially registered and technically are not under the care of government.
They are usually taken care of by villagers or even relatives in the government-run camps. Somehow, state officials have the same access and control over these unofficial camps.