The Government Delegate
to the Bamenda City Council, Vincent Ndumu Nji has declared that a team of
lawyers would be put in place to pursue and bring to justice the perpetrators
of girl trafficking in the region.
He spoke over Radio Ndefcam during its
Saturday morning call in program, Press and Associate. According to him, “the
council lawyer and other lawyers would take up cases against these agencies
that hoodwink and recruit these girls and also to an extent put pressure to
bare at the level of any government structure that can help follow up to find
out where these girls are. Definitely we must put hands together to make sure
these girls come back home safe and alive. It is not a problem of the city
council as such but is a problem that can be handled by the ministry of social
affairs and to an extent the ministry external relations without leaving out
the local administrative authorities. The City council would give a helping
hand to make sure something is done. This
would be not only to help the girls that are from the Bamenda city but all the
girls in the region.”
The reaction of the government delegate
is coming on the heels of a heart rending testimonies of some of the girls who
have been sold into “slavery” in Kuwait. Their testimony was further buttressed
by another testimony recorded by a victim who is still over there and sent to
Ndecam Radio. In all the testimonies, the story is the same. The girls are
forced into sex, maimed, abused and killed. Some of them are made to work for
over twenty hours, wash snakes, eat and sleep with cats and dogs.
Several marches are planned in Bamenda
this week by the Common Future of Gwain Colbert, a journalist and human right
activist, Afu Stephen of PEATTU, a trade unionist and Teacher and many other
concerned Cameroonians. They say that their march is to draw the attention of
the public and the authorities to the plight of these girls whose unfortunate fate
is not of their making. Statistics according the report from CRTV’s Cameroon
Calling states that more than 30 girls leave Cameroon everyday to Dubai or
Lebanon under such dubious circumstance. The report further indicates that, of
the thousands of black girls working as house servants over there, 90% are from
Cameroon escaping from economic hardships and bad governance. If the Statistics given is something to go by,
then it is a serious indictment on the collective conscience of Cameroonians
and the government of the republic.
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