European Asylum Support Office

EASO COI Meeting Report
Nigeria
Practical Cooperation Meeting
12-13 June 2017
Rome

August 2017SUPPORT IS OUR MISSION© European Asylum Support Office 2017
Reproduction is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged, unless otherwise stated.
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Cover photo: © iStock.com/ Johnny Greig
Lagos, Nigeria - February 28, 2016: Okada motorcycle taxi riders waiting for fares in Lekki
district, Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa
Neither EASO nor any person acting on its behalf may be held responsible for the use which
may be made of the information contained herein.

EASO COI Meeting
ReportNigeria
Practical Cooperation Meeting
12-13 June 2017
Rome

August 2017

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 3

Acknowledgements
EASO would like to thank the following experts and organisations for their participation at themeeting and the presentations they gave:

Anna Giustiniani, project Manager, IOM Italy
David Pratten, Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa; Fellow of St
Antony’s College, University of Oxford
European Commission - Office of the EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator
Luisa Inversini, President of the Territorial Commission for International Protection– MilanMegan Turnbull, Visiting Assistant Professor, PhD, Department of Political Science,
Skidmore College
Olumide Femi Makanjuola, Executive Director, TIERs - The Initiative for Equal Rights,
Nigeria
Sine Plambech, Anthropologist, PhD, Danish Institute for International Studies
Stella Amadi Odiase, Lawyer and International Development Practitioner, Nigeria
Stephane Jaquemet, UNHCR’s Regional Representative for Southern Europe
UNHCR RSD unit

4—

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAContents
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... 3
Disclaimer .................................................................................................................................. 5
Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................ 6
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 7
Map ........................................................................................................................................... 8
Drivers, patterns, and perception of migration: Focus on Nigeria (Anna Giustiniani) .............. 9
UNHCR’s role in refugee status determination and initial considerations on current protection
issues in Nigeria (Stephane Jaquemet) ................................................................................... 13
Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 16
EASO COI Report – Nigeria Country Focus .............................................................................. 18
Analysis of the Security Situation in Nigeria in view of Article 15(c) of the Qualification
Directive (Luisa Inversini) ........................................................................................................ 19
Armed groups and security situation on the Niger Delta (Megan Turnbull)........................... 24
Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 32
Justice system and Rule of Law in Nigeria (Stella Amadi Odiase) ........................................... 35
Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 42
UNHCR COI research and country guidance on Nigeria (UNHCR RSD section) ....................... 45
The Office of the EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator .................................................................. 46
Migration and trafficking into the European sex industry – the case of Nigerian Edo womenand girls (Sine Plambech) ........................................................................................................ 47
Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 56
The situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual (LGB) in Nigeria (Olumide Femi Makanjuola) ........... 60
Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 70
Ritual killings, cults and chieftaincy (David Pratten) ............................................................... 74
Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 82
Questions and Answers with experts ...................................................................................... 84
Indigeneity .......................................................................................................................... 84
Why Edo State? ................................................................................................................... 84
Treatment of failed asylum seekers upon return to Nigeria .............................................. 87
Inheritance .......................................................................................................................... 88

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 5

Disclaimer
The meeting report compiles information presented by key speakers during plenary sessions
and subsequent questions and answers related to country of origin information. The different
chapters of the report provide literal transcripts, rather than summaries or syntheses.
Variations in style, terminology, spellings, and choice of language for different terms used bydifferent speakers may appear as a result.
The external speakers validated the information in this report as of August 2017 and havegiven their consent to be quoted publicly from this report. Information provided by an
external speaker in this report should be cited under the name of the speaker and the context
in which it was delivered:[Name of speaker], EASO, Practical Cooperation Meeting on Nigeria,
meeting in Rome, Italy, held on: 12-13 June 2017.
Any opinions expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the individual speakers
and do not represent the official position of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO).
Furthermore, this report is not conclusive as to the determination or merit of any particularapplication for international protection. Terminology used should not be regarded asindicative of a particular legal position.
‘Refugee’, ‘risk’ and similar terminology are used as a generic terminology and not as legallydefined in the EU Asylum Acquis and the Geneva Convention.
Neither EASO nor any person acting on its behalf may be held responsible for the use which
may be made of the information contained in this report.
The target users are asylum caseworkers, COI researchers, policymakers, and decision-making
authorities.

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EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

Abbreviations
ACCORD

Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation

ACLED

Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project

CEDAW

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

CFR

Council for Foreign Relations

COI

Country of Origin Information

DTM

Displacement Tracking Matrix

ECOWAS

Economic Community of West African States

EU+ countries

EU member States plus Norway and Switzerland

FGM/C

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting

ICASA

International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa

IPOB

Indigenous People of Biafra

LGBT(I)

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, (Intersex) persons

MASSOB

Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra

MEND

Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta

MOSOP

Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni people

MSF

Médecins Sans Frontières

MSM

Men who have sex with men

NEMANational Emergency Management Agency

NGO

Non-Governmental Oroganisation

NWP

Nigeria Watch Project

OPC

O’odua People’s Congress

SGBV

sexual and gender-based violence

SOCTA

Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment

SOAS

School of Oriental and African Studies

SSMPA

Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act

THB

Trafficking of Human Beings

TIERs

The Initiative for Equal Rights

UNHCR

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

VAPP

Violence Against Persons Prohibition Law

WFPWorld Food ProgramEASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 7

Introduction
On 12 and 13 June 2017, EASO organised a Practical Cooperation meeting on Nigeria in Rome,in the framework of EASO’s Operating Plan in Italy.
Following the need expressed by the Italian National Asylum Commission and other EU+
countries for accurate information on specific topics on Nigeria, and in view of a more
harmonised approach to Country of Origin Information (COI) and decision practice in the EU+,EASO brought together around 100 participants, including COI specialists, caseworkers anddecision-makers from most EU+ countries, together with EU institutions, as well as UNHCR
and IOM.
EASO invited the guest speakers mentioned in the Acknowledgement section of this report,
to share their expertise and field knowledge on Nigeria on selected topics and recent
developments in the country.
This Meeting Report includes transcripts of the presentations and subsequent questions andanswers (Q&A).

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EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

Map(1) Map 1: © United Nations(1) UN, Map No 4228, Rev. 1, August 2014 (http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/map/profile/nigeria.pdf),
accessed 4 August 2017.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 9

Drivers, patterns, and perception of migration: Focus on
Nigeria
Anna Giustiniani, project Manager at IOM Italy
IOM’s input focuses onthe data on the arrivals, mainly arrivals by sea,the drivers of migration witnessed through the accounts of the migrants themselves,

return migration, which is one of the key elements of IOM activities,the responses put in place in Europe and in the area of interest.

Data: Arrivals of Nigerian migrants by sea - from February to December 2016, there has beena steady increase. In 2015, mainly people from Afghanistan and Syria were coming by sea to
Greece and Italy, whereas in 2016 and 2017 there was a change into the pattern, also reflectedin the asylum applications, with more Nigerian and Eritrean applications.
Arrivals of Nigerian migrants to Italy - 1st January to 31st December 2016: out of the morethan 180,000 arrivals by sea, Nigerian migrants represented 21 % of this group, accounting for
more than 37,000.
Unaccompanied migrant children - more than 3,000. It is the third nationality of
unaccompanied migrant children present in Italy. Statistics until April 2017 show that
increase. There are almost 1,000 people, more than April 2017, while the presence of
unaccompanied migrant children remained steady. If we look at the gender of unaccompanied
migrant children, you will notice that while most of them are young male aged 16-17, only
among Nigerian nationals the number of girls is quite high.
Nigerian migrants’ profile at a glance - data collected from IOM’s activities at disembarkation:
IOM’s Displacement Tracking Metrics section meets and interviews migrants throughout theirroutes from their origin countries to their destination. Therefore, looking at the data provided
by Nigerian migrants in Italy, 58 % of Nigerian migrants are male between 18 and 25 years ofage. They mainly come from Edo state, the vast majority from Benin City. Most of Nigerians
travel on their own and the length of the journey was generally between 6 months and 1 year.
One year is the extreme and does not so often happen. The main transit countries are Niger
and Libya. Italy is one of the main intended destination countries.
Drivers of migration: socio-economic factors must be considered. Nigeria is one of the fastest
growing economies in the world. There is a very clear distinction between the north and thesouth, but there is very low pro-capita income, high unemployment rate, especially in theyoung generation, and extreme poverty in some areas, especially in the north.
There are also political factors: inter-state ethnic violence and Boko Haram insurgency. Basedon IOM’s assessment, the insurgency in the north and east areas is mainly generating IDPs
and movements within the region, that is, movements to Chad, Cameroon and Niger. There
are also environmental factors to take into account: climate change, land degradation anderosion linked to land misuse.
Among the drivers of migration, the call for Europe cannot be underestimated. Migrants
themselves express knowledge about the tragedies, especially in crossing the Mediterranean,
but are still willing to try their luck.

10 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAThis is linked to the perception by Nigerian migrants - an important addition of factors andrelevant to look at: there is circulation of information, and circulation of misinformation as
well. There are three main collection hubs : Agadez, Seba and Tripoli, which are. IOM describes
them as information hubs, since it is where often the decision to continue onward to Europe
is taken.
Through the DTM (Displacement Tracking Matrix) exercise, we have interviewed more than
1,000 Nigerian migrants arriving in Italy, mainly at landing points but also in Lombardy.
Initially, war, conflict and political problems were asked in one question, but later on thequestion was divided. War, persecution and economic factors were then distinguished.
Although economic factors are there, the perception of the migrants is that they fled becauseof war, conflict and persecution. This is quite evident and linked to the fact that they apply for
asylum once they arrive. The only ones that do mention economic reasons are theunaccompanied migrant children. IOM understands that this group leaves their countries
because they cannot access education and the services they are expected to.
There is a general perception that free movements are tolerated. Most of the movements
happen within the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) area where there
is free movement, and even when there are rules (e.g. asking for residence permit), it
generally does not happen. There is a general tendency to think that free movements aretolerated in the region, so why not go further to Europe? What are the reasons for this kindof behaviour? Porous boundaries, certainly; tribal links (we have people of the same ethnic
origins living in different countries in ECOWAS); circular and cyclical migration, especially inthe field of agriculture; lack of knowledge of existing legal frameworks regulating bordercrossing; and access to adequate information, which is key.
Comparing migratory movements of Nigerian nationals to Europe to the ones within the
ECOWAS indicates that the percentage arriving to Europe is very small.
What are the reasons why these movements to Europe happen in an irregular manner? The
reasons are: the length of the procedure to obtain documents to travel regularly; lack ofknowledge of regular channels, as already mentioned; and very few legal channels to reach
Europe, we must admit; general lack of trust vis-à-vis the government and the authorities.
This brings us to the issue of resorting to smuggling and trafficking networks. With respect tothe latter, especially, there has been a huge increase in the number of arrivals of young
women including underage ones, but we cannot underestimate either the presence of young
boys that are transferred for the purpose of labour exploitation.
With respect to counter trafficking, over the past 3 years, IOM together with the Italian
Ministry of the Interior and other organisations including UNHCR are present at landing points
with experts and counsellors in counter-trafficking. We have been providing counselling to a
lot of children and women arriving. Whenever possible, they have also been assisted by being
included in the referral system and transferred to other regions in Italy. IOM with otherorganisations, including UNHCR, has been providing assistance at arrival starting from 2006.
We have witnessed a huge increase: more than 300 Nigerian girls who were victims of
trafficking have been referred to proper assistance since 2014. Based on the assessment of
the Nigerian women/girls incoming trend to Italy, IOM has also developed specific trafficking
indicators that you will easily find in IOM’s resources in our website. 20 % of asylum
applications in Italy come from Nigerian nationals.
Return migration: what are the reasons for migrants to consider returning? Their expectations
have somehow been disrupted because the available opportunities were not as they were
presented before they left. They are often forced to work in under-the-table jobs. This is also

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 11

linked to the fact that because their asylum application would have often been rejected, they
do not have a clear legal status to live in Italy and the integration project has failed.
Support provided by the Nigerian government upon return: the government has been working
together with IOM in a definition of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for managing
return and integration matters. These are still under discussion and development. So far,government efforts have been mainly allying to issuing travel documents for would-be
returnees, and to support reintegration, but much more needs to be done on this specificendeavour.
There are also a number of non-state actors, NGOs - including faith-based organisations -, thatare very active, especially with victims of trafficking and which play a crucial role in assisting
the returnees upon their return. In this area, financial resources are limited. The number of
non-state actors is limited too compared with the numbers of returnees, both forcibly
returned and voluntary returnees.
What are the challenges upon return? These challenges are obviously also the reasons why
the number of returnees or voluntary returnees remains quite low. There are still inadequate
reintegration assistance and the risk of social marginalisation of returnees: this plays a keyrole in the decision-making process of would-be returnees.
Statistics from January 2016 until April 2017 indicate that the number of returnees – 366 -,compared to the total of returnees assisted by IOM – 99,000 -, is quite low. The top countries
from which Nigerians return are Germany, followed by Austria, Netherlands and Italy.
In regards to IOM’s work with the Nigerian authorities, and the commitment by the Nigerianauthorities to develop some national migration policy, the National Migration Policy 2015 has
been elaborated through a lot of work and capacity building by several organisations,
including IOM. Objectives in regards to returns/reintegration: the recognition that return is
an important component; reintegration, which is likewise very relevant; the need to increasebilateral/multilateral arrangements with the country of origin; as well as the need to set up
training programs to support the reintegration of returned migrants.
The strategies to put into place these objectives are to develop the standard operatingprocedure, ensuring timely issuance of documents to would-be returnees, promote training
and education opportunities for returnees and strengthen AVR programs.
The recently launched migration partnership framework with Africa embeds return andreintegration, among the key pillars. The aim of the migration partnership framework - Nigeria
is one of the top countries that EU is dealing with - is announcing cooperation on return andreadmission; the prevention of irregular migration; fighting traffickers and smuggling
networks; addressing the root causes of irregular migration; and promoting sustainable
development. Without these two last points, it would be very difficult to stop migration
without giving an opportunity to the people who decide to remain in their country of origin.
Building on this EU–Nigeria-Africa partnership, the renewed action plan on migration
envisages the conclusion of the readmission agreement with Nigeria: works started in
October, a second round of talks was meant to take place in February (did not occur), and thereadmission agreement should have originally been signed in June 2017. There are no
indications when the readmission agreement with the EU will be concluded.
What is IOM’s approach in this context? What are the activities on the ground in Nigeria?
Capacity-building activities for the migration policy document; direct assistance to migrants;
awareness-raising activities. The circulation of information prompting migrants to migrate andthe perception by migrants indicates that migrants have to be addressed directly, as they are
the ones taking the decision to migrate.

12 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

Within the capacity-building and direct assistance activity, IOM has defined a joint initiative
within the EU Trust Fund, targeting 14 origin and transit countries, including Nigeria. The main
focus will be policy and data collection; support for the re-integration of returnees, including
those returned forcibly by the countries; and labour migration.
Activities in the transit countries: Niger and Libya - charter flight(s) organised by IOM from
Libya to Nigeria, within the humanitarian repatriation program, run by IOM in close
cooperation with the Libyan authorities and with the Nigerian authorities in particular, theembassy in Tripoli and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Activities are also provided in Niger, in
one of the IOM transit centres, in particular in Agadez, where migrants are provided withinformation and assistance including non-food items.
Activities on raising the awareness of migrants: (1) The Missing Steps, a TV mini-series whichis going to be broadcast on the national TV of Nigeria, with the support of the government of
Switzerland, and Nollywood actors. The idea was to use the same speech/wording and same
approaches that migrants would use to take their decisions. It will broadcast in Nigeria. (2)Activities to be implemented in transit and destination countries. The Aware Migrants
Campaign consists of several activities, including video testimonies. Having migrants speaking
to other migrants would be the best way to address the key message about difficult and very
often deadly journeys.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 13

UNHCR’s role in refugee status determination and initialconsiderations on current protection issues in Nigeria
Stephane Jaquemet, UNHCR’s Regional Representative for Southern
EuropeFirst very briefly about UNHCR role in general in refugee status determination. In the 1951
Refugee Convention, states have an obligation to collaborate and to accept UNHCR’s
supervisory role. What does it mean? It means that in countries which are not party to the1951 Convention, mainly countries in the Middle East and in Asia, not in Europe and not in
Africa, we usually do refugee status determination instead of the government. We do it under
our own mandate. In State parties to the 1951 Convention, as is the case in Italy, normally thestate has the responsibility to do refugee status determination, but UNHCR can be part of theprocess. It can be an observer or have a more formal role. You have all kinds of scenarios,
from a very distant involvement to a much more direct involvement, as it is the case in Italy,
where a UNHCR staff is a full member of each of the 48 asylum territorial commissions.
The Nigerian caseload has been there since 2008. With two exceptions - 2010 and 2012 – thiswas the first nationality of asylum seekers and of arrivals by sea in Italy, roughly 22 % eachyear. It is important to realise that Nigeria is a country of 180 million people, 60 % of whom
are under 25 years old. The other day I was giving a presentation about a related topic migration - and one of the figures I presented, and this is something we have to realise, is thatin 25 years the total population of Africa will go from 1 billion to 2 billion people. It will double,
so the migratory pressure will not only continue, it will expand.
Nigeria is today the seventh most populated country in the world. It is expected that it will be
the fourth most populated country in 10-15 years’ time. In 10 to 15 years, there will be only
China, India and the US before Nigeria. I think it is something we need to bear in mind. Nigeria
is composed of 36 states. It is a federal system with 250 ethnic-linguistic groups. When you
do refugee status determination of Nigerians, it is a headache just to know to which ethnic
background they belong to. It is a very, very diverse society.
Last year 37,000 people arrived by sea, see chart below. In comparison, you see the number
of applicants. It means you have roughly 10-11,000 Nigerians who never applied for asylum.

14 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

Sea Arrivals and first time
applications
37,551by Nigerians, 2012-2016
Sea arrivals
26,55022,237
17,7809,0009,685

1,615
358
2012

2,6803,170

2013

2014

2015

2016

Of course, for Italy, the problem of people who never apply for asylum and are therefore
almost immediately irregular is another issue. It is a problem of law and order for Italy. I will
not go into too much detail about this. What is important to notice is the increased numberof women applicants in comparison to other nationalities: you have relatively more women
applying than for other nationalities.
Last year we did a profiling exercise of the Nigerians. We had some difficulty to do it. It was
not an easy task. We chose not to do it on arrival. That would have been interesting as wewould have probably had more variety of cases, but we decided to do it at the level of refugee
status determination. A number of colleagues worked on the basis of existing refugee statusdetermination files, which of course gave us some better indication because the files are much
more complete than if it were at disembarkation stage. We examined 300 cases - totallyconfidentially, so no names etc. because that was important - just for the purpose of knowing
a little bit more on the profile of Nigerians arriving in Italy.
What we realised, and that was the first paradox of this caseload, is that we have the mostdeadly conflict in the north eastern states and you have people mainly coming from thesouthern states. The vast majority of Nigerians do not come from the conflict areas, which ofcourse does not mean that you do not have localised conflicts in Nigeria but that is anotherissue. Massively people come from the south. In terms of religion, 95 % are Christians, which
does not reflect the proportion of Christians and Muslims in the country. The ethnicity mostrepresented is the Benin-Edo ethnicity, which is at the border with Benin.
Most of the asylum seekers are young and single men, though I have mentioned that there isan increasing number of women as well as unaccompanied minors, but they are not the firstnationality when it comes to unaccompanied minors.
Work experience: in general, there were more manual and low-skilled jobs, and a number ofthem were unemployed. As to the route, it is relatively straightforward and it is the mostlogical one, which is going through Niger and Libya. They spend roughly 10 months on thejourney. Usually the longest period is waiting in Niger or in Libya to have the money to crossor to find a smuggling opportunity to go beyond.
The reasons for leaving were really a mix. A number of people mentioned poor economic
conditions in the country, and there was an increasing number of sexual and gender-based
violence (SGBV) cases, though we need to be a little careful with that because IOM estimatesshow that at least 80 % of the Nigerian women are being trafficked and not all of them would

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 15

be applying for asylum. The women we would be interviewing are not necessarily victims of
trafficking because usually the traffickers would not let them apply for asylum. It could be adifferent type of SGBV, which is not victim of trafficking but could be rape, domestic violenceetc.
Another reason is family disputes, which can be also tribal disputes; the distinction is quitedifficult to make. This is also very widespread in the south in particular in the oil-producing
areas, which is where the majority of Nigerian asylum seekers come from.
Generalised violence - inter-ethnic or inter-religious conflict - is also widespread. You have tobear in mind that when you have a localised conflict in Nigeria, you may have anywhere
between three to 300-400 people killed. You suddenly have an eruption of violence that canlead to massive loss of lives, and if it is three people dying it may not even appear in Nigeriannews, if it is 300 it may, though not necessarily, become international news. News of a “few”
deaths by violence in Nigeria almost goes unreported. This also makes the role of asylum
professionals very difficult, since it is difficult to have access to that type of very specificinformation.
Threats from Boko Haram: in principle, it would be credible if people come from the northeastern districts. In this case, you would have to make a solid assessment in terms ofcredibility.
Threats from criminal gangs: they are everywhere in Nigeria, in all parts of the country, notonly the conflict areas, you have entire municipalities which are de facto controlled by criminal
gangs.
Of course, another reason is persecution based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The
fate of the LGBTI community is really difficult in Nigeria, as it is in a number of other Africancountries like Uganda.
What are the key protection issues? I will probably not be able to develop them further
because you already have other presentations on these issues. You have the specific situationin the North East, the region affected by the conflict with Boko Haram. You have the situationin the Niger Delta, which is the oil-producing area. The Niger Delta has been traditionally theplace of terrible inequality and lack of access to resources in spite of the wealth of that region.
Later on, I will develop a bit further the subject of the Biafra independency movement.
Religious minorities: what do we mean by minorities in a country like Nigeria? It iscomplicated, because you have minorities within the two main religions, and with agnostic
people. One of the alarming situations is the situation of the Shia Muslim minority.
Unfortunately, like in many Sunni majority countries, the Shia, mostly a minority, are not only
discriminated but there have been incidents of massacres of Shia Muslim minorities.
The concept of “indigene” versus settlers - the difficulty for some people who have migrated
to a region they do not belong to and are not registered as belonging to that area - createsmany tensions between the “indigenes” and the settlers, and sometimes the authority is
taking side with the indigene population.
Vigilantism and cultism: I am sure that you will be mentioning this. LGBTI issues are extremely
important. Nigeria has one of the most homophobic legislations in Africa. I think it is only
Uganda that has a worse legislation, which is in addition to the tradition of discriminating or
persecuting people who have a different sexual orientation.
The situation in the North East. I recently had a telephone call with my colleague in Nigeria
covering Borno, Yobe and Adamawa who was telling me that on the surface it seems that thesituation is better because there is less movement in terms of fighting. Boko Haram has been
partly defeated, but the problem is that both Boko Haram and the government resort to16 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

methods of fighting which are not in respect of international humanitarian law. There is anasymmetric warfare with the insurgency committing various abuses, like child suicide
bombers, women being drugged and involved in explosions and sexual slavery. There is also
extrajudicial killing: a number of cases have been reported by human rights agencies, [of acts
committed] by the security forces, as well as the use of paramilitary militias. Damage is huge:
USD 9 billion damage just to schools and infrastructure.
Food insecurity: there are 8.5 million people in need of urgent life-saving assistance.
Unfortunately, the WFP [World Food Program] has been forced to reduce food rations
because of funding constraints. We have 1.8 million internally displaced persons, and we have
250,000 returnees. The problem is that some of these returnees have not returned
voluntarily. There have been mass expulsions in particular from Cameroon.
The Biafra issue is an old issue. For people of my generation, not the vast majority of people
in the room, Biafra was a very important moment for humanitarian agencies because it
coincided with the creation of MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières]. MSF was not created for the
Biafra operation. They existed before, but they became the real MSF through Biafra because
for the first time you had a humanitarian agency assisting on the insurgent side without asking
the permission of the government. The motto was, ‘You can work on both sides but on thecondition that the government allows you to work on the insurgent side’. However, MSF justsaid that they could not wait; people were being killed. There were between one and three
million people who were killed during that conflict and it was one of the worst conflicts postWWII, not only in Africa but in the world. Unfortunately, the Biafra issue has not been totallyresolved. There is still a kind of ‘independentist’ movement in that part of Nigeria, the South
East, including repression of this movement by the government and the security forces.
Peaceful activists are being killed, but there are also extrajudicial killings being documented
by human rights agencies. It is a situation you need to be aware of, because you might havepeople who may belong to this “independentist” movement or have been associated with thismovement and you would have first to assess the facts but also assess the credibility.
UNHCR regularly publishes what we call ‘The Nigeria situation’. It is mainly an update oninternal displacement but also on the more than 200,000 refugees in the neighbouring
countries.

Discussion[Question] How to assess the question of the protection of the state with regard to conflicts
between gangs or secret cults.
[Jaquemet] It is a very important question and a complicated one to answer. I understand it
is not only about Nigeria, but you also have the global situation of countries where you havethe existence of various armed movements which go from purely criminal to those beingorganised and having a political agenda. My previous post before coming to Italy was in
Colombia, so you can imagine that it is the perfect theatre to assess that. In a country like
Colombia which is probably one of the most sophisticated ones when it comes to all thevarious actors, you had the political movements like the ELN or the FARC, which wereorganised movements with an ideology of fighting the government.
The complicating factor is that even these movements were related to drug cultivation andtrafficking and sometimes the FARC would delegate some of the activities to purely criminal
movements. There is also the situation of Central America, where there is not a civil war in
the proper sense, however there are rival gangs controlling full parts of cities. I can tell you
there were parts of Bogotá where I would have never dared to go. I only dared to go there on
the day of the elections because there was so much police that it was the exception. The rest

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 17of the time the suburbs belong to those gangs, so if you challenge those gangs you might be
at risk, not only in that part of the area but in the whole country. If you are being confronted
by one specific movement, they will spread the word to all the other gangs and the person
will be at risk in the entire country. Therefore, I would say that when you have to make thatassessment, you would have to see what is the real control of the movement over the
territory.
The second question is what is the level of penetration of the police. The third question iswhether we are talking about a movement which is only local or one which has ramifications
through the territory. What we call the internal flight alternative, gives the person thepossibility to live in another part of the country, not only in terms of security, but also in termsof the possibility of the person to really live, have a job, and have the possibility to stay.
I would say that in a number of cases where the gangs are really widespread throughout the
territory, for instance in a country like Guatemala, most of the time people would have a very
valid claim to obtain asylum in a country like Italy. In my view a country like Nigeria is much
more complicated, because it depends on whether those people have the capacity to also
persecute people in other parts of the country. That is the real question. In some cases theanswer would be ‘yes’; in other cases it will be ‘no’. It is one of the most complicated questions
when it comes to refugee status determination.
[Question] Are there updated figures on the international protection of Nigerians comingfrom Biafra (refugees, subsidiary refugees or humanitarian protection)?
[Jaquemet] I think, specifically, no.

18 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAEASO COI Report – Nigeria Country Focus
During the conference on Nigeria, the EASO COI Report - Nigeria Country Focus was released.
The report was written in the framework of the EASO Operating Plan to Italy. Two COI
specialists from Landinfo - Norway and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service - The
Netherlands, were deployed to an EASO Asylum Support Team, to assist the Italian COI unit indrafting a report on selected topics in Nigeria. The report was written in accordance with the
EASO COI Report Methodology. It was reviewed by COI experts from Denmark, Portugal, theRepublic of Slovenia and Switzerland in order to ensure the highest quality.
Key topics
The first chapter of the report provides background information about the legal andadministrative system, ethnic groups and political situation in Nigeria. This chapter also
discusses the general human rights situation, covering issues related to Boko Haram,
vigilantism, ethnic-religious violence, corruption, and abuse of power by security forces. The
second chapter presents the security situation in the country's six regions and thematic
security issues such as conflicts between 'indigenes' and 'settlers' and between nomads andfarmers. The third chapter covers the judiciary, sources of Nigerian legislation and thefunctioning of law enforcement. Chapter 4 is devoted to gender-related issues, such as thewidespread domestic violence of which mainly women are victims, Female Genital
Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) the prevalence of which is steadily decreasing, and child andforced marriages largely occurring in northern Nigeria. Trafficking of Human Beings (THB) is
discussed only briefly as this topic is covered comprehensively in EASO’s Sex Trafficking of
Women report – 2015 (2). Chapter 5 is dedicated to the situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual andtranssexual (LGBT) persons, and their treatment by society and authorities, and discusses theimpact of the recent legislation prohibiting same-sex marriages. The sixth chapter gives an
overview of the main religions in Nigeria, and highlights several types of violence and conflicts
linked to religion. Finally, Chapter 7 focuses on human rights issues related to secretsocieties (such as the Ogboni), university cults (violence, recruitment and the possible
consequences of refusing such a cult), the occurrence of ritual killings, and chieftaincy
succession issues.

(3) Available at: https://www.easo.europa.eu/sites/default/files/public/BZ0415678ENN.pdf

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 19

Analysis of the Security Situation in Nigeria in view of Article
15(c) of the Qualification Directive3
Luisa Inversini, President of the Territorial Commission for International
Protection – Milan
The topic of this presentation is the application of Article 15(c) of Directive 2013/32/UE on
security situation in Nigeria. The analysis has been developed according to EASO methodology
fully explained in the document: “Article 15(c)-Qualification Directive (2011/95/EU). A judicial
analysis”.
When we assess eligibility for subsidiary protection under Article 15(c), the logical order ofthe questions that need to be examined is:I.

The situation of “armed conflict” in the applicant’s home area.
The nature of violence generated by the “armed conflict”. The violence is required to
be indiscriminate, against civilians. It implies that the violence “may extend to people
irrespective of their personal circumstances” (see CJEU (Grand Chamber), judgmentof 17 February 2009, Case C-465/07, Meki Elgafaji and Noor Elgafaji v Staatssecretaris
van Justitie).

II.

III.

The level of indiscriminate violence.
o The level can be so high that a civilian is at real risk of suffering serious harm
merely by being present on the territory (The question of ‘general risk’).
o When the level of violence is lesser, the personal circumstances combinedwith the background of (the lesser level) of indiscriminate violence cannevertheless expose the applicant to a real risk of suffering serious harm. The
more an applicant can show being specifically affected, the less the level ofindiscriminate violence needs to be (The question of ‘specific risk’).
The effective protection provided by the state in accordance with Article 7 Directive(The protection question).

The CJEU gives a broad definition of “armed conflict”. It goes beyond the Protocols of the
Geneva Convention because it is focused on the specific aim to grant effective protection topeople, who are suffering from the consequences of an armed conflict. For the European
Court, it’s not necessary for that conflict to be categorised as ‘armed conflict not of aninternational character’ under international humanitarian law. (cfr CJEU judgment of 30
January 2014, case C-285/12, Aboubacar Diakité v Commissaire général aux réfugiés et aux
apatrides).
CJEU states (paragraph 35) that ‘[…] an internal armed conflict exists, […] if a State’s armed
forces confront one or more armed groups or if two or more armed groups confront each other.
[…] It’s not necessary to carry out, in addition to an appraisal of the level of violence present
in the territory concerned, a separate assessment of the intensity of the armed confrontations,the level of organisation of the armed forces involved or the duration of the conflict.’
The Nigerian Armed Forces are the fourth largest force in Africa and are supported by 82,000
Paramilitary Forces. The Army has about 180,000 members. Lots of operations are taking(3) This chapter reflects the speaker’s personal analysis and should not be interpreted as a formal EASO position or
guidance.

20 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

place, including Lafiyla Dole in the North-Eastern part of the country, and Niger Safe in theSouth.
The Multinational Joint Task Force was reorganized after the massacre of Baga in 2015 when
the Nigerian forces were accused of fleeing away during the attack of Boko Haram. A regional
conference took place and the composition of the task force has then taken the present
configuration.
The analysis of the other armed groups present in Nigeria is very articulate. Ethnic, religious
and economic reasons are strictly linked and that is the reason why it is very hard to give acomplete framework of the areas of conflict.
It is well known how aggressive Boko Haram is towards civilians and we know where the groupis located. I wanted to rapidly show you the other critical areas looking at the map.
There are fights between Shia movements and the Nigerian Police in Kaduna, Kano, Sokoto
state and in the Central part of the country. 300 people died in 2015 and the tension in thearea is increasing. Land disputes, ethnic differences, settler-indigene tensions and religious
affiliation cause frequent clashes between nomadic herdsmen (identified also as “Fulani”) andfarmers in the Southern and Central part of the country. Criminal groups are very active in the
Niger Delta and in the Southeast. In the South, there are clashes between Nigerian Force andmilitants for a separate state of Biafra and the Niger Delta Avengers. In the waters off thecoast of Nigeria many pirate attacks are carried out.
In the document “International protection considerations with regard to people fleeing NorthEastern Nigeria (the states of Borno,Yobe and Adamawa) and surrounding region update III”
October 2016, the UNHCR calls upon States to suspend forcible returns of residents to thispart of Nigeria.
The figures of the ongoing conflict presented by the UNCHR are impressive: at least 8,200
civilians died in 2014 and 2015; more than 2,000 women and girls are believed to have been
abducted since 2009; there are up to 20,000 unaccompanied and separated children; between
2009 and 2015, 910 schools were reportedly destroyed and another 1,500 schools wereforced to close; by early 2016 there were more than 950,000 children with little or no accessto education; more than 600 teachers were murdered between 2009 and October 2015 while
another 19,000 teachers are reported to have fled; an estimated 7 million persons are in needof humanitarian assistance; 350,000 children are reportedly suffering from severe
malnutrition; a total of 1,878,205 IDPs have been displaced; refugees in Niger were reported
to be 82,524, 65,618 in Cameroon and 7,337 in Chad. Other valid sources confirm the UNHCR
data.
In the “Displacement Tracking Matrix” IOM illustrates the situation of internally displaced
people in North-Eastern: 1,765,663 displaced by insurgency; 65,303 by communal clashes;
1,777 by natural disaster.
In the “Humanitarian Response Plan 2017” OCHA estimates at about 6,900,000 the numberof people targeted for humanitarian assistance in these regions, highlighting the areas
inaccessible due to security reasons.
Can we consider that this extremely situation meets the threshold of the “general risk”, wherea civilian is at risk of suffering serious harm merely by being present on the territory?
Actually, there are no legal criteria to calculate the level of indiscriminate violence, even if in
the Sufi and Elmi judgment the European Court for Human Rights has fixed some indicators
generally followed by the judiciary: the parties to the conflict and their relative militarystrengths; methods and tactics of warfare applied (risk of civilian casualties); type of weapons
used; the geographical scope of the fighting (localised or widespread); the number of civilians

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 21

killed, injured and displaced as a result of the fighting; socio-economic conditions; cumulative
effects of long lasting armed conflicts (see ECtHR judgment of 28 June 2011, Sufi and Elmi v
the United Kingdom, applications no 8319/07 and 11449/07).
These indicators, not exhaustive, are very similar to the indicators identified by the UNHCR.
Let us analyse the situation in the remaining states of Nigeria to evaluate the level and thenature of violence in 2016, comparing different sources.
In the document “Update on incidents according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data
Project (ACLED)-covering 2016”, the Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum
Research and Documentation (ACCORD) reports that 4,731 people died.
5,763 fatalities have been estimated by the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR), an
independent organisation from USA, that issues the “Nigeria Security Tracker”, an effort tomap political violence based on a weekly survey of Nigerian and international press edit.
The SB Morgen (SBM), an Africa-focused market intelligence and communications consulting
firm, calculates that 3,232 victims died.
Nigerian Watch Project (NWP) is an independent source, who publishes an Annual Report on
Security 2016 written by the University of Ibadan, with support of the Nigeria Stability andReconciliation Programme (NSRP) and the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRANigeria).
This source uses an extensive approach to security data. According to the NWP, the official
crime statistics are deficient and only 20% of crime victims report their case to the security
forces. There would be many reasons for this. First, security officers won’t pay attention tocollecting data. Moreover, they would attempt to hide the bodies of victims when state forces
are responsible for massacres, for example in the North-Eastern part of the country.
Corruption also could explain why people do not report crimes to the police.
However, all the sources quoted agree that in Nigeria the overall rate of violence is decreasing
in 2016 and crime has become the first cause of death in Nigeria. The Nigerian government
has put many efforts in fighting Boko Haram and these efforts have led to a deep level of
instability in the other areas of the country. Boko Haram is no more the main cause of violence
and fatalities of civilians in Nigeria.
The SBM provide interesting data. Issues related to cattle rustling and the so-called Fulani
herdsmen have a higher impact on violence than Boko Haram. There is no link between cattle
rustling and Fulani herdsmen because the herdsmen attacks seem to be a totally independent
phenomenon. In 2016 Fulani herdsmen represent 29 % of the overall attacks with 44 % of theoverall victims. They are very effective!
The data must be interpreted of course, but the Nigeria security situation requires us to focus
a bit less on religious and political violence and instead more on the common violence, its
actors and its consequences on civilians.
First, the Diakité judgement, I mentioned earlier, seems to exclude the “internal armed
conflict”, when a single group –like a cult or a gang – fights against the population in general,
but we can overcome this remark following the ongoing jurisprudence.
Then, being a civilian is a necessary pre-requisite to benefit from protection under Article 15(c)because the violence must be “indiscriminate”. The question of the legal definition of“civilian” is still open, but generally “civilian” is considered a person not member of an
insurgent group or of a State’s armed force.
New doubts arise when we apply this definition to the widespread violence categorised as
piracy, robbery, kidnappings, herdsmen attacks and cattle rustling. A person can be a “civilian”

22 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

and “not a civilian” at the same moment because the harm can come from different groups,
not necessarily so organized or identifiable during an ongoing conflict. For example, think
about a member of a cult robbed by a group with whom his cult isn’t fighting.
Moreover, the traditional examples of acts of indiscriminate violence (massive targetedbombings, aerial bombardments, guerrilla attacks…) don’t fit completely in this security
situation. Are we sure that crime represents always a form of indiscriminate violence or inmany case the violence is sectarian and only a particular social group is at risk of a serious
harm?
In 2016 the UNHCR has published the “Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the International
Protection Needs of Asylum-Seekers from El Salvador”. These guidelines represent a very
interesting benchmark, because they have been issued following the massive exodus ofSalvadorians due to the increasing power and violence of organized criminal groups. El
Salvador has a rate of approximately 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, but the
UNHCR considers that most - if not all violence - in Salvadorian society is discriminate,targeting specific individuals or groups of individuals for specific reasons.
In this situation, I would remember that it is important to verify always whether the applicant
comes within the scope of the exclusion clauses (Articles 12 and 17 of the Qualification
Directive), for example in the case of an asylum seeker who states that he is part of a criminalgang and we think that he is telling the truth.
The localisation is another relevant indicator of the level of violence because the security
situation is different from state to state. Actually, the assessment of the CFR and the Accord
are quite similar, except for the states of Sokoto, Zamfara and Bauchi.
These sources have a traditional approach in collecting data. Their list includes fatalities
caused by economic, social and political grievances, but not data related to the activity ofcriminal gangs.
Classifying deaths can be challenging in many cases, but if we look at the data provided by the
Nigeria Watch Project we can notice that the rate of fatalities in Borno state, where theviolence is essentially political and religious, is quite similar to the rate elaborated from the
CFR data. Instead in the states affected by violence more strictly related to crime, thedifferences are higher (e.g. in Edo state 0.2 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants for the CFR; morethan 4 deaths for the NWP).
Basing on data provided by CFR, the [overall Nigeria] rate is about 3.02 deaths per 100,000
inhabitants, in Adamawa it is 6.16, in Borno 55.36, in Benue 13.11, in Ogun 4.83.
Just to give an idea of the level of violence, in Italy the rate is 0.80 deaths per 100,000
inhabitants in 2016. Only in Benue state 553 killings have been reported in 2016, while in Italy
there have been 268 killings, but Italy counts 57 million of inhabitants.
The analysis of the casualties related to common crime in 2016 shows as Rivers State, but also
Lagos state, that has a very low population, have registered a quite high rate of killings.
I would compare the rate of violence in the Nigerian states to some other countries, that areconsidered “at general risk”. I am not going through all the figures, but I want to emphasise
that, for example in the debate on Afghanistan, the threshold of 20-30 deaths per 100,000
inhabitants hasn’t been considered sufficient by [Italian] judiciary to state that indiscriminate
violence takes place in the country. As I mentioned before, El Salvador has a rate of
approximately 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
From this quick overview we can conclude that, except that for the North-Eastern Nigeria, noother state goes beyond the threshold of the “general risk”. Instead there are some states
where the level of violence must be taken in account with other qualitative and quantitative

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 23

elements to assess eligibility for subsidiary protection under Article 15(c), at the first place thestatus of “civilian” of the applicant.
In these states, are there specific factors of risk that, combined with the background of thelesser level of indiscriminate violence, can expose a civilian to a real risk of suffering serious
harm?
First, I just want to clarify that for members of a particular social group (especially ethnic or
religious) subsidiary protection should only be considered if the person is not eligible forrefugee status.
Within the traditional «risk-enhancing» categories (age, gender, profession…), there are newrisk profiles we should focus on, such as people particularly wealthy (or their security guards)
and consequently more exposed to crime acts. Then in some areas we must consider
herdsmen, which seem to be a quite unusual category, or university students because ofcultist threat or sailors because of piracy. People who work or live close to oil installations
must be included too if we are assessing an applicant from the Niger Delta.
Coming back to the Elgafaji judgement. In Italy, many judgements recognize subsidiary
protection under Article 15(c) to all applicants coming from Nigeria, without any distinction
between North and South of the country, between Boko Haram and cults, basing only on thegeneral security situation and the level of violence. I don’t agree.
There is an ongoing debate on the threshold of risk above which subsidiary protection should
be automatically granted. In my opinion, we should start to discuss also about the minimum
level of indiscriminate violence, because art. 15 (c) can’t be applied under a certain threshold.
In fact, the system itself is perfect.
When the rate of violence is low – like in most of the Nigerian states - for a civilian there is noreal risk of serious harm. Consequently, the factors of personal exposure to risk, that theasylum seeker has to prove, are so high, that he will be eligible for refugee status or for
subsidiary protection under letter (a) or (b), without any consideration about the generalsituation of indiscriminate violence in the country of origin.

24 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

Armed groups and security situation on the Niger Delta
Megan Turnbull, Visiting Assistant Professor, PhD, Department of
Political Science, Skidmore College
I am going to talk about two regions – the Niger Delta and south eastern Nigeria. For both ofthese regions, I will give some background on security/agitation and the history of theseregions. As regards the Niger Delta, I will talk about different armed groups, specificallydifferent types of groups, such as cult groups as well as larger, more organised, militant groups
which have articulated a political agenda, and the government response to those groups, notonly from the federal government, but the state and local governments as well.
As regards south eastern Nigeria, I will talk about vigilantism, and the pro-Biafra groups,
especially one that has emerged most recently, and how the federal government has been
responding to these groups. I will conclude by talking a little bit about the different forms ofstate and non-state protection available in Nigeria.
Starting with the Niger Delta. In the Niger Delta, Nigeria has 37 billion proven oil reserves, and
it is about 70 000 km2, so it makes up a relatively small portion of the country geographically.
However, as I am sure many of you know, you cannot understand Nigerian politics without
understanding oil, and how oil, especially oil money, has sustained military and civilian
regimes alike throughout Nigeria’s post-colonial history, but it has also contributed tocorruption and lack of transparency since 1960.
I think a lot of us have been reading in the news about the most recent group, the Niger Delta
Avengers, but there is a long history of agitation related to devolving control over the nation’s
oil down to the local level. Currently the Federal Government controls the oil industry anddepends upon oil for about 75 % or more of government revenues. What happens in the Niger
Delta is going to be of key concern to the Federal Government. Before 2016, as far back as the
1960s, there was a 12-day uprising by Isaac Boro. The reason it is called the 12-day uprising isbecause it was quickly crushed by the Nigerian Federal Government shortly before theoutbreak of the Biafran War or the Nigerian Civil War in 1966. Following several military
regimes, there was the emergence of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni people(MOSOP), led by Ken Saro-Wiwa. This was a largely peaceful movement, and especially in the
1990s there were several peaceful protests and marches organised by MOSOP and other civilrights groups in the Niger Delta, which have articulated a demand for resource control, selfdetermination and political autonomy in the region.
The military regime has violently repressed many of these peaceful social movements. In the
1990s, president Sani Abacha infamously executed Ken Saro-Wiwa by military tribunal, alongwith other activists as well, and Nigeria became a pariah state in the international community.
Following the transition to democracy in 1999, around the time of transitional elections,
December 1998 marks the Kaiama Declaration and the founding of the Ijaw Youth Council,
which is yet another organised pressure group which has articulated a similar demand forresource control and political autonomy.
This group started out as largely peaceful, but under the new civilian administration in the
1990s and early 2000s, there were heavy military repressions and even massacres of local
communities that were peacefully advocating for resource control, addressing pollution andenvironmental degradation in the region, as well as demanding better socio-economic
development outcomes, such as clean water, employment opportunities and access tohealthcare and better infrastructure. Stepping back a little bit, as was pointed out earlier

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 25

today, the Niger Delta is a region that is qualified not only by high rates of poverty, but also
by incredible inequality, which helps to contribute to the agitation. There are politicians andemployees of oil companies who enjoy nice cars, and expensive homes, and can clearly afford
to have a very comfortable lifestyle, whereas many people living in the Niger Delta, especiallyfishing and farming communities, who have had their livelihoods severely hurt by oil spills andenvironmental exploitation of oil, are not doing all that well, to put it lightly. So this has been
one of the drivers of a lot of peaceful as well as violent movements for resource control in the
Niger Delta.
One of the lessons that many activists and militants later learned from the heavy military
repression of these peaceful protests and marches in the 1990s and the early 2000s was thatpeaceful protest was not working. If you were to talk to militants and people living in the Niger
Delta, I think this is a lesson that they have taken to heart, as has also been articulated bypeople such as Asari Dokubo, who was formerly the leader of a militant group which emerged
before MEND (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) in 2006. He was veryclear that the Nigerian Federal Government only responds to force, to violence, and that theway to extract concessions from the Nigerian Federal Government was to hurt the oil
infrastructure in the region: blowing up pipelines and severely lowering the daily productionof oil. This was the only way that the Federal Government was going to start to pay attention
and to respond to some of the demands of these militant groups.
In the early 2000s there was a shift away from more peaceful protests to far more violence.
There was the emergence of large organised groups, starting with the Niger Delta People’s
Volunteer Force. Asari Dokubo was imprisoned on treason charges in 2005. This was followedby the emergence of another group, which went on to make greater international headlines– the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which comes on the scene in early
2006, in January, by kidnapping foreign oil workers.
I will talk a bit more about the government’s response later on, but following a 2009 Amnesty
program, things have been relatively quiet in the Niger Delta until 2016. With the rolling backof the amnesty program, as was planned in the December 2015, cuts have been made in thestipends that were supposed to be paid to militants or ex-militants. Security contracts former
militant leaders once enjoyed were cancelled by the Buhari Administration. The most recent
group is now the Niger Delta Avengers, but we also see other groups, such as the Red
Scorpions.
Let me talk a little bit more about armed groups in the Niger Delta. We can think of two
categories of these armed groups. One is smaller cult groups, especially in the 2000s. There
were groups like the Bush Boys, Deebam, Deewell, as well as The Outlaws. These groups areslightly different from larger groups such as the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, theMovement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), and more recently the Niger Delta
Avengers, to the extent that they do not articulate a clear political agenda. Instead, they areheavily involved in fighting for territorial control amongst each other over access to oilpipelines, engaging in oil bunkering or tapping into oil pipelines, siphoning off the oil to sell it
and profit from it, being armed thugs hired by local politicians, and engaging in politicalviolence and electoral violence as well. There is therefore a combination of criminal andpolitical violence that the smaller cult groups are engaged in. These groups have also, atdifferent points in time, enjoyed alliances but have also come into conflict with the larger
groups, such as MEND and the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, particularly in the 2000s.
One thing that I’d want to emphasise here is that membership is incredibly fluid among thesegroups and there is a lot of shifting alliances in fighting not only between these groups, butalso with local politicians. In Rivers state, there is a lot of evidence that Former Governor Peter
Odili once backed Dokubo and the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force to pursue his own26 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

political aims, and specifically to rig the 2003 elections in his favour. After the 2003 elections,
there was a falling-out between Dokubo and Odili, Dokubo publicly stating that the agreementthat he had with the Governor at the time was that Obasanjo would not win the region during
the presidential election, but he did. So Odili then leveraged his relationship with Ateke Tom
and the Niger Delta Vigilantes, yet another organised group in the Niger Delta that was activeat the time, to go after the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force and Asari Dokubo. The
landscape of armed groups especially in the 2000s has been incredibly complex. It is a very
complicated story. I feel like the word ‘complicated’ is used a lot to talk about Nigeria, but it
certainly applies to the Niger Delta especially at this time.
Under the Obasanjo Administration, there were efforts made to not only crush these groups,
but also to have a ceasefire. There was a failed amnesty program that never really went
anywhere. Eventually Asari Dokubo was imprisoned on treason charges in 2005. Then we see
the emergence of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which
many would suggest to be something of an umbrella group, so many of the followers in the
Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force under Dokubo went to join MEND as well as many othergroups. This was a far more secretive group. Asari Dokubo was a much more charismatic
leader. He was very savvy when it came to using the media to create a certain image ofsomething of a folk hero and to articulate his political demands. MEND was a bit different
from that. Similarly to other groups, such as the Niger Delta People‘s Volunteer Force, MEND
has demanded resource control and political autonomy for the Niger Delta.
To be clear, the larger groups such as the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, the Niger Delta
Vigilantes, and MEND, have all also been engaged in criminal as well as political violence,
similar to smaller, so-called ‘cult groups.’ The difference between these larger, organizedgroups and the cult groups is that the former rallies support around demands for regional
autonomy and resource control.
In 2016 we see the emergence of yet another group. I think what we know about this groupso far is pretty limited, but we know it seems to be pretty small in number, and it is not clearthat it is necessarily only composed of former militants, though some have suggested that it
has links with one of the former leaders of MEND, Tompolo [real name Government
Ekpemupolo], especially because shortly before one of its first attacks, the Buhari
Administration filed charges against Tompolo for money laundering and theft of about 171
million dollars. Tompolo has denied any links with the Niger Delta Avengers and so have theNiger Delta Avengers. If you go on their website they seem to distance themselves from theformer old insurgency which is pre-2009, saying that they are going to focus on blowing up
the oil infrastructure, and do not plan on kidnapping any oil workers as did occur before theamnesty program in 2009.
It was also interesting that they do seem to display a fairly high level of technical sophisticationin their attacks. For example, they managed to blow up a subsea oil export pipeline thatbelonged to Shell. To detonate a bomb below sea level requires some technical sophistication
as well as some diving capabilities potentially. So this group so far seems to be small but fairly
sophisticated. I think most people would suggest that there are many new militants who havelooked at the payoffs that many former militants, especially militant leaders, have got funding
from the amnesty program in 2009 and have learned that this is a way to enrich and provide
for themselves.
Government response: The local and state governments, especially after the transitional
elections in 1999, have leveraged different armed groups for political ends, especially cultgroups, smaller groups that do not necessarily articulate clear political goals such as resource
control. This has contributed to a lot of electoral violence and criminal violence. We have theEASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 27

intersection of those two types of violence, especially around the 2003 elections but
afterwards as well.
As for the Federal Government, especially in the 1990s but even under the Obasanjo
Administration, and even more recently with the Buhari Administration, the initial responseto the Niger Delta Avengers in 2016 was one of repression: ‘We are going to crush thesemilitants and wipe them out’, especially as they hurt the daily oil production of the Nigerian
Government. In 2009, shortly before the Amnesty program, oil production per day was down
to 700,000 barrels, which was incredibly low. It rose back up to 2.2 million barrels a day, but
now following the Niger Delta Avengers attacks on the oil infrastructure in the region, I believe
it is now down to 1.5 million barrels a day, which has prompted Buhari to shift to a moreconciliatory approach.
The Obasanjo Administration, following the Administration of Yar'Adua before he died in
office, has responded to a more carrot-and-stick approach, especially with these large militantgroups, once it realised it was being hurt by the attacks in the oil pipelines, given thegeographic terrain of the region as well as the severe damage that it was doing to Nigeria’s
economy and the oil revenue on which the Federal Government very much depends, not only
to sustain government operations, but to maintain the patron-client networks and patronage
that has provided for a degree of political stability in Nigeria.
In 2009, there was a massive federal Amnesty program, which does one thing but does not doanother: The one thing it does do is that it does provide a degree of stability, largely by paying
off a lot of militants, and especially militant leaders. Many former militants received a monthly
stipend of about 400 dollars or 60,000 naira a month and militant leaders such as Tompolo
enjoyed security contracts with the Federal Government, which were incredibly lucrative.
That was one thing that the Amnesty program did to help put a lid on the violence in the Niger
Delta. The one thing it did not do was address the underlying conditions which gave rise to
the insurgency and the militancy to begin with. That is a context of high rates of inequality;
lack of jobs and employment opportunities particularly for young unemployed men (not tosound like a cliché, but that is an indicator of insurgency); poor development outcomes likelack of access to clean water, health care, and poor infrastructure. I think that in the Niger
Delta there is a general sense of sympathy for the goals that these groups are articulating.
This is not to say that if control over oil was devolved down to local level and there is politicalautonomy, we would suddenly see better development outcomes in the region, because I do
not think that would address the underlying condition of corruption. Also, leaders of militantgroups which had articulated a clear commitment to resource control and political autonomy,
along with a hatred of the federal government, were easily ‘won over’ by the federal
government with the lucrative stipends and contracts they received as a result of the 2009
amnesty program.
Following the Amnesty program which is scheduled to end in December 2015, former
President Jonathan was pretty clear that it would end in December 2015, and Buhari started
to roll back the amnesty program with budget cuts once he was elected. Then we see the riseof the Niger Delta Avengers. Unsurprisingly, we see a similar pattern where Buhari’s
Administration is now shifting to a more conciliatory approach. The Vice President has
recently visited the region. Paul Boroh, who is Special Advisor to the President on Niger Delta
Affairs, has recently stated that it is important for the Federal Government to empower andeducate and employ the youth in the region.
This differs from Buhari’s initial reaction that he was going to crush the militants. This is asimilar pattern that we saw before the 2009 Amnesty program, when the Federal Government
tried to crack down on and wipe out these militants but upon realising this was not as effective

28 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

or was rather ineffective, shifted to a policy or a strategy of paying off a lot of militants as away to improve oil production.
South East Nigeria. A very brief background on the region, which is different from the Niger
Delta. That is why I wanted to talk about these two regions separately. I also think theGovernment’s responses have been different there too.
The Nigerian Civil War, or the Biafran War, was incredibly devastating for the region. One totwo million are estimated dead, largely because of famine. At the end of the Civil War, theFederal Government had this policy of ‘no victor, no vanquished’ and declared that it wasgoing to follow a strategy of reconciliation and rehabilitation and reconstruction in the region.
However, those words were not necessarily put into action, and this is a message that
continues to be articulated in south eastern Nigeria: that the region has suffered, that is has
been punished by the Nigerian Federal Government ever since the end of the war, and that it
is very much marginalised compared to other regions of Nigeria.
Following the 1999 democratic transition, the overall context in south-eastern Nigeria but also
elsewhere is that of very high rates of insecurity. There were high rates of armed robbery,especially in local markets, traders complaining of extortion and protection rackets, anineffective and very much corrupt police force who were not willing or able to provide
protection to civilians and traders, and general insecurity. This is the context in which one of
the most famous vigilante groups emerged in Nigeria, the Bakassi Boys.
Following 1999 transition, there is very limited agitation for independence in the southeast,
but there is some coming from the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of
Biafra, the MASSOB. Now we are seeing more, larger protests and demands for an
independent Biafra from Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a recent group to have emerged.
There is evidence to suggest there is growing popular support, but I think that the MASSOB
had more limited influence, especially among the Igbo elite in the region, as well as among
local communities. There seem to be larger numbers of young men particularly who aresupporting and coming out to march more or less peacefully in rallies organised by the
Indigenous People of Biafra. I see vigilantism in south-eastern Nigeria as more or less distinct
from the pro-Biafra movement, and I want to emphasise that vigilantism is not a phenomenon
that is unique to south-eastern Nigeria or even Nigeria for that matter. Therefore, I am goingto talk about those two things separately.
The Bakassi Boys, one of the largest vigilante groups to emerge in south-eastern Nigeria, wasfounded by local traders in the city of Abia in Abia state in 1998. For a long time, for several
years, it was perceived as being widely effective and enjoying a fair amount of popularsupport. But after a few years, several governors in the region, most notably in Anambra andAbia state co-opt the group and provide it with weapons, funding and other kinds of material
resources, and the group transformed from what was once a vigilante group that wasperceived to be very effective at reducing crime rates and violence in the region into politicalthugs of local governors, who even have them carrying out assassinations of the governors’
political opponents and even detaining and torturing others.
In late 2002 the Federal Government moved in and wiped out the Bakassi Boys and they werequickly disbanded. Since the Bakassi Boys, we have not seen a large group like this in southeastern Nigeria. If you travel in the region today I think you will find smaller, localised groups
who will wear a t-shirt saying something like ‘The Scorpions’ across their chest who seem tobe hired by private citizens for security purposes. This is not to say that something like the
Bakassi Boys may not emerge again in south-eastern Nigeria, but today there certainly areseveral smaller, street level groups that are operating throughout the region.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 29

I also want to be clear that vigilantism is not just found in south-eastern Nigeria. To give a few
examples, the O’odua People’s Congress (OPC) was founded in 1994. Its overarching goal wasto advocate for what it believes to be the political and cultural interest of the Yoruba, and it
was very much formed in reaction to the 1993 annulled elections. Following the transition in
1999, the groups started to take on vigilante activism and even arbitration services in certain
communities, notably in Lagos. It still maintains this overarching goal of being a group that
advocates for and protects what it believes to be Yoruba interests in south western Nigeria,
but it is clearly incorporating more activities into its repertoire as well.
In the Middle Belt, especially in Plateau state, you will see vigilantism largely in reaction toreligious violence. As was pointed out earlier today, this religious violence may look religious
in character, but there are underlying political dynamics there. In Jos, for example, there isconflict between settlers and indigenes over the control of local government areas, especiallyin the north Jos and in Plateau state. In rural Plateau state there are conflicts between herders,
nomadic herders and settlers/farming communities. Therefore, this is helping to drivecommunities organising vigilante groups in reaction to this violence, at least that has been myexperience having worked in Jos for a little bit.
Finally, as was also mentioned earlier today, in north eastern Nigeria you have the Civilian
Joint Task Force which emerged in 2003 and is a reaction not just to the violence that was
carried out by Boko Haram, but also to the indiscriminate military repression which is carriedout by the federal military against communities that the military believe to be sympathetic toor in some ways supportive of Boko Haram. So, largely, you see different forms andorganisational types of vigilante groups across Nigeria in response to different forms ofinsecurity, whether it be Boko Haram, indiscriminate repression from the military, high rates
of armed robbery in south eastern Nigeria, or crime in south western Nigeria, or what on thesurface appears to be religious violence in the Middle Belt. The larger context is a Nigerian
police force, which is unable to really provide protection and security to civilians along with avery repressive and heavy-handed military as well.
The states highlighted in yellow [Enugu, Eboni, Abia, Imo, Anambra] are considered the corestates of what constitutes an independent Biafra, although I think that those who aresupportive of this cause, though not all, would suggest that some of the Niger Delta stateshould be included in the future independent Biafra, not only because there are significant
Ibo communities living in the Niger Delta, but because it would strategically provide them oil
and access to the sea.
I will talk about two groups. The first one, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign
State of Biafra (MASSOB), was founded in 1999 by a lawyer, Ralph Uwazuruike, who was
imprisoned on treason charges from 2005 to 2007. Let me go through a few of thecharacteristics of this group: It has largely espoused the commitment to non-violence, andwhile there may have been pockets of violence in some marches or rallies organised by the
MASSOB in the early 2000s, I would say it has been a largely non-violent movement. It has
started to establish a shadow government, so if you speak to some MASSOB leaders they arevery insistent that they are building a government that is going to administer south eastern
Nigeria or an independent Biafra one day. However, I do not think that any of these structures
are actually in place, and the MASSOB has actually been pretty unsuccessful at building any
kind of institutions that are capable of governing or administrating south eastern Nigeria. I
think to any extent it has been symbolic, such as when they were selling license plates or
Biafran passports, but nothing where they are providing sanitation services, healthcare,building schools and roads. It has had limited and even decreasing influence over the years,
and for the most part it has been largely rejected by Ibo governors and the Ibo elite in southeastern Nigeria.

30 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAOne of the reasons for this is not only a memory among a certain generation, an older
generation in south eastern Nigeria that remembers the horrors and the tragedy of the Biafranwar, the Nigerian Civil War, but also that many of these governors are well incorporated into
the patronage of the People’s Democratic Party, or the PDP government, in the years when
MASSOB has been operating. So would it make sense for local governors to seek to build an
independent Biafra when they are already depending on and benefitting from the PDP rulingparty in Abuja?
Recently it has been plagued by factional fighting, where we have had split-off movements or
splinter movements such as the Biafran Zionist Movement. However, these have not been
particularly successful or influential in building any kind of mass popular support, let alone a
shadow government that is capable of governing a population.
More recently, we have seen the emergence of the Indigenous People of Biafra. This wasfounded in 2014 by Nnamdi Kanu. He was arrested in October 2015 on treason charges andwas released recently in April 2017. The conditions of his bail included that he could not speakin public and could not organise mass rallies, but of late the Federal Government has beencommenting that he has been violating his bail conditions by appearing in public and is now
seeking to imprison him again.
In 2009 in London, Kanu founded Radio Biafra, which has been his mouthpiece for his message
that we should have an independent Biafra, and trying to rally popular support for this cause.
I would say that the rhetoric has been violent. At different points in time, the leaders said thatthey needed guns and bullets, and that they would have to build by force an independent
Biafra because the Federal Government was not going to respond to any kind of peacefulprotest. However, the protests and the marches that have been organised by the group havebeen overwhelmingly non-violent. Amnesty International and other civil society organisations
in Nigeria have done a good job of documenting that while there may be pockets of violenceat these protests (there may be people burning tyres or throwing rocks and stones at security
agencies), it has been overwhelmingly peaceful despite the violent rhetoric. This is perhaps
because its leader has been imprisoned on treason charges and even held despite court orders
by Nigerian judges saying that he needs to be released. The federal government refused torelease him anyway, until he was finally released in April 2017. What may have contributed
to the popularity of the group may have been this unjust treatment, the fact that there
continues to be high unemployment and limited opportunities for many young people insouth eastern Nigeria, as well as the growing distance from the Civil War.
International Crisis Group has estimated that some rallies have been as large as 10,000 people,
which is quite significant. There was a survey conducted by SPM Intelligence in May 2017 thatsuggested significant support for the group. I would take this with as big a grain of salt as youneed to, because I am not sure about their sampling method or how representative thesample is. However, there was an online survey that received 489 responses from people who
considered themselves indigenous to the region, and about 72 % either thought that theleader of the group was fighting for justice or was a saviour of the Ibo people or a saviour ofsouthern Nigeria. That, along with other pieces of evidence, suggests that this is a group thatis enjoying some significant and growing popular support, especially if you look at images of
the rise [of popularity] among young men in particular, but also among women.
The other thing I would add is that it is important to understand this in reaction to the 2015
elections. If you travel through the South East, you will see that it was very much a PDP
stronghold and did not give a lot of support to Buhari, along with the Niger Delta region. Prior
to that, there was already an anti-Buhari sentiment in the region, and Buhari did not makethings any better with his 97 %/5 % comment: He was giving a talk at the United States
Institute for Peace in Washington D.C. and an audience member asked him, ‘How will youEASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 31

treat or deal with the problems in southern Nigeria?’ and his response was, ‘I cannot be
expected to treat the constituencies that gave me 97 % of the vote the same as I would treat
constituencies that only gave me 5 % of the vote’. This got a lot of airtime in southern Nigeria
in particular, and understandably, this did not do anything to increase the minimum amountof support he had. In south-eastern Nigeria, and in southern Nigeria more broadly, there isalso a sense, now that we have this northern president who has made statements that hedoes not care about that region, we need to drive agitation and to try to pressure thegovernment in the sense of, ‘I want to extract some kind of concessions the way we have seenin the Niger Delta in the form of an Amnesty program’. This is not to doubt the commitmentof people who are very much interested in an independent Biafra. The government’s responsein the South East has been different than in the Niger Delta. I think that has a lot to do withoil, and with the history of the Civil War. So those two factors are important for understanding
the differences in the Federal Government’s response.
The Federal Government responded with heavy military repression of both the MASSOB and
the Indigenous People of Biafra. Both leaders of those groups have been arrested andimprisoned on treason charges, and even after judges ordered the release of Kanu, theFederal Government declined to release him until recently. There have been arrests anddetentions of those suspected to be members of those groups. In 2003, there was aparticularly brutal crackdown on members of the MASSOB, and this has continued. As was
already mentioned earlier today, Amnesty International has recently documented that at least
150 peaceful protesters have been extrajudicially executed by the police while they were
exercising their civil and political rights.
In the Niger Delta, in comparison, in the past there has been military repression of peacefulprotests and of the local communities, because larger organised militant groups were able toput pressure on the oil economy in Nigeria and hurt the Federal Government’s oil revenues,
We’ve seen a shift in previous administrations, and I think we are seeing it now, to a moreconciliatory approach. Buhari has even started to up the budget again of the Amnesty Program
after previously rolling it back.
I conclude by talking a little bit about state and non-state protection. In terms of state
protection, for me at least it is difficult to not really view it as just state repression. I think themilitary has committed human right abuses against people who were exercising their civil andpolitical rights through peaceful protests in the Niger Delta, and most recently in south eastern
Nigeria. These reports by local and international civil society organizations have been
submitted to the Buhari Administration and certain agencies have responded, but they havenot addressed any of the questions raised in these letters submitted by civil society
organisations, and the Buhari Administration has yet to investigate these military abuses andhuman rights violations.
To that extent, the military has been able to act with impunity, particularly in south-eastern
Nigeria. I think one way of understanding this, especially in the South East, is that the Federal
Government is reacting to messages and rhetoric. It sees the very message of an independent
Biafra as a threat to the integrity of the Nigerian state. I think it is important to understandthe history of the Civil War, for that might be the case why it sees these messages asfrightening. It is less concerned with protecting the human and political rights of Nigerians
who are peacefully assembling to pursue a particular goal, no matter how much the Federal
Government disagrees with this. I think you will see many civil society organisations pointing
out that these civil rights need to be protected, and the Federal Government is respondingthat the message itself is a threat and needs to be crushed immediately.
Speaking of Nigerian and international NGOs - I think others can speak better about this than
I could – they continue to document very carefully human rights abuses and violations, and32 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

pursue legal redress, but I think with the limited cooperation of the Nigerian government, it
is not entirely or particularly effective. I think the arrest of the leader of the Indigenous Peopleof Biafra is a good example of this, where even when you have judges saying that the Nigerian
government must release him, they keep balking on that, and they do not want to do that fora while. So there is some progress and there is an active legal community in Nigeria and civilsociety organisations, but this is happening within the context of several administrations thathave been quick to rely on the military to try to impose law and order, when it is really thepolice that should be imposing law and order and not so much the military.

Discussion[Question] Is the the independence movement of Biafra now declining, or do you expect
any resurgence and possibly any Biafran conflict in that area that might lead to morerefugees in the future?
[Turnbull] I do not think it is necessarily declining. If anything, during my own work in southeastern Nigeria years ago, it was pretty clear to me and to a lot of people I spoke to, that asregards groups like the MASSOB, there was not really a lot of faith in their ability to actually
govern or provide any basic services. While some people may have been nostalgic or
respected the message of the group or the dream of an independent Biafra, I think that manyliving in the South East thought it was unrealistic. However, I think that that is now shiftingwith the Indigenous People of Biafra especially. Earlier today Stella [Odiase] and I were justtalking about this generational divide between older people who remember the horrors of
the Nigerian Civil War compared to young people today, man and women alike, who are in
their teens or their early 20s who do not have any recollection of this, but what they areexperiencing are high rates of unemployment, job opportunities and poor public goods
provision, as well as this feeling that there is a president who has no interest and cares nothing
about their region. I think this is actually helping to increase popular support among young
people for an independent Biafra and south-eastern Nigeria. The government’s response does
not help at all: heavy repression of these groups where you have the military executing thesepeople as they are peacefully protesting. There is video footage of this, and it is horrific. As
for the increasing number of refugees, I would not be surprised at all if there are more people
from south eastern Nigeria who are going to point to the heavy-handed repression of theBuhari Administration and say that they need protection of some kind. Even in the Amnesty
International report and other civil society reports, there are many people who did not want
to reveal their identity and said they were scared to even talk, because of fear from theFederal Government. So I think support for this cause is increasing, as is fear of the Federal
Government, understandably so.
[Question] Are there any oil fields in Biafra? I mean, is Biafra trying to get independence
also because they might have the economic resources to rely on?
[Turnbull] No. I think this is why a lot of people who support Biafra also want to include theNiger Delta or parts of the Niger Delta. Not only because there are Ibo communities living
there, but for strategic reasons, because there are oil and natural resources that an
independent south-eastern Nigeria theoretically could benefit from. If you want to look at thesurvey by SPM Intelligences, it is one of the questions that are asked. I would take that survey
with a grain of salt and also look at other evidences and the messages that are put forth byleaders of this movement about what they think would constitute a future independent
republic in the South East.
[Question] What do you mean by ‘vigilantism’? Because for Italians this sounds like ‘ronde’.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 33

[Turnbull] When I think of vigilante groups, I just think of groups usually composed of young
men that are organised to patrol neighbourhoods at night as a self-defence force and even togo after criminals. For example, the Bakassi Boys actually tracked down perceived criminals,
detained them, held private trials and then held public execution of them. It had this displayof carrying out what they took to be justice. Another fact I would add that contributes to some
support for vigilantism is the slow court systems as well. Court cases can go on for years andpeople are waiting for justice. Sometimes it can be much faster to turn to a group like theOPC, for example, to resolve any kind of dispute, especially in south-western Nigeria. That is
why I think of it as a crime-fighting force, but there are other versions of that, such as the
Civilian Joint Task Force, which has responded to both Boko Haram, which I know you know
about, and also the military repression as well.
[Question] What is the difference between MASSOB and IPOB?
[Turnbull] They are two different groups, with two different leaders. One emerged right after
the transitional elections and has much clearer commitments to non-violence, rhetorically atleast. In the Indigenous People of Biafra there is a much more violent rhetoric, but the actions
have been largely peaceful. However, they pursue more or less the same goals. They bothwant an independent republic in south eastern Nigeria. There are different memberships anddifferent leaders, and there are different levels of influence too. If anything, I think the
MASSOB had limited influence to begin with, and it has only declined in the recent years
because of factional infighting, whereas the Indigenous People of Biafra is really just startingto take off, that is, if the military does not manage to completely crush it before it manages
to gain more momentum and more membership. So one, I think, is becoming more influential
and the other is becoming less and less influential, and really did not have much momentum
to begin with. But they have a similar agenda or similar messages despite the more violent
rhetoric of the Indigenous People of Biafra.
[Makanjuola] Just to add to what you have presented, and I am sure Stella [Odiase] will touch
more on this, it also happens that, apart from all of these different groups, one of theundertones that you see across all of these different groups is also about resource control andpower. Even the leaders of the group themselves, when you look at them, they are moreparticular about the million dollar contracts they want to get from the government, so rather
than the ideology or the change, it is the contracts they want to get. You would see this in
MASSOB men, in OPC, and in all of them. They all had contracts from the Federal Government.
So at the end of the day, even at that level, when you look at the issue, it is not about thechange; it is about money and the power to be heard. Oftentimes, they get to the point where
they become really good for election too. So if we do not pay good attention, starting fromlate this year to early next year, we will begin to see a new group image or the old groupreinforcing the existent, because the government of those who want power would then wantthem for election. So there is going to be high risk of volatile groups in the South East, startingfrom later this year to early next year. It is important to recognise that all these groups haveno particular interest in the community at heart. It is about the social and economic powerthat controls the system. It is about unemployment, and people capitalize on that, because
when they get a million dollar contract, it is still all about them. Asari Dokubo is the free money
giver in the South East. He gives money to anybody that likes or adores him or that listens tohim. It is that kind of system that you see.
[Turnbull] I could not agree more with that and with what you just said. As you pointed out,around election time many of these groups, especially in the Niger Delta, but elsewhere in
Nigeria have been leveraged by local politicians to pursue their political ends. When theelection is over, they cut them off and they are just armed and running around to enact
violence. I completely agree with that analysis.

34 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA[Question] You said that the survey concluded that there is a 70-odd % who supported
IPOB’s political goals, but what kind of support is that? Is that support for a free state of
Biafra or is it support of someone who says that Igbos are marginalised? Is it voicing thatkind of concern, or is it somewhere in between?
[Turnbull] There were a number of questions that were asked in the survey, and to be clear I
was not involved in the survey in any way. It was done by SPM Intelligence and again, I would
take this with a grain of salt along with other evidence suggesting some increasing support
especially among younger generations in South East Nigeria regarding this message that thefederal government has not done enough to develop or improve the life of Nigerians living in
the South East and therefore there needs to be some kind of change in the political institutions
such as independence. So there were a number of questions that were asked among people.
This was carried out in May 2017 among respondents who considered themselves indigenous
to the South East. One of the questions, the one that I mentioned, was, ‘What are yourthoughts on the leader of the indigenous people of Biafra?’ and one the available answers
was, ‘He is a fighter for justice. He is a saviour of south eastern Nigeria. He is a saviour of the
Igbo people’. The other options were not good: they were like, ‘I do not like him’. If I
remember correctly around 13-something % thought that he was a fighter for justice, 20something % or maybe 16% that he is a saviour of some kind. But overall 70% of those people
had positive responses for him.
[Question] All those possible alternatives were vague, there was not a single alternative
saying, ‘It is because I support an independent state of Biafra’?
[Turnbull] Yes. There are other questions asked in the survey, but I think it just helps to point
to a shift that we have seen recently. Before, in south eastern Nigeria there was not a lot of
popular support even among the political leaders from the south, and recently especially inthe context of the post-2015 elections, especially the way the federal government has
responded to this, it seems to have started to push some momentum in that direction.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 35

Justice system and Rule of Law in Nigeria
Stella Amadi Odiase, Lawyer and International Development
Practitioner, Nigeria
I first want to address a couple of key issues arising from other presentations. The first thing I
want to talk about is the north-south divide.
CNN in particular does this all the time: the ‘Islamic north’ versus the ‘Christian south’. It issomething to be very careful about, because the boundary lines are not actually that clear. I
actually learnt that when I started doing fieldwork. Initially, when I finished law school, I waspracticing law for quite some time, I taught criminal law for a bit, and then I got into NGO
work, activism and international development. When I got into international development, I
had the opportunity to begin to travel. In my first trip to the northern part of Nigeria, I had a
lot of stereotypes and misconceptions. I made sure I wore my flowing robes and that my hair
was well-covered, and then I got on the streets of Kano and I saw people wearing tank tops
and jeans! I got to Adamawa state, and as someone who comes from Rivers state, I originally
thought that my part of the country had a monopoly on rivers and seafood. I was shocked to
discover that fishing is part of the mainstay of the economy in Adamawa state. There arepeople whose parents or grandparents come from southern Nigeria, but know no other life
apart from the north. They live there. They work there. They can’t even speak their original
languages, and for all intents and purposes, they consider themselves northerners. So you
might get an application from someone who is not originally from the north east, where you
have Boko Haram, but has lived in the north east all their lives and has done business in thenorth east all their lives. In fact, most of the commercial activities in northern Nigeria arecarried out by people from the south. That is something to be a little bit careful about when
thinking about Nigeria. The lines are not always black and white so clearly; there are so many
grey lines as well. It is important to put things in context and actually get to the root of them.
The second point which has come up is the question of Biafra and the Niger Delta. There isno part of Nigeria called Biafra yet. There is south eastern Nigeria, and there are people insouth eastern Nigeria who, for legitimate reasons, think that they should be allowed to breakaway and form an independent republic. But it is not called Biafra as of now. So there is anagitation for a state of Biafra. Especially among the foot soldiers, there are legitimate
concerns. I hear you, Megan [Turnbull]. I heard the point about the 95 to 5%. I watched thaton CNN or BBC , and I was appalled when the President actually said that he would be morecommitted to the part of Nigeria that gave him 95% of the general election votes and ignore
the region that gave him just 5%. I also think that the response of the state in locking up theleader of the Biafran agitation up for months and months and months actually made themovement more popular. Something which could have been addressed maybe much quicker
has become a monster of sorts, because everyone now is interested in it, just by the sheer
injustice of the unusually long detention of one of the arrow heads of the movement.
This brings me to the question of the character of the Nigerian state. In most cases, theunderlying factor behind the large numbers of Nigerian migrants abroad is the character of
the Nigerian state. It is not that there are no laws to protect people, or that the institutions
that are supposed to protect people don’t exist. It is because the capacity of those institutions
to do their work has been greatly eroded, and the character of the Nigerian state as a wholeis terribly flawed. They are unable to protect their citizens and to enforce the commitments
they made internationally and also at national level.

36 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAThe other issue is the federal/state dichotomy, the structure of the Nigerian state, and thefact that some laws are made at federal level and they are not made in the states. Nigeria is
structured as a federal system of government. However, it is a very lopsided federalism
because there is inordinate power at the centre. The constitution places so much authority inthe federal government, and not enough at state level. This is contained in the 3 constitutional
lists: the exclusive list, the concurrent list and the residual list. The exclusive list contains thesectors and issues which the federal government only is meant to address. The concurrent list
contains the issues which both the federal and state can legislate on. Where there is a conflict
between state and federal law, the federal laws supersede. The residual list contains thoseissues, concerning which the local government authorities can make laws. There are not many
items on the residual list and it covers issues such as chieftancy matters. The responsibility toprovide electricity, to provide infrastructure and many basic social services lies with thefederal government. The states are largely reliant on the federal government for theirrevenues, their income. Generally they are not doing as much as they could be in terms ofgenerating revenue internally at state level, so it is a very lopsided federal structure, where
the states tend to mimic what happens at the centre.’. There are states that copy and paste
the annual federal budget, and just change the figures. It doesn’t matter whether the items
apply to them or not. So that is the type of federal government system we have.
The Violence Against Persons Prohibition Law [VAPP], is actually the domestic version of the
CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
That was a UN Convention that Nigeria signed on to , and we have been advocating to have it
domesticated. The Constitution requires that for an international treaty to have any policy
weight ‘in-country, it needs to go through a process of domestication. i.e. it needs to be passed
into local law through an act of legislation. There had been a massive push for the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women to be adopted as part of our
local laws. The CEDW domestication Bill went through different phases. It was initially called
the Violence Against Women Prohibition Law. This was rejected by a lot of male and somefemale parliamentarians on the grounds that men can also be the victims of domestic andother forms of gender-based violence. So the Bill was amended and called the Violence
Against Persons Prohibition Law, (VAPP) retaining most of the content.
However, before the VAPP, which is Violence Against Persons Prohibition Law, a number ofstates had actually passed laws at state level that reflected the broad principles of the VAPP.
For example, before the VAPP act passed, a number of states had actually outlawed female
genital mutilation (FGM), including Edo state. As a member of the International Federation of
Women Lawyers, I once went with a team to some of the states on advocacy visits to say,‘Now that you have passed the law against FGM, you need to stop carrying out FGM especiallybecause there is a penalty, and there are sanctions for this’. I remember that in one
community in particular, the elders in the community, the male elders said to us, ‘We are notthe ones that do the cutting; it is the women, the matriarchs, they are the ones you need totalk to’. That is typical patriarchy! ‘We don’t have anything to do with this. It is the womenthat are harming women, you know.’ So we said, ‘Okay, can we have a conversation with them
then?’ We sat with this woman and we went on and on, ‘This is harmful. Health-wise it isdangerous. It is not a very good idea. These are the side effects, and as a matter of fact there
is a law - it is a criminal offence to do this now’. She just looked at me and she said, ‘Well, haveyou finished? Because I actually have a batch of 20 girls I need to go and circumcise. Whenyou finish speaking English, I have to go back and do what I need to do’. I was really perplexed.
She didn’t care; they didn’t care about the threat of sanctions or imprisonment. I wanted tofind out what is behind this type of attitude. So we decided to probe. I and the rest of theteam, probed a little bit further. We found out that the women who actually do the cutting
receive an income for doing it. So when you go to them and you say, ‘Stop doing it’, in mycountry we say, ‘You are pouring sand into my bowl of porridge’, which means that you are

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 37

taking away my means of livelihood. You are saying that I can’t eat. So you are passing a lawthat is just looking at the problem from the surface. What those women are saying is, ‘Give us
an alternative means of livelihood and we will drop these razor blades in an instant’. We don’teven need the threat of sanctions or criminality to do it.
Nigerians move around everywhere, even within Nigeria. It is amazing. I went to Mali foranother meeting. My French is not very good, very halting and just a few words. So I got off
the aircraft and I am at the airport in Mali and I wonder how should I ask for a taxi and saythat I need to get to ABC hotel. I am thinking about it and then someone walks up to me andsays in Pidgin English, ‘You look like my sister, you know?’ I asked him what was he doing here,‘What are you doing in Mali?’ I did not know him but he spoke in Pidgin English! He said,‘Actually, do not tell anyone, my family thinks I am in France’. I say, ‘What are you doing in
Mali though?’ He said, ‘I am actually set off in heading to France, but I ran out of funds, so I
am just here in Mali at the local airport, and I help usher people to their taxis and they giveme tips. I am hoping to save enough money to get to France’. I say, ‘Have you ever thought ofgoing back home though?’ ‘No, no, no, I am going to try my luck’, as they say. It is really more
about the character of the state, the failure of the state in terms of expanding choices andopportunities.
I will just reiterate that, in terms of laws and policies, we have a lot of them. So the problem
really is not that we don’t have the types of laws that you need for the state to protect its
citizens. The challenge lies with the character of the state. Nigeria gained independence in
1960, and has been under military rule for more years than it has been under democratic rule.
Especially prior to 1999, when we returned to civil rule, the institutions that are responsible
for upholding the rule of law were severely damaged in terms of their capacity because of thelong years of non-democratic rule. Then there is the corruption issue and how that affects orlimits the ability of the state to be an effective protector of rights.
The sources of Nigerian law - We have all of these: customary law, Islamic law, received English
laws and statutes, Nigerian local legislation, and judicial precedent. Our law recognises
custom as a source of law. It will take court pronouncements to repudiate the unjust
customary practices and actually say that, ‘No, this custom is repugnant. This custom can’t
hold’. Customary law is actually a very strong part of Nigerian law. In some places, it is very
stringently enforced. There are some shameful traditional practices still going on in someparts of the country. There are parts of the country where a woman loses her husband, andas a matter of custom, she is required to drink the water that is used to wash the corpse before
burial to prove that she didn’t have a hand in his death, that she didn’t murder him. This iscustomary practice.
There are some of those customs, which the law says are repugnant to natural justice, equity,and good conscience, but they need to be challenged in a court of law. Sometimes, even when
they are challenged, the judges still refuse. Thanks to the job that the NGOs are doing withthe support of some international partners, training judges and all of that, we have more andmore judges being very proactive and saying, ‘No, no, no, this custom can’t go on, it is wrong’.
Up until about 7 years ago, the law said that a Nigerian woman who seeks to travel , would
have needed to get written consent from the husband to obtain a visa until someone
challenged that in a court of law. It was challenged right up to the Supreme Court where it
was basically agreed that this was an outdated practcie and had no place in a country that hassigned on to so many domestic and international frameworks. However, there are now many
more judges who have, in addition to their legal training, been exposed to international bestpractice and who have begon to repudiate some of these historical, legal ad customaryinequities.

38 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

We have had what we call judicial precedent, like re-writing some of these harmful traditional
practices. This applies to something like female genital mutilation, for example. The argumenton the surface was that it is a cultural issue, that it is part of our traditional rite of passage,
and that it is what makes you a complete woman, but the underlying nuance was that it wasan economic or a livelihood issue. Therefore it wasn’t really about all of that; it was about
livelihood and income. When you see an application that refers to some of these customary
practices that sound unbelievable, they actually do happen in some parts of the country.
The administration of justice - Like most other countries, we have this system of courts: thecustomary court, the Sharia court, and all of those courts, and you appeal from one level tothe next. Part of the challenge is the cost of going to court and the time it takes to get cases
resolved. It can be forever. I was once given the case file of a case which was initiated the year
I was born, and I will leave you to guess when that was! I met the case decades afterwards. It
has been going on from the year I was born and it is still going on. With few exceptions, ittakes a lot of time and expenses, to obtain justice in a law court.
How easy is it to access justice in Nigeria? The immediate answer to that would be that it is
not very easy. Since 1999, there have been a number of reforms. Some states like Lagos state
have been very proactive and have tried to reduce the time and the cost of the administrationof justice by setting up alternative dispute resolution courts and centres court, where people
are encouraged to resolve their issues without going through the long, expensive, tedious
process of court cases, but that is Lagos state. Lagos state was the former capital. It is in aclass of its own; it is like talking about California in the USA. It is almost like a country because
the economy is strong, so they can afford to do certain things, irrespective of what ishappening in the rest of the country.
However, the legal system in the country generally and the question of access to justice stillleaves a lot to be desired. The process is very slow. We still have some very outdated English
laws that form part of our legal system. There has been a process put in motion to review andrevise some of these laws but there are still a number of gaps and issues to be revised. So
access to justice is limited in many instances by high costs, long duration it takes to go throughthe courts, travel time to courts especially in the rural areas, and then we have the questionof awareness amongst the citizens about what your rights are, and how to engage with thestate and the institutions of state.
In 2014, before the last general elections, there were signals from the negotiators that the
government had sent to the Boko Haram insurgents that had kidnapped those Chibok girls
that they were ready to release them. We didn’t have a legal framework for theirrehabilitation, as regards who should do what, and all of that. So the Federal Ministry of
Women Affairs, put together a team of three people to draw up a set of guidelines and referral
pathways on gender-based violence (GBV). This framework is meant to respond to a numberof questions such as: What happens to a girl who was formerly held captive by insurgents?
Which institutions should be involved in rehabilitating her and who coordintes therehabilitation?
I happened to be part of the 2 person technical team working with the Ministry and
UNWomen at the time to draw up the national guidelines and referral pathways on gender
based violence. We consulted with villagers from Chibok through focus groups with some of
the indigenes. I remember asking one of them about the issue of kidnapping these girls. I
asked what had really happened. There are varying accounts of what happened in Chibok.
One of the versions which was told during the development of the GBV guidelines was thatthe community was forewarned of the visit. The FGD participants said, ‘With Chibok, theinsurgents actually sent a message to the community’. This is very important because it speaks
to the character of the state. The insurgency problem is first of all a failure of intelligence all

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 39

around, before anything else. A community member said to me, ‘They sent a message to thecommunity. They sent a message to us’. I said, ‘How did they deliver that message?’ They said,‘They took a school girl of about 10 years old, who was getting back from school, and theygave her a letter to deliver to the elders saying, “We are coming to your community on suchand such day, so expect us along with the consequences of our visit’. They got that letter andthey didn’t know who to speak to, where to go, so everybody kept quiet until they struck andkidnapped those girls. So there is a disconnect between the citizens and the institutions ofgovernment that are responsible for protecting them. Sometimes there is a lack of awarenesswith citizens wondering, ‘Where do I go? I have this problem. Which agency am I supposed to
go to? Who am I supposed to talk to about this? What are my rights as a citizen?’ Some people
apply for asylum also because of that disconnect. ‘The law is there. The agencies are there,
but how do I engage them? I am not very sure. I have tried, but it is just not working, let mego (overseas) where at least, the system works’.
The hot-button asylum issues and the role of the state as a protector - this is based on theconcept note that I received before the workshop and also on some of the work that I havedone. There has been a lot of talk about the crisis in the North East. Like I said, it is basically afailure of intelligence. The reason why I think that the North East is important for the very
important work that you all do is because of the first point I made. The crisis in the North East
is not only affecting people from the North East. There are a lot of people from the south whohave lived in the North East all their lives. I have colleagues that grew up in Borno state. They
were born there and lived there all their lives because it was relatively peaceful before. I thinkthat Nigerians by nature have the tendency to just migrate. They migrate even within Nigeria,
from one part of the country to the other, and they set up elsewhere. This is why the issue
with the Biafra is really problematic. It is not as simple as we may think it is, because first ofall, the determination of who belongs to Biafra or not is a big question. Megan [Turnbull]talked about Ibo-speaking communities in the South South (Niger Delta). Those communities
would actually pick a fight with you for calling them Ibos, because the issue of ethnic identity
is a big deal in a multi ethnic society like Nigeria. The Niger Delta struggle is also based on aset of demands that are essentially different from the Biafra demands. The Niger Delta
struggle has essentially been about resource control. The Biafra struggle is basically about
secession. So you have some of those who are agitating for A Republic of Biafra saying ‘theNiger Delta is part of us and most of the Niger Delta basically saying, ‘no we’re not.’ So would
you forcefully annex the Niger Delta states to a republic of Biafra? These are some of the
intricacies.
As regards the North East insurgency, my country was never prepared for the scale at which
it happened. In terms of laws, in terms of policies, we have a National Emergency
Management Agency (NEMA), but that was established only to manage disaster relief in the
short term, for example, in case of flooding or in case of an event which is defined by law as‘an act of God’. However, NEMA is not structured, nor is it even empowered by law to take on
the fall-out of an insurgency or violent extremism over a long period of time. Therefore, as
regards coordination on the ground, thank God for the international groups, UNHCR, the Red
Cross/Crescent, and all of that. Otherwise there would have been a lot more confusion thanthere is already. Even as is, there is confusion with the data, as regards how many people are
actually displaced, and who/where exactly they are. It is actually a bit of a mess. There arepeople from southern Nigeria who are caught up in that mess. I think that would be useful tobear in mind as you go forward with your work.
Child protection –23 out of 36 states have ratified Child Rights Act. Surprisingly, we have statesin northern Nigeria with high Muslim populations who have passed laws against childmarriages and early marriages. The challenge is once again in the disparity between rhetoricand reality. The law says one thing, but something else is happening in practice. How strong

40 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

are the institutions of state to enforce the law? It is still happening. In fact, when I started
doing work around gender issues, I was actually surprised to find that whenever I travelled tonorthern Nigeria to do bits of gender related work, people were more willing to listen, andengage, and ask me questions, and negotiate the issues I was talking about, as opposed topeople in the south! Very surprising, because that was another stereotypical thinking that I
went into international development work with. I thought it was going to be very difficult totalk about gender in northern Nigeria, but I found that they were more open, and they werequicker to pass some of those laws, and act to make sure young children stay in school, forinstance. However even though the law says that child marriage is a crime, it is still prevalent.
Female genital mutilation continues in parts of Southern Nigeria, and because we have weak
juvenile justice systems, which again reflects the character of the state.
The question of gender and gender disparities in Nigeria - I think there is a plethora of reportsthat speak to those issues. We have a high rate of feminized poverty. What that means is thatamong the poorest of the poor, 70 % are women. Women have less access and opportunities.
Recently the Federal Government set up a micro-credit access facility with the central bank,and committed to disbursing 70 % of these funds to women who own small businesses. When
you look at the criteria for accessing the loans, the first one is that you need to have to havea bank account. The second one is you need to have collateral, possibly some landed property.
Now, out of all the bank accounts in Nigeria, only 15 % are owned by women, according to
the 2013 ‘Gender in Nigeria’ country report produced by the British Council. That means that
programmes like the CBN initiative above, unintentionally exclude a large chunk of those whoneed the product, i.e the women.
As regards the gender question, there are still huge gender disparities most of which aresustained by patriarchy and long-held customary practices and beliefs . Some of them have
not yet been challenged in a court of law, some are in the process of being challenged and,like I said, it is a long process, and it is an expensive one too.
LGBT rights - my brother over there [Makanjuola] will do justice to that and talk about theSame Sex Marriage Prohibition Act. In the last administration, we nearly had a first female
speaker in the Federal House of Representatives. She didn’t win the elections in 2015, and she
wanted to document her story. I was involved in writing her book. I remember I asked her,
‘When you were the majority leader in the House of Representatives, when the Same Sex
Marriage Prohibition Bill became law, what really happened? Why did you reject it when it isso obviously an infringement on the rights of a particular cluster?’ She said, ‘Well, we just felt
it was a foreign agenda. There was too much pressure from abroad. We just felt we didn’t
own it. We felt there were interests from outside the country that were forcing us to do this,and we wanted to send the message that Nigerians will not be forced or coerced. It has to be
our own. We don’t have ownership over it’. That was her response. I am sure Makanjuola will
do justice to this issue during his presentation.
As regards some of those cases I talked about that were referred to me for a legal opinion,
there is one of them – understandably I am referring to them by their initials – in which there
was a young female from the Niger Delta region, specifically from Edo state. Her story wasthat she was fleeing from a forced marriage. Her parents were late. Her uncle who was theeldest member of the family had already received a bride price on her behalf. To a certain
extent, in some parts of the country – I think this cuts across especially where there is highpoverty – marriage can be very transactional sometimes. It is a vehicle for stepping out ofpoverty rather than the cementing of a relationship between two people who love each other.
Not in all cases but that happens, so that was her story. She said she ran away and they wereafter her. Somehow she found her way out of the country and now she was applying forasylum. The authorities in the country where she was seeking asylum got back to me and said,‘Can you give us a legal brief on the issues she has raised?’ Part of the argument that the

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 41

authorities were making very strongly was that if she was being forced to get married in Edostate, surely she could relocate to Lagos state or to Abuja and live there. When I read thedetails and I did a bit of investigating, I actually found out that the poverty in her family wasvery bad, and the uncle was threatening fire and brimstone. He said, ‘I will find her wherever
she is. She is not going to rub egg on my face like this’. That is a Nigerian way of saying. ‘You
won’t put me to shame’. He said that she had to come to back and fulfil her obligations. Like
I said, each case has to be taken on its own merits. I think there is one thing to take away fromhere: because the country is so diverse and there are so many issues, I think it is very
important to be a bit cautious about having a blanket approach to every case from every partof the country. Each case must be taken on its own merit. So in her own case I did a bit ofdigging, and he didn’t know I was investigating his case, but somehow I got round to talking
to him because like I said my husband is from Edo state. Her uncle was livid, and I really saw
that her life was in danger. So I did a legal opinion and also gave my professional opinion about
the facts on the ground. I think that eventually she got the asylum.
There was another one who was the campaign manager for a major political party. There is
one thing that has not featured in our conversations yet today, and that is the elections, theviolence that comes with the elections, and how that can be the basis for an asylum request.
Politics is a ‘do or die’ affair because it provides access to the national cake. There are someparts of the country where the perception about poverty reduction is that improved access topolitical office is the major way to reduce poverty.
This was reflected in a poverty diagnostics exercise which I was a part of just when Nigeria
signed on to the PRSP framework. In the Niger Delta region, when we asked the sample, mostof the people we had focus groups which said to us that poverty means an inability to accessthe ‘national cake’. That is what poverty means to them. They said that if you want to reducepoverty, we should make it easier for us to access the ‘national cake’ and eat it, and to eat achunk of it. Speaking from a technical perspective, for us that means ‘give us access to politicalpower’. This goes back to the point made earlier, about political power and how that drives
the emergence of some of these agitation clusters, especially within their top hierarchy andthe leadership.
In the south east, which Megan [Turnbull] spoke so well about in her presentation, they said,‘Poverty means I can’t do business. It means my containers are stranded on the high seas. It
means I cannot bring goods into Nigeria’. So for them it is more about commerce. It is more
about mercantilist aspirations, and how the state has not put laws and policies that make iteasier for them to operate as business people. There is so much diversity that each case has
to be taken on its individual merits.
The issue of elections and politically motivated violence is a very big deal. I think it has largely
been left out of our conversation, but as someone who lives and works in Nigeria, I think it
can be very strong grounds, especially when the elections are approaching or it’s election
year. I was once asked to review an asylum application where the applicant was a campaign
manager for a major political party and he witnessed his principal getting assassinated. He
actually ran into the bushes to escape assassination. He comes from the South West part ofthe country. Ordinarily, I would have said that this was possible, but I didn’t think there weregrounds to flee Nigeria, so he could relocate, and after the election things would calm down,
and he will get on with his life. However, there were two factors that made him particularly
vulnerable: We don’t have any form of witness protection in Nigeria and we don’t have a
victim’s charter. Some lawyers and NGO activists have been pushing for a victim’s charter toprotect the rights of the victims, to protect people who witness violent crimes, but we are notthere yet. The applicant in the asylum case I was reviewing was particularly vulnerable
because of that. I did a few checks and I found that he actually did witness an assassination.

42 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

There was another application, which I was asked to review by a foreign agency. This camefrom a male applicant who claimed he was part of a group called the ‘Niger Delta Forceful
Avengers’. They claimed they had been placed on an assassination list created by the Federal
Government. This was referred to me, I checked it out and I said, ‘In the first place, even if
there is a group called the Niger Delta Forceful Avengers, they are not on the front burner,
and there is no government list ordering anyone to kill anyone on this basis. The facts don’talign with the reality on the ground, and I think that should inform your decision’.
There was one that I didn’t mention here though, that came from Edo state. He said that hewas being hounded by a cult group. That is very common with people coming from Edo. They
always claim to be hounded by cult groups. In a few cases that might be the truth because,
like I said, cases must be taken on their individual merits, but sometimes it is not as bad as theapplicant makes it seem, and it needs to be probed a little bit further.

Discussion[Question] Do you think it is not only a lack of awareness but also a lack of confidence ingovernment institutions?
[Odiase] Yes, you are right. I think it is a combination of both, but more often than not, there
is just that disconnect. Citizens don’t really know where to go. I mean, if indeed they did
receive that letter saying, ‘We are coming to a school in your community’, the nearest police
station was three villages away, so the man who got the letter in the village said, ‘I didn’t haveany money to transport myself three villages away. I wasn’t sure if this was a police matter. I
didn’t know who else to talk to about it’. So, yes, you are right. In some cases it is aboutawareness. The confidence issue is also there, but there is also a huge disconnect between
the government and the governed. I think it is a relic from the long years under military rule.
I think that as a country we have to unlearn certain things and learn certain things. I think it isboth of them.
[Question] Is there any place in Nigeria where people (also women) do not have the right tovote?
[Odiase] People have the right to vote in every state. There is no state in Nigeria where women
cannot vote.
[Question] Very often Nigerian applicants have an issue connected to Ogboni. Could you
actually tell us what it is? What is the activity of the Ogboni?
[Odiase] Coincidentally, I have had a few referrals on that as well. The perception is that the
Ogboni is a secret cult that goes to great lengths in order to eliminate members that try toexit or that say, ‘We don’t want to be part of this anymore’. The group itself has mounted avery aggressive media campaign to say that there is nothing secret about them and that they
are just a social club. However, I have come across one or two cases of former members who
have actually been hounded for exiting. One of them sought asylum in Canada as well. WhenI investigated his case, it was actually true, because he was spilling all the things they did under
the cover of secrecy, and they didn’t like that. Therefore, in some cases, it is a ‘yes’. I am nota member so I don’t know what exactly they do there. I just have the accounts that end up on
the public space, but I know that in the case of one of the applicants that I handled, he had
left the group and he was granting newspaper interviews, and alleging some funny things
about ritual killings and slaughtering of animals. Because of that, they wanted him silenced. I
remember the authorities asking me, ‘Okay, if he is not safe in Edo state, can’t he live in Lagosor Abuja?’ I said, ‘Whether a secret cult or a social club, they have branches in every part ofthe country. So no matter what they are if they are truly hunting down a former member they
can do so from any part of the country and nowhere is safe’.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 43

There was another case where there was a land dispute. The person who was seeking asylum
said, ‘The owner of the land belongs to an Ogboni member, and I testified against him in the
court case concerning the land dispute’. For that reason he felt his life was in danger because
he spoke against an alleged cult member. In that case, the facts were a little bit different, andmy advice was a little bit different as well.
[Question] (1) North-south divide: We know that there is a difference between the south
and the north, but as you say, this is not strict. Is there any north that is most disadvantaged
compared to the south?
(2) How does the bail procedure work in the English criminal procedure, if there is one?
(3) Is there trial in absence in the legal framework?
[Odiase] (1) The north-south divide – the poverty indices in the northern part of Nigeria arehigher. You have larger numbers of poor people in northern Nigeria than in the south.
Interestingly, when we did the poverty diagnostic and we went to about 4 states in northern
Nigeria, when we asked, ‘What does poverty mean to you? What should a poverty reduction
strategy do to reduce poverty?’, they essentially said, (paraphrasing) ‘Well, there is a divine
being that has destined some people to be poor, and some people to be rich, and it is the
responsibility of the rich to take care of the poor. So if you want to eradicate poverty, please
make the rich richer so they can take better care of the poor’. They wanted that in the PRSP!
So yes, poverty is more widespread in the northern part of Nigeria. However, the point I wastrying to make was that you have a large number of southerners that live and do business innorthern Nigeria, just like you have a lot of Muslim northerners that live and do business insouthern Nigeria. In Port Harcourt, where I come from, there is a whole community of them.
They are responsible for our beef, for some of the products that we buy in the Niger Delta. I
am just trying to say that if an application comes from someone who gives reasons that are
tied to the problems in northern Nigeria, but who is not a northerner, don’t be in a hurry to
dismiss it, because you have people from the south that know no other life. They were born,raised and have always lived in northern Nigeria.
(2) The question of bail - Right now, the way the law stands, first of all a woman can’t standas surety for bail. To be released on bail you need sureties. For different offences, the surety
is required to have varying leves of economic strength. E.g for the people who are currently
alleged to have looted state resources during the last administration, the bail conditions arevery high. For IPOB’s Kanu, the bail conditions were almost a little bit amusing to me. They
included a wealthy Jew, and all sorts of conditions. This further shows that bail conditions
depend on the offence. You always need to produce sureties. The economic powers of thesureties also differ depending on the crime or the offence that the accused person allegedly
committed. But women cannot stand sureties by law.
(3) Trial in absentia – No, you have to be present because the failure of a party to appear in acase could be grounds for dismissal. They can also keep adjourning the matter over and over,until they eventually dismiss it. So there is no trial in absentia.
[Question] Is it possible to jail individuals for debts in Nigeria?
[Odiase] Not by law, no. You will be compelled to pay. You could forfeit your properties. They
could take possession of your physical properties, take over your house, take your car and allof that, but by law you are not supposed to be put in prison. Because of the weakness of thestate and because of the corruption in the police force, we increasingly see a criminalisationof civil cases. What you described is a civil case – it is between two individuals, it is not a crime.
You have some Nigerians who would go and give the police some money and they would
actually lock up or detain someone who owes another, but that is wrong by law. If they get

44 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

the right lawyer, they would be released. By law, you shouldn’t be put in jail because you owe
a debt.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 45

UNHCR COI research and country guidance on Nigeria
UNHCR RSD section
UNHCR delivered a presentation on COI research findings on the topic of indigenes andsettlers in Nigeria in relation to the relevance and reasonableness tests for internal flight /internal protection alternatives (IFA/IPA) to Nigeria.
UNHCR has public International Protection Considerations with regard to Northeastern
Nigeria and surrounding regions, please refer to:
UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), International Protection
Considerations with regard to people fleeing northeastern Nigeria (the states of
Borno, Yobe and Adamawa) and surrounding region – Update II, October
2016, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/57ebb35c4.html.

46 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAThe Office of the EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator
The Office of EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator briefly presented the comprehensive EU legal
and policy framework to address trafficking in human beings (THB): Directive 2011/36/EU andthe EU Strategy towards the eradication of THB 2012-2016, which is human rights and victims
centred, gender specific and child sensitive; and recalled the mandate of the EU Antitrafficking Coordinator (DG HOME, European Commission). The speech then focussed on:the external dimension of Trafficking in Human Beings (THB), with particularreference on Nigeria as a priority country;

THB in the context of the migration crisis,embedded in the priorities of key EU policy instruments such as the European Agenda
on Migration and the New Partnership framework, with a particular focus on Nigeria.

Information on the situation of THB for what concerns victims of trafficking registered in the
EU was provided, based on Commission’s report on the fight against THB (2016), which showsthat 35% of the victims registered in the period 2013-2014 are non-EU nationals, with Nigeria
being the main non-EU country of origin. IOM and UNICEF data was also mentioned,
highlighting a sharp increase in the number of Nigerian women and girls arriving to the EU
through Libya (11.000 in 2016, double the number in 2015), of whom 80% are estimated to
be victims of THB for the purpose of sexual exploitation in the EU. The strong genderdimension of the phenomenon was highlighted. Reference was made to children as aparticularly vulnerable group to trafficking, with several provisions of the Anti-trafficking
Directive being based on the best interest of the child and key deliverables of the EU Strategy
concerning children. In this context, the recent adoption by the Commission of theCommunication on children in migration was also mentioned.
EU funding for projects on THB was addressed in relation to several instruments, including the
EU TF. Relevant reports published by the European Commission (Transposition report, Users
report), Studies (in particular: on the gender dimension of THB and on high risk groups), anddeliverables under the EU Strategy were mentioned. Participants were informed on theavailability of all resources on the EU Anti-trafficking website. On the same website, aninfographic can be found of the progress and actions that have been achieved in the past five
years, covered by the EU Strategy Towards the Eradication of Trafficking of Human Beings
2012-2016(4).
References were made to victims of THB as a particularly vulnerable group in the EU asylum
acquis, as well as to the need to ensure conceptual clarity in relation to the differences
between smuggling and trafficking, as they bare significant implications for what concerns therights of the victims and the obligations of the Member States.
It was highlighted that trafficking is not a migration related phenomenon per se, nor it isvulnerability that renders people victims of trafficking, but that THB is crime fuelled bydemand for goods and services provided by the victims and huge profits. Thus, the need tountangle the trafficking chain, for what concerns traffickers but also the abusers, with relevant
implications in relation to prevention, both for in relation to prosecution (stressing the need
to follow the money) and demand reduction, as legal obligations for the Member States.

(4) EC, Together against Trafficking in Human Beings, last update 16 August 2017, http://ec.europa.eu/antitrafficking/. For an infographic with all relevant links to the resources and reports mentioned, see EU Antitrafficking Action 2012-2016 at a glance.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 47

Migration and trafficking into the European sex industry – thecase of Nigerian Edo women and girls
Sine Plambech, Anthropologist, PhD, Danish Institute for International
StudiesThis presentation provides a detailed, ethnographic, anthropological insight into some of the
background of the Nigerian women that we see in Europe these years.
The lecture - ‘Migration and trafficking into the European sex industry – the case of Nigerian
Edo women and girls’ -, focuses on Edo and not just Nigerian women, since the percentage ofwomen arriving from Edo state is so high. I have been working on trafficking, women
migration and prostitution and sex work for the past 15 years as an anthropologist. I do fieldwork in Edo state and in different European cities in the red-light district. I also work in North
East Thailand. Three of the main groups of migrant sex workers and victims of trafficking are:Nigerian women; women from Eastern Europe; and a lot of migrant sex workers fromThailand.
The outline of the presentation is:The current situation;



Why Edo state? (which is the question I get most);



Why women?;

The modus operandi;Return and re-trafficking; New tendencies.

The current situation - there is an increase in the arrival of Nigerians. You have seen that in
the past couple of days. I also want you to look at the number of Nigerian nationals from
Copenhagen, Denmark, who identified as trafficking victims, just to see how the increase inarrivals is followed by an increase in identified victims, even though there are many otherdrivers for the arrivals of women, and the reason why in northern Europe, for instance, there
are more identified victims than we have previously seen. We really have to look at theconnection between the number of arrivals and the number of identified victims.
One third of the Nigerian arrivals are women and the ratio of women to men is quite highcompared to other West African migrations. For instance, from Mali and other places, thedata I have is 1 % to 5 %, whereas 1/3 of Nigerians is women. For Thailand it is 75 %. So wehave 7-8 places around the world which you could call ‘trafficking hotspots’ or ‘women
migration hotspots’, where women in particular migrate to Europe and where the ratio of
women to men is much higher. Edo state, Nigeria, is one of those places.
I want to emphasise that much of what I am going to talk about today is from the women
perspective as an anthropologist. When we do interviews in the red-light district in various
European countries, we estimate that 50-60 % of the women in the red-light districts havearrived by sea. The rest of them have either arrived earlier when it was more possible to geta tourist visa and then overstay the visa and stay in Europe, or they have arrived in Europe byother means. The current situation which we have not talked about, but which those of us
who work in Nigeria have talked a lot about yesterday, and which is not mentioned, is therecession in Nigeria, the fallen oil prices, and how that influenced the number of arrivals in
Italy and other places this year. The political economy is quite important.

48 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAThen we have seen the change in the migration system development. Many of the young
women that arrived these years, as many of you have mentioned, do not owe as much to theirmadams or their traffickers as those who arrived previously. Previously they would owe
EUR 50-60 000, for instance. Many of those who arrive now have to pay EUR 25 000. I will also
talk a little bit about why we see that discount in the prices, so to speak; it is just a market andthe markets are falling.
The organisation is also different. Most of the women will explain that while it was previously
much more dangerous to travel through the Sahara desert, it is much more organised now inthe sense that it is safer, though difficult to say safer, that is not really what I mean. What I
mean is that when we look at the migrants that used to arrive 15 years ago, they would be ina truck in the Sahara desert for instance and if the truck stopped, there would not be anothertruck to pick them up. Now it is so organised that we rarely see those kinds of incidents. There
are so many transit points and it is so organised all the way from Edo state to Libya that it is
not very dangerous to cross the Sahara. The most dangerous places for women are in Libya
and across the Mediterranean, according to the women themselves. When we look at othermigration systems across the world, it is not unusual that you have this high price initially andthen later the price falls. The Nigerian case is not unusual in that sense.
Then we have the main transit points. They are Agadez, Sabha, Libya, and also Benin City.
Many do not apply for asylum. They want to stay under the radar; or others want them to stayunder the radar. We have to pay attention to this very large group with whom you are maybe
in contact very briefly, or who do not want to be in contact with you. That is a major project
we are working on with the University of Oslo to try to get some more data on the many
Nigerian women and men who are living under the radar in Europe and who, after they arrive
in Italy, are travelling onwards to other European countries and want to stay or are forced tostay unregistered. Finally, we also see their increase in the red-light districts in northern
Europe as well.
Why Edo state and why women? - The migration of women from Edo state to other states
within Nigeria was a concern already in the 1920’s during colonialism. The women would also
leave their families behind and they would travel to other states to sell sex, and there was amajor discussion on how to get the women back to Edo state in order to protect them but
also because it was considered embarrassing for Edo state that so many of their women leftin order to sell sex. It was kind of staining the reputation. This is a discussion that is still goingon in Nigeria, the staining of the reputation or of the national image related to the fact thatso many Nigerian women are leaving to go to Europe. When I interviewed anti-trafficking
organisations in Edo state they would say that they want to protect the women obviously, butthey would also say that it is bad for Nigeria.
There are several reasons why we have seen this current migration that started in the early
1980’s. There is no single explanation for that. One of the two major things that spurred thecurrent migration from Edo state and created these migration and trafficking systems that we
see today is that there were French and Italian companies who set up business in Edo state.
Many of these Italian men married Nigerian women from Edo state and then went to Italy.
Some of these women were the first ones to invite their family members to come to Italy,
which is not unusual. We have seen that in other areas as well, where it starts with what you
could describe as family reunification and then turns into what we are seeing today.
Then there was also a demand for labour in Italy in agriculture, and women initially started inagriculture but then moved into the sex industry. That move is very much connected to how
more difficult it was to enter Europe and Italy. The higher the price, the more money the
women would have to borrow. I will explain this debt bondage later. The place where theycan earn the most money, if they are undocumented, is in the sex industry. There is a strong

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 49

connection between migration control, the debt and the involvement in the sex industry, andthat is of course what madams, traffickers and sponsors are living on today, so the structuralcomponent is quite important.
Edo state is a major site, a migration hub, a trafficking hub. You can learn Spanish, German
and Italian there. Edo state is now the place in West Africa that receives the most remittancesfrom western Europe and most of them are from women. I know that we should talk about
profiting traffickers, but this would not work if it was not possible for women to send money
back to Edo state. We have to look at that connection as well. Most ethnographic researchshows that even though the women have to pay off these large amounts of debt, EUR 60,000,
while being in the informal labour market, they still manage to send back a little bit of money
to Edo state.
You see Moneygram and Western Union signs all over in Edo state. Small red and yellow buses
are a very common sight in Benin City. They are used for everyday transport, but these arealso the kind of buses that would take women onwards to the border between Niger andNigeria before they continue with other means through Niger and to Agadez.
Why women? Why is it so gendered? Again, there are multiple reasons for that. We cannot
look at the migration of women without looking at the conditions of men in Edo state and thelarge number of unemployed men. The women I have done different kinds of research
projects with, young women and older women, talk a lot about how they had to become thebreadwinners of the family, and that is why they considered travelling to Europe.
Recruiting and self-recruiting - As in many trafficking networks, we often pay much attention
to the men as the perpetrator, the male traffickers, and they certainly exist, but as regards
the Nigerian women, the modus operandi means that there are several people involved.
Though there are also men involved, the primary group of recruiters are women that are
already in Europe. These are the madams. Madams can be recruiters and madams at the sametime. They would identify women in the area in the village that they think might be interested
in going and then they would have someone else to help, which could be a man. These are
increasingly men that have been deported from Europe and who now have migration skills to
become involved in this. We have to consider the backlash of returning and deporting a lot ofvery skilled migrants back to areas where there are a lot of migrants who want to leave. It iseither male family members, or deportees who are involved in the recruiting process. Then
we increasingly see that smuggling or trafficking - and I do agree that we have to separate thetwo but sometimes we also need to look at them together - are done in order to facilitate andfinance one’s own migration.
The mix of who is the trafficker and who is the trafficked is becoming increasingly complex. I
guess that those of you who are working on this recognise this complexity. For instance, I have
had cases where women were asked to pay EUR 70,000 but then if they agreed to find andrecruit five other women to bring along with them across the Sahara, they would come toEurope having to pay only EUR 30,000. You see how these market dynamics are very crucial
to explore. We cannot ignore the self-recruiting. There are a lot of women and also very young
women who want to go to Europe. The old picture of young women sitting in a village in Edostate knowing nothing about migration and nothing about prostitution is not the kind of
trafficking we are talking about.
Every time we do surveys in these areas, IOM and the University of Benin City Observatory,
all the different services that we are doing, there is almost 100 % knowledge about what kindof jobs women are having in Europe. The point is that they just do not know the conditions
until they are here. It does not make it less tragic to know what kind of job you are going tohave. You can be a victim even though you know what type of job you are having.

50 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

There have been awareness campaigns in Edo state for the past 10-15 years, warning against
prostitution and trafficking. I would not say that there could not be some who arrive and who
would not know anything about it, but every time we do surveys, it appears that people areaware but they do not know the conditions. That is where exploitation is very crucial.
Deportees and returnees as recruiters is certainly something that we have to look more into,
the dynamics of deportation and recruitment.
What is often really ignored, when we talk about trafficking, is the role of debt. It is quiteboring, as opposed to talking about sex slavery and all kinds of other sensational issues thatthe media often brings up. Nevertheless, the exploitation is primarily in this relationshipbetween the woman and the trafficker or the madam, because of this debt and the violence
that can then be inflicted, or that the woman will experience because she has to pay back thismoney.
Often the women know that they will have to borrow money and they agree to work off thedebt. The deceit often consists of this: they are told it will take them 2-3 years to pay off themoney, that it will not take them that long, and of course when they come to Europe theyrealise that it takes them much longer, or that there has been an increase in the debt, or all
kinds of things where the exploitation really unfolds.
It is often under restrictive contracts in a foreign country: this is the definition of debt
bondage. What the women will get in exchange is passage, accommodation, food andinformation. It is important not to think that it is only the crossing [to be paid].
The difference between smuggling and trafficking in this connection is that smuggling is just atransport; it is not a long-term contract, whereas trafficking is what happens next when you
arrive in Italy or Europe and you have this bondage contract for an unknown number of years.
The women will think that it is a limited number of years, but then it just continues. What they
get in exchange is not only the transport but also information about where the labour markets
are and where they can earn the most money. Sometimes the madams and the traffickers will
force them.
A huge number of women decline any form of assistance. They run away from the antitrafficking crisis shelters; they do not want to be in contact. Much of that is because they getother kinds of information that they need in order to pay back the debt from the madams, thetraffickers and other contacts in the Nigerian migrant communities. They do not feel that the
information they get from social workers and others is that helpful. They think that other kindsof information are more helpful. It is potentially a very highly exploitative situation withforced labour, increase in debt and violence.
I think it is crucial to follow the money in order to understand why we see these arrivals andwhy they then move onwards. These are numbers for 2015. Lagos: it is USD 3 for one client,
Barcelona: USD 27, Copenhagen: USD 91. In addition, the women that I interviewed in Lagos,
who were working at a brothel there, would stay in the room where they have their clientsand they would have up to 10 clients per day, and they would work 24/7. In Barcelona theywould not have as many clients per day and they would also work fewer days, say 5/6 days,
whereas in Copenhagen you would see women who have two/three clients per day and theywould work maybe 4 days per week. Of course, they can increase the number of clients if thedemands form the traffickers are forcing them to do so. In that case, they would be on thestreet every day soliciting clients and would lower the price in order to get more clients.
Voluntary vs forced returns: that is a very complex field. I would say that 100 % of the womenthat arrive these years have debt, because it is not possible to arrive here without a debt
unless you have pawned your ancestral land or had money already. What debt is really doingis that it makes it possible for the poorest of the poor to migrate.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 51

Prior to this we would say, ‘Oh, it’s often not the poorest that migrate. You need some kindof resources in order to be able to pay just a small fare to be transported’. What we see now
is that the poorest of the poor - to use that expression, though it is not something we use inanthropology -, have access to migration by borrowing money. Therefore, if we consider
borrowing money and working through this debt under labour contracts which are highly
exploitative and which make women and girls very vulnerable, they are all trafficked. Wherethat line is drawn is something that I know many caseworkers and social workers are working
on every day. Thus, I am not going to answer that. I am just going to say that I do notexperience any women arriving in Europe who are not in debt bondage and who do not haveto pay back this money.
The traffickers, madams, sponsors, guides have many names but they are usually calledmadams by the Nigerian women. It is primarily a woman’s business. They are organising it andorchestrating it, and we also have madams in the red-light districts in the various European
countries. They are also mostly from Edo state, with the same ethnic origin and same social
network. However, the city of Benin has transformed over the past 5-7 years and we see anincreased number of people who are not from Benin City who are going there to facilitate
migration, because it is a place where there are a lot of different offices that make fakedocuments. It is a place where people would travel to if they want to travel onwards toEurope. So, it’s not necessarily any more the case that the women are connected in social or
ethnic networks, there are other tendencies because it is becoming so organised.
Smugglers: When I talk about smugglers I refer to the people who take them across the Sahara
desert to Libya and across the Mediterranean. It is not the same as traffickers, madams andsponsors. That kind of smuggling where some people would be involved in the recruitment
and in taking women across Nigeria and through Niger is what you can call an
entrepreneurship of coincidence. While we often talk about it as very organised and involving
a huge network of people, very often when we do these surveys and detailed ethnographic
insights, we see that it is much more fragmented. It is often a person who is just around andhe is the one who can participate in this, or it is a woman who can participate in that because
she has some kinds of skills, maybe returnees vs the much-organised networks. We have bothtypes.
Often the women would not denounce their traffickers or the madams for multiple reasons.
We are often told that it is because they are so afraid of the madams and the traffickers, whichis also true and they have good reasons to be afraid of them, but it is also because we have tounderstand this complex double figure of the madam, which on one hand is the one that
exploits them severely, on the other hand we see cases where it is a little bit more complex
where they are actually travelling around Europe with their madam, because she used to bein that situation herself and now she is high up in the hierarchy. She is still earning money on
the newcomer but the relationship is quite complex. We also see Romanian women who often
have boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with the one we would consider a trafficker. These
relationships can be quite complex.
The role of juju in migration and trafficking from Edo state. Many of the women would
mention Ayelala if you asked specifically what kind of shrine they are devotees of. The reason
why it is often mentioned is because we have Nigerian women who say that they do not dare
to denounce their traffickers or madams because they fear juju and that before they left theyswore an oath, in one of the shrines in Benin City, that they will not disclose any information
about the madams. They promised to pay back the debt and they made this kind ofagreements. It is important to say that many of these women have made such agreements
many times in their lives because of other things that are not connected to trafficking. It is aplace where they would go to and they would also go to the church; it is combined.

52 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

But we cannot just dismiss the fear. Of course, it is very complicated to know how that fear isfelt, whether you should have protection from that fear and what will actually happen when
you return to Nigeria. There have been cases where women would say, ‘What happened tome and my family back in Nigeria was related to juju’. The Guardian recently stated that thetrafficking of Nigerian women that we see these years is fuelled by juju. I would say that it is
not fuelled by juju, though juju may play a part in it. It is the political economy, trafficking
networks and all kind of other things. However, we should give attention to it and certainly
listen to the women who mention it but balance it out with the other multiple exploitations
that the women experience.
Two of the women that were returned from Italy showed me around in the neighbourhoodand these shrines are very close to where they live. It is not something that you need to goout of Benin City to find. They would go there occasionally, and they would also go to church.
Juju is not only related to trafficking; it is related to so many other issues in Edo state.
Who the women are, their families in Nigeria and how they fare when they are in the EU.
When I interviewed a large group of women who have been selling sex for several years in
Italy and in other places in Europe, when they were returned to Nigeria through the assisted
voluntary return program, I asked them to take photos of their everyday life upon return andin almost all the photos that they returned to me there were only women. Of course, I asked
them, ‘Why are there only women in the photos?’ They would say, ‘There are not really any
men in our family. After I returned to Nigeria I am the one who is still supposed to take careof the family like I did when I was in Italy’. This also makes women very vulnerable upon
return. It is not that they would be safe necessarily if they were living with men, but it is single
women households living alone with women on the outskirts of Benin City, with very limitedaccess to any kind of safety or security and many of them have experienced violence upon
returning.
They would say that they lived off on about USD 1-5 per day before they left, and the level of
education is very low, though some of them have education but are unemployed. There is ahigh level of unemployment in Benin City as elsewhere in Nigeria.
The situation in northern Europe is often that they have their main contact in Italy and theywould move to northern Europe, stay there for 2-3 months to earn as much as they can forthe madams, traffickers or family and then they would go back to Italy. We see this group of
women travelling back and forth between northern and southern Europe and crossing all the
EU borders on the way. That is something we should look into because sometimes they justtravel with the traffickers crossing all the borders and of course if they have their papers it isfine, but we also have several who are crossing all the borders and are not at any point being
confronted. I have met women who have travelled around for 6-7 years in any European
country with their traffickers and they were not met by any authorities. It is not to say that
we should necessarily put a lot more authorities; this is just to say that this is what is goingon.
The condition of the women in Copenhagen. Many social workers and anti-trafficking
organisations are trying to get in contact with them. When they come to the crisis centres
very often would run away. One of the major issues is that they are not offered or offered
only very little money while they are in the protection period, but they still have to pay backtheir debt, they still have to pay money to their family in Nigeria. When I am working with theDanish anti-trafficking NGOs we are looking much more into what we can do during theprotection period, because these women are here to work either for a madam or a trafficker
or to take care of their family.
It’s pointless to say ‘trafficked’ or ‘not trafficked', because as I said they are all in a debt
bondage, but it is about understanding what is going on when we separate the women into

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 53

other categories and at what time they will often apply for asylum. We have women that wecall ‘just started’, that is, women who have been in Europe for a short time, and are still
optimistic about reaching their goals of paying their debt as quick as they can and often not
yet aware of all the difficulties that they might encounter.
Then we have the ‘not there yet’, women who have been in Europe for a while, and know thedifficulties but are still hopeful. These women tend to feel that they have not achieved theirgoals yet and therefore want to continue living and working in Europe.
Then we have the third group, ‘the disillusioned’, women who have stayed in Europe for sometime, and are disillusioned about the perspectives in their host country. These are often theones who apply for asylum.
Finally we have the ‘confident agents’ who are very few, for instance madams who haverepaid their debt and now have moved up in their hierarchy. Maybe they also have the papers,
so they can travel back and forth in Europe. These are the women that young women in Edostate aspire to, not to become like them, but to have the same amount of income that they
have, so ‘confident agents’ are women who have been in Europe for a long time and feel thatthey have either reached their goals or learnt to master the situation.
There is still another category: the new group of minors that we have all talked about, whichis part of this research project that I just mentioned. We are looking into the backgrounds ofthe many minors that arrive.
Return and reintegration. Benin City is changing and I have touched on it. While it was amigration hub for the past 10-20 years, it is increasingly becoming a deportation hub. It is aplace where many of the migrants that return will go to either because they are from there or
because it is considered a place where there might be a job or an opportunity within the
migration facilitation, trafficking, and smuggling industries.
I have primarily talked about the women, but several of the Nigerian men who are deported
back to Nigeria are convicted of selling drugs in Europe. They are sent out much faster thanthe Nigerian women that are involved in prostitution, because we have to consider whether
they are victims of trafficking. Rarely do we consider how selling drugs can also be a part oftrafficking networks. They are often sent out of the country back to Nigeria, and we do see
signs of continuous transnational crime and involvement in drugs among some of thedeportees. So we have just deported the problem of drugs, so to speak. We have to look atthese transnational connections all the time. That is something that we have seen in the US
context as well, where there is a large number of deportations of drug sellers and gangmembers back to the Dominican Republic and Mexico City. We see this rise in crime in thesedeportation hubs. What that kind of insecurity does for women who then want to leave anunsafe place is something that we are also trying to look into. It is quite complex.
I also wanted to draw attention to return assistance marketing. In return assistance posters
you see a neat little family - mother, father and child - going back to their nice little house.
That is not how return is in Nigeria. Of course, often it is women who are sent back on theirown leaving here the children they have. I have several women in my research that have left
their children behind, not mentioning to anyone that they have a child if the child was notregistered, or leaving the child with family members in Italy and Spain. They are returned to
Nigeria and they hope to get back to their child at some point, fighting for many years in Edostate or in Nigeria to come back to the child that they left behind in Europe.
How do the assistance return programs work? What about re-trafficking and the stigma ofmany of the women who have been involved in trafficking and in the sex industry in Europe?
What do they experience when they are sent back? As many of you know, in some European
countries, you cannot stay even though you have been identified as a victim of trafficking of54 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

human beings. You will have a protection period and then you will be sent back to Nigeria. In
terms of assisted return, some of the women have opened small shops with the assisted
return money from IOM: small grocery stores and often hairdressing [salons]. I know that for
the last couple of years the assisted return programs are developing, so I am not going to talkabout all the recent new initiatives.
For many of them, these projects worked for 3 or 6 months or even 1 year, but after that wewould say that when we compare those who are returned as unidentified irregular migrants,
with those who have been identified and are under the assisted voluntary return program, it
is very few for which we can see a difference, because of the difficulties of living and having alife in Benin City if you have been living several years in Europe. Maybe you return with a littlesocial network or you do not have any awareness of the market that you are involved in. You
may experience a lot of stigma because of the job that you have been involved in. I hope thatthe programs are more sustainable now.
Maybe I should just mention one thing regarding the violence which I think is quite important.
When we return the women, I am often asked whether we are returning them directly into
the arms of the traffickers. That certainly happens, but I would say that all the women that I
have followed have experienced severe forms of violence upon their return to Nigeria. It was
not necessarily from the traffickers; it was from being vulnerable because of all the things thatthey had experienced while they were in Europe and that they had to recover from. Even
though they had some assistance from NGOs, still they had to recover from all these traumatic
experiences.
There were still many of them expected to take care of their family. As regards the moneythat they have when they return, if they do not have a family house to get back to, which
many of them did not, they have to rent a small room in the outskirts of Benin City. It is very
unsafe for a single woman to live there with or without your children. They would also
experience very violent armed robberies of their re-integration shops because they might be
the only one in that area who had money to open a shop. We have to look at the violence thatthe women experience not as something that is only stemming from their relationship withthe traffickers but also from the multiple other sides that make women vulnerable. How toseek protection from crime in Nigeria is certainly something we have to talk much more about.
Re-trafficking - Many of the women either want to go back to Europe or are forced to go backto Europe because they still have the debt. If they are returned before the debt is paid back,the madams or the traffickers will ask or force them to go back, maybe not after three months,
six months or one year. Several will leave after one or two years. Whether it is re-migration
or re-trafficking is often a very complex issue to discuss, but they would enter the sex industry
again.
We have also talked about awareness campaigns [e.g. movies produced by internationalorganisations or foreign governments]. I am not opposed to these awareness campaigns, but
I will just say that they have been there for 10-15 years and we have never seen as many
Nigerian women arriving in Europe as we do now. Awareness campaigns are not an answer.
It is not so much the dangerous travelling through the Sahara desert or Libya: they watch CNN
so they know what is going on. The danger is in the belief that you will be the one who escapes
those dangers. Therefore, I would say that it is on a much deeper level that we have to address
this, rather than through Hollywood films.
The other thing is the awareness of what is going on in Europe. What we could address moreis the fact that you cannot get papers, how difficult it is to get asylum, and how difficult is toget access to health care. For those who are in a severe trafficking situation, when they are inEurope, they might be in situations where the trafficker or the madam is their only point ofcontact, so what would you do in that situation?

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 55

[We should] address much more clearly, really, the everyday concerns of the women, like
where to stay. We have women in Copenhagen who are living in 4-5 different places movingaround all the time. Some of them are living in the streets. Having all this information would
not prevent everynyone, though it might prevent some. The recession that we see now in
Nigeria, and the way that the migration and the trafficking is so well-organised make it reallydifficult to hinder that, using this kind of campaigns. We know that [applies] not only to
Nigeria; there have been awareness campaigns in multiple countries throughout the world.
New tendencies and what I believe are overlooked issues: I know from my migrationcolleagues that Nigerian women are involved in the sex industry in China, the Middle East,and in sex tourism destinations in Thailand and South America. We see a re-routing of thetrafficking routes that we, in the European context, should be very focussed on. We have tolook at what happens elsewhere, in particular if we work internationally. Why is thishappening? You talked a lot about reducing the demand, which I think is an important
discussion, but what seems to regulate this is that these women are now re-routing to otherplaces not because of a reduction of the demand. That does not necessarily reduce thenumbers here. What we see is that it is becoming so difficult to come to Europe that some
women prefer to travel elsewhere. Then they are just as vulnerable in other places. It needs
a lot of cooperation with international partners in order to address what happens to thewomen, and of course who can say that? This is a European context but still, in a global
perspective, we have to pay attention to this.
I also think that we have to look into the fact that some of the women will say that, and I knowthat that is quite controversial, they prefer to be trafficked than to be smuggled. Let me
explain why they say that. That is because when you are someone’s investment, the traffickers
hope that you will pay back the money and exploit you, so they cannot afford that you drownin the Mediterranean. They would say that when they would just be smuggled they hope that
their involvement with the trafficker will protect them at a later stage, which is obviously not
the case. However we have to understand the rationality between just being smuggled andentering into this kind of contracts and why it is that women might think that that would offer
them any kind of protection, even though we know that that is not the case.
We have to pay more attention to the connection between trafficking and debt. Even though
we have talked about it for many years, I still think that we talked way too little about it, andhow it’s possible to exploit people that owe you money. We see younger migrants anddiscounted journeys. I think that that is a clear warning sign. One thing is the recession in
Nigeria but the other thing, discounted journeys, it’s because at times the high level of debt,
EUR 60-70,000, had prevented some to leave, as they would say, ‘That’s just too much, I would
never be able to repay that’. Some of them would not really understand how many years it
would take them to repay that. They would not pawn their family house or ancestral landbecause of [such an] amount of money, but when we see discounted prices; we have to really
pay attention to that, because it means a new development in the market. We always have to
pay attention to the political economy behind this.
Violence upon returning is not necessarily stemming from traffickers. The violence that theyexperience from all other kind of actors is just as serious. We should not put a hierarchy, thatthe violence you experience from traffickers is worse than other types of violence. Violence isviolence.
We also have to pay more attention to the exploitation and the trafficking that occurs duringtransit, because the transit periods have prolonged in the past years in Libya, which also
explains many of the pregnancies that we see. The women are waiting much longer in transit
in Libya before they cross, and the situation in Libya certainly makes the women much more
vulnerable while they are there.

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Discussion[Question] 1) Do women have a stigma when they go back after they have been trafficked– especially women with children, born after prostitution?
2) What are the roles of families when a woman decides to travel to Europe in a trafficking
organization?
3) what roles do churches, like Pentecostal churches have in encouraging victims of
trafficking to travel?
[Plambech] 1) Regarding the stigma, in terms of finding a livelihood opportunity afterwards,
most of the women’s families, those that have a close relationship with their mother, would
know what kind of job she had in Europe. It is not that no one is aware... Otherwise, she would
try to keep it a public secret. Many of them sometimes mentioned feeling that it is more
stigmatising to be returned and deported than to be one who has worked in the sex industry,
because you are a failed migrant and they have to live with that stigma as well. It’s a double
stigma. Some of the women mentioned that the kind of livelihood opportunities that they feelare available to them because of this stigma are things like selling water at the market orwalking around selling water or small snacks, because they do not have to interact so muchwith their clients. Whereas opening a business where you are located in a specific place makes
you much vulnerable to accusations: ‘Oh, you are a former prostitute. You are a deportee…’.
They are also thinking about how to place themselves in a way where their livelihood cancontinue even though they would suffer from the stigma. We have to pay attention to therelationship between stigma and real livelihood opportunities when women are returned,
because some of the women have faced a lot of judgements and accusations of being involved
in sex [industry]. People would say, ‘Do not go to that room. She is one of the cheap ladies’,or other kind of things which really damage their livelihood opportunities. We cannot ignore
that.
2) With regards to family involvement, it is very mixed. The idea that families are selling theirdaughters, I have heard that, but it is much more complex in the sense that women feelpressured to be involved in it, but it is not necessarily selling [them] and she feels she is the
only one that the family hope will be able to take on this journey and manage to get to Europe.
The families are involved, but there are also quite a lot of cases where the family is not
involved at all, in particular among the young women who are not leaving children behind in
Edo State that their mothers would have to take care of so that she would have to say, I am
leaving my children here and I am leaving the country… the young women would often not
say anything, they hope to call later when they arrive in Libya or Italy and say, I am here now.
They know that their parents would prevent them from travelling, as they know it isdangerous. Therefore, it is both, both pushing but also preventing.
You mentioned the children. In most of the cases that I am aware of, when the children areborn here, they do not bring them back to Nigeria. They would leave them here, because they
think it is a better future for the child to be left in Europe. And then she will suffer from thereturn, hoping to come back to Europe at some point. One of the women I worked a lot withtried three times to cross the Sahara desert to go to her son in Madrid. They try, they areparenting over the phone, talking with their friends that… some of them can leave them withfamily members who are already here, but some of them have to leave them with very loose
contacts, where 5-10 children are being taken care of by one woman while they go to work in
the red-light district at night, and that would also be the case if she is returned. Every time weare in return processes, we really have to ask if they have children here that they may havenot said anything about or things like that.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 57

3) The role of the churches… it is not something that I have worked a lot with. When thewomen return, that is a place they would go to seek answers in terms of why they werereturned, why they failed in being in Europe and why the madam or the traffickers deceived
them, they do seek different kinds of answers. I know that there have been several
accusations, it has not been part of my work but I am sure it exists, where priests and pastors
and also the shrines are involved in the trafficking industry. The juju priests are paid to makethis kind of oaths. We cannot separate this from the political economy or trafficking as a job
market. I know it is controversial but that is how it is: they earn a lot of money on making
these oaths and the churches do as well.
[Question] Social stigma for people that return to Nigeria. Do you think the social stigma is
so intense that it can qualify as individual persecution and marginalisation and impossibilityof being included in the labour market in their own country so that they might possibly be
victims of re-trafficking? Do you think it can be a reason to be considered as personal
persecution for this people that return to Nigeria?
[Plambech] Yes, I do think it should be considered as something you should be protected from.
The stigma of prostitution and being a returnee should [receive] much more concern and howthat is connected with livelihood. We see that many either want to or are forced to be retrafficked, and then we have not really solved the women’s situation. Not only the stigma but
as I also mentioned the violence. It is very terrible violence that some of the women havebeen exposed to after arriving in Nigeria. On the second point, just to clarify, there are very
few women that have that level of success, most of them do not have that at all. The few areoften the madams, those who have been many years in Europe, and they have a permanent
residency, they can travel back and forth, they have paid back their debt… but even though
you only have one in the neighbourhood, that is the one that you could aspire to or hope to.
It is not that we have many Nigerian women living in Benin City or around Edo State which are
hugely successful, not at all. It is very few, most of them are not able to repay their debt andto do the other things that they hoped to do with their travel to Europe.
[Question] Are there different profiles of men migrating to Europe, are their drivers very
different from women or not?
[Plambech] They are not very different. It is primarily about economy, employment, conflict;
it is many of the same reasons but there is an increased number of women breadwinners.
Because of such a high unemployment rate among young men, men cannot take care of thefamilies so women have increasingly become the breadwinners of the family. So many of thewomen that we meet in Europe are either breadwinners of their own families, so they havechildren that they leave behind, or they are young women who are leaving Nigeria in order totake care of their families. Therefore, the trend that I mentioned starts even before they leave
Nigeria. The women that I have worked with would often say, ‘I left because there was no
man in our family to take care of us’, either because he died or because he was unemployed
or because he travelled elsewhere or just did not take care of the family. So the dynamics thatmake women leave are also the dynamics that make it difficult for men to take care of theirfamilies.
Often when we talk about women’s migration we should talk much more about the difficulties
of men taking care of their families but we always pay attention to what we could do about
the women, but that is certainly one dynamic. Then when they come to Europe, as you alsomentioned, we have seen many more of the Nigerian men who are convicted of drug selling,whereas women are involved in sex work. So there certainly a difference in what kind of
informal labour they engage in when they come to Europe.
[Makanjuola] Generally I see that across Nigeria, Edo men are oftentimes considered very
lazy. They want money but often they do not want to do any work. So it is very easy to58 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

encounter men, who are already living in Italy and have the resources to bring them over, who
say to them: ‘You have come over, you work for me for 2-3-4 years to pay me back all themoney that I used to bring you here.’
We also rather deny the fact - I spoke with a couple of people in that state - that just as wehave seen women in the sex trade, it is a new thing for men to get into the sex trade too.
Many would come from those regions, especially Benin. They sell sex when they get to Europe
because they would feel that for them getting involved in cocaine or hard drugs or all otherkinds of criminal offences might be too much for them to bear. They would prefer to get into
the sex trade for a certain period of a year or two, to repay back the person. You can hardly
speak to any family in Edo state, no matter how high profile or high class they might look, who
do not have somebody in their family who is involved in this migration. It is usually thebreadwinner most of the time. It could be a woman, it could be a man. If that person is goingabroad and they do not have the resources, the entire family can pull the resources together
to then push the person to go abroad. Therefore, what I would like to say is that those persons
ensure that other people get out, even when that person gets to Italy or in other parts ofEurope and what they engage in is sex trade or drugs. The other people that come after themalso have the likelihood of engaging in the same transactional markets if that is what they feelmight give them faster resources. However, Edo men are generally considered to be quite lazyand the women are more on the higher side... looking after their house, their money and allof that… Women from Edo and Calabar, which is Cross River specifically, are considered to bevery hard-working and they would do anything actually to keep their household in order.
[Question] What is the number of female-headed households in Edo state. Is it higher incomparison to other states in Nigeria?
[Makanjuola] There is no statistic nationally saying how many households are headed by
women, but if I could just speak from my own ties with Edo state and my experience growing
up within that environment, I can say that all my mother’s family and everybody I grew up
with within that environment were women who were either single parents or the first female
child and had the responsibility of raising the family. Those who could not go abroad to engage
in whatever kind of transaction had to look for wealthy men within the country to marry, andthey did not mind being the ninth or tenth or eleventh wife as long as he had the money totake care of the family. So there is a lot of burden on many Edo women, not just Edo women,
but Edo women are constantly proving that they… they also enter into a lot of trade … I grew
up in an environment where my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my own mother,
did a lot of trade. They moved across the country from Edo to the east and to the south aswell. They moved between a lot of states doing different kinds of trade. They come to theSouth West, to Lagos, and engage in all kinds of trade, all kinds of things as a means of survival,
because they have people who are dependent on them back home.
But apart from that, many of them do not even move outside of Nigeria. There is a wellestablished sex trade space for people in Edo state. Sex is very well sold in Edo state; I mean
it just depends on how well it is sold. It is not like what you see in Bangkok, where you walk ina street in Bangkok and they call you ‘Ponshu, ponshu’. You would never get to see that in
Edo, but there is a clique, a group of people called ‘run’, who are not so much ‘commercial
sex workers’ but they sell sex in another form. They have their daily jobs, their average jobs,
they might work in a bank, they might be teachers ... but they still sell sex in a very professional
way to people who have the money and the resources. It is about power, it is about money
and about the ability to earn more money other than the income that they have. They do notconsider themselves as people who sell sex or who want to sell sex. Such people too will cometo Italy, they can even migrate easily but they might not be part of these people you see atnight on the streets of Napoli or anywhere they stay within Italy. They have their own
clientele; they are very professional and have a very well-organised system. So it comes in

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 59

different classes and in different ways, and such women would look down on those other
women who often live there as plain sex workers or who are forced into the sex trade
generally. So women within that state are generally considered very keen on their household
while men, like I said, are mostly considered quite lazy.
I think one other thing we have also not looked at within Edo state is the issue of education.
What is the level of education and exposure of women and men within those states? What is
the average qualification you come across in those states? The ones I come across are reallyquite dedicated, they understand this issue. If you look at many of the women who are being
passed across North Africa or to another part of the country, they are women who are just attheir early age, and they are probably in secondary school or did not finish secondary school,
and went into business or trade. Therefore, there are several dynamics that play around,compared to women from South West or women from the east like Imo. So education has arole to play. There are some parts of the country where it has been considered that women
prefer to be well-educated, like Imo state for example. Many women from Imo state take a
lot of pride in education, you see women in Imo state wanting to attain high political offices
like governor, senator, bank manager, so education has a whole lot of dynamics to play aroundthese issues. It is not as easy to convince an Imo state woman to go into prostitution in theway that it is for an Edo woman.

60 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

The situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual (LGB) in Nigeria
Olumide Femi Makanjuola, Executive Director, TIERs (The Initiative for
Equal Rights), Nigeria
I will start with the background of TIERs - The Initiative for Equal Rights -, which is theorganisation I work with. TIERs was founded as a response to HIV and human rights
discrimination of LGB persons in Nigeria in 2005. In 2005, it was just a group of friends whojust wanted to respond to a certain attack.
Most importantly, at that point there was a huge lack of knowledge about HIV prevention formen who had sex with men, especially gay men, both those who identified themselves as gay
men and those who just had sex with men and did not want themselves identified as gay men.
Gay men or men who had sex with men felt that they could not contract HIV through anal sex.
The first research in Nigeria that specifically focused on HIV prevention for “men who had sex
with men” (MSM) was conducted in 2006, and that was the beginning and genesis of LGBT
conversation in a public space in Nigeria. I remember, just before that, there was an ICASA(International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa) Conference, and Nigeria was the host in
2006. Usually everywhere across the continent in Africa where that conference is hosted,
there is a pre-conference for MSM and HIV. There was one in Abuja at that time too, and theformer president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who was the president at the time, felt embarrassedby the show of ‘Men who have sex with men’ pre-conference in Nigeria and was quite upset.
I remember within 24 hours he had ordered his former Chief of Staff to work with the National
Assembly to draft a law that was going to curb homosexuality in Nigeria. That was the genesisof whatever happened in 2014.
Before I take you too deep into that, TIERs as an organisation is based in Lagos, Nigeria. Our
genesis of work as an organisation started in 2005, and even though we are based in Lagos,
Nigeria, we worked across the Anglophone West Africa sub-region. We are currently working
in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and we did a bit of work in Gambia too. We only stopped
in Gambia during the lifetime of Yahya Jammeh and his many threats to homosexuality, but
now we might go back.
Some of the services provided by TIERs include legal support, HIV prevention, alternative
narrative, capacity-building and structure of funding within the West African sub-region. The
West Africa sub-region has one of the lowest amounts of funding when it comes to workwithin the LGBT human rights. Therefore, one of the goals of TIER is to highlight theimportance of investment that needs to go into human rights of LGBT persons in West Africa,
particularly Nigeria and as regards the role Nigeria plays in human rights of LGBT persons
within the region, but also across the continent in Africa. We are close with different
organisations that include the International Centre for Advocacy on Rights to Health, theInternational Centre for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights, the Women’s Health andEqual Rights Initiative, Queer Alliance, and other organisations in Nigeria. We are considered
one of the leading LGBT organisations in Anglophone West Africa, and that might be as a resultof our growth in the last 12 years.
I am going to start with the general legislation and what the legal environment currently looks
like in Nigeria for LGB persons.
Before the signing of the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) there was not asystem law. People often forget that, and keep thinking that the genesis of hate, violence or

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 61

promotion of hate towards LGB started in 2014 when that law was signed by former President
Goodluck Jonathan.
There is a criminal penal code under Sections 284, 405 and 214, 215, 217 both in the criminal
court and in some parts of the north where Sharia law has been practiced: all existing law that
focuses on sodomy.
Even though they do not specifically focus on men, they focus on sodomy and everything else
related to carnal knowledge and anal sex. The law was already silent even though it was a lawthat was inherited from the British Empire, but it was still in existence. A lot of people werearrested and charged under this law, not even as much as under the SSMPA.
In 2014, the Nigerian President signed the law that criminalised same sex marriage. The way
they titled that law was clearly to criminalise same sex marriage. There were sections of that
law that criminalised ‘organisation’, ‘assembly’, ‘registration’, and ‘gathering’. There weresections of the law that criminalised ‘aiding’ and ‘abetting’ and ‘supporting’, and this extends
to social organisations like TIERs and to persons like myself. For example, for me, as a person
who works with TIER, it means that I could get 10 years imprisonment for the work around
LGBT, and I could get 14 years for being gay. In total, I am entitled to 24 years imprisonment
under that law, should I be arrested and charged under the SSMPA.
There is also the question of how do you get to arrest somebody who is gay when there is noclear evidence. What is criminalised in Nigeria – this confuses people a lot - is not the identity,
it is the act. The identities are not criminalised, whether in the criminal penal code or in the
new law. It is just the act that is criminalised and for you to be caught in the act they musthave been an invasion of privacy, were that from a state actor or a non-state actor.
The law also prohibits gay clubs society. There are however the questions of ‘What is asociety?’, ‘What is a club?’, ‘What is considered a society? Is it a gathering of three-six men?
What is considered a meeting?’ In Nigeria there are meetings called by men only; there aremeetings that are called by women only. These are generally misinterpreted by many of thestate actors. There are also issues of how such law could become a tool in the hands of state
actors as a form of blackmail and extorts.
There is a general understanding within the Nigerian police and even though ‘bail is free’ or‘the police is your friend’, some things are becoming tools in the hands of Nigerian police, andI think one of them is the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act 2014, where people get arrested
based on suspicion and they are forced to pay an average of $ 200 to $ 1 000 in bribes/bails. I
have worked on cases where people have had to pay as much as $ 1 000 to bail, since they
did not want their parents to know yet or they did not want to be publicly outed.
It is also a society where an arrest of a gay man is seen as an achievement. When police arresta gay man or a lesbian woman or a bisexual man or woman, they parade them in thenewspaper and on TV or the government releases a statement saying, ‘We’ve arrested a groupof gay men’.
Often people bow down to paying their way out, to avoid being outed. How you pay your way
out comes in different forms: it could be paying to the police; or paying blackmail to people
who are aware of your sexual orientation within your area.
There is also a problem with the law: if you are charged under the new law, it is only the highcourt that can actually attend to the matter. It means that all the minor/small courts or lower
courts cannot actually attend to the issue if you are charged under the 2014 SSMPA. In case
you are charged with sexual charges, you would be referred to a higher court.
To understand how the Nigerian judiciary system works, this means you might be for five toten-eleven years without a hearing or without even getting any attention to your case. The

62 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

interesting part of it is that of all the cases that we have been documenting since 2014 nosingle person has been charged under this law.
However, this law has been used as a form of arrest, but when the charges are presented,
they are all under the criminal penal court. For example, just about three weeks ago, 53 men
were arrested in Zaria, Kaduna state, for having an all-men party; the media claimed it to bea gay wedding. The case is still in court; we realised it was celebrating a birthday celebration,with all his other friends and they were charged with homosexuality, public indecency,
unlawful gathering and other senseless charges.
The implementation of the law itself has not seen the light of day, but what we have seen is
the actual implementation of existing laws, triggered by the new law signed by the former
president. People have been arrested and charged under the existing criminal penal code, andLGBT persons who fear being outed to their family have often surrendered to all kinds ofblackmail from state actors.
State actors who often are expected to protect individuals within the country are also part ofthe people who validated this crime. We have seen cases where people meet randomly online.
The only place gay people or bisexual men or women meet is through social networks andapps like Grindr, Romeo, Manjam, and all those social networks that are often global. People
go on these websites and register but sometimes they are not gay or lesbian. They meet
people and set them up, and then blackmail them and extort money and their valuables. Most
times these people go to the police to report that they have been blackmailed. You would
expect that if somebody is blackmailed, the police should focus on the issue of blackmail, but
sadly, the police often turn the case around and focus on the sexual orientation and gender
identity, and instead arrest those who came to report the case themselves.
There is disconnection on how reporting of the cases is done at the state level. People do notwant to report their cases to the police. They do not want the police to get involved. We have
had cases where the police thought that contacting a human rights organisation is not helpful
to them because they would not get more money, but instead they contacted the family of
the people that had been arrested to get more money from the family. The family often wantto ‘kill’ the case because they feel that it is an embarrassment to them and their family to havea son or daughter who’s gay, bisexual, or lesbian.
The majority of the human right violations experienced by LGBT persons are brought both bystate and non-state actors, but we have seen an increase from non-state actors in Nigeria.
This has an influence on the cultural and religious views, which stem from issues of sexuality
and orientation. There is a general lack of and poor knowledge of sexual orientation andgender identity across Nigeria, which goes beyond the LGBT rights-related issues.
The typology of the violations that we have seen ranges from blackmail, unlawful arrest,
extortion, mob attacks, invasion of privacy and torture, to mention but a few. We have seencases where people are stopped and searched. Those of you who have been to Nigeria, I am
sure you have seen police on the street in many parts of Nigeria who do ‘stop and search’.
One of the things that the policemen doing ‘stop and search’ do is that they would actually go
into your mobile phone to read your email or Facebook inbox messages, and read yourpersonal WhatsApp messages. Should they see any messages related to same-sex
relationships you would be arrested. There have been many cases.
At one point in 2016, we had to write to the Inspector General [IG] of the Police on thecontinuous harassment of mobile phone search of citizens at large. Even though the IG did
give an instruction that there was no law that required the police to search your mobile phone,
except if there was a police warrant, this in fact still happens. Many people have been arrested
by police just for generally exhibiting feminine attributes publicly, maybe throwing of hands

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 63

or speaking ‘like a woman’, even though I do not understand how women speak or walk likea woman. One of the most bizarre cases I have seen was a case in 2014 where a gay wasarrested for wearing pink, and the police said to him that pink is meant for women not formen, and therefore if you are wearing pink you must be gay. These are the undertones of agenerally broken down system. Whether we agree or not, this is a sorry state, both for LGBTand for non-LGBT.
Often you come across people who are exploiting each other as a means of survival. I always
personally feel that the police exploit the LGBT issue for money. They are a reflection of thebroken down system of society, of people who are not properly taken care of. They have poor
salaries, poor maintenance, and a poor welfare system for them, so they turn into vultures
and they ‘vulture’ on the citizens they are supposed to protect. You see that reflection within
the society.
The violations occur or are based on the real or perceived sexual orientation. Of all the people
that have been arrested, none of them have been caught in the act. We have never had a casewhere anyone has been caught in a sexual act, so it is often based on suspicion that they are
gay or lesbian.
If we look at the typology of the cases (see the graphic illustration from our 2016 Human Right
Violation Report) you can see unlawful threats, unlawful detention, arrest. Since 2015, westarted publishing a Human Right Violation Report of those who were willing to come forth toreport cases. The cases you see are not a reflection of all the cases across Nigeria, but asnapshot of what is happening among those who have reported. Many people often do notreport these cases.
In 2016, we received cases from a total number of 16 states. A total number of 232 persons
were involved in the violations, 152 cases, and in terms of gender, we had 28 females and 129
males. People often ask me why issues of bisexual or lesbian women are often silent in Nigeria
and you get to hear more about gay men issues. I think we have to realise the culture of silenceand how women are repressed within the Nigerian society. Being a woman is already an issue;
being a lesbian woman is a second issue to deal with in a country like Nigeria. Women often
face much more marriage pressure than men do, and women are considered secondary tomen. In addition, many lesbian women within Nigeria would just prefer to keep quiet because
they are used to a culture of silence, of not talking, so often they get married to their partnerand just stay in whatever relationship they still want to continue.
You also see that of all the cases that we documented, we had only 37 state actors, we had
107 non-state actors, and we had 16 with both state and non-state actors. Many non-state
actors were just cases that were reported in the area: for instance, you have a neighbour who
is nosey, very suspicious of every person coming in. It is also an issue of class, of economic
power. If you have the resources to live in an area where you can feel safe to an extent, you
might feel ok, but in reality, how many gay men or lesbian women or bisexual men or women
have that kind of resources? They are part of a system that is already broken. People do nothave the resources, so this is also the reality of what we see every day.
Accommodation is a general problem for everybody as much as it is for an LGBT person. Whenyou have an LGBT person being thrown out of the house by their family, they are in the street
like every other child living in the street, but what we should not forget is that the main
purpose why they are in the street is because of their sexual orientation. They might havebeen attacked because of their sexual orientation.
Violence and violation is a reality for many people in Nigeria, but we should not forget thatthe reason why LGBT people are exposed to violence is a result of their sexual orientation and64 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

gender identity. That is very important, so that whenever we come across these cases you
know that it is not part of the normal violence that is common within the country.
This [illustration] gives you the states where we have seen the cases [Abia, Abuja, Akwa Ibom,
Anambra, Bayelsa, Benue, Delta, Ebonyi, Edo, Enugu, Imo, Lagos, Nasarawa, Rivers, Oyo,Ogun, Plateau] . The most interesting part is that of all the violations that have been
documented publicly, South South continues to be very high in the amount of violations andthere are many things that makes that happen especially in Rivers state. Rivers state is quite
volatile, not just because of LGBT people but because it is also an environment that is facing
a lot of unrest politically. You constantly see one problem or the other happening in Rivers
state. There are many dramas in Rivers state. The violence is high and you see the reflection
on LGBT people. We have seen a lot of highly documented cases of violence against LGBT
persons in Rivers state.
All of the states mentioned are states where people have reported cases to us: South South5, North Central 4, South East 5, and South West 3. For some reason, South West state often
records the lowest form of violations. I think it is as a result of the trade that goes on withinthat state, and it being a business hub for West Africa and for a lot of things within the country.
It is quite commercial compared to other states within the country in the South East, South
Central and the South South. If you look at the numbers, Rivers state has 40, the highest of all
the states.
I am not sure if you can still find the video online, – but just after the law was signed in 2014,
two men were caught in Rivers state and were made to have sex publicly, they were filmed
and that video circulated across Nigeria. This is a minor example of the cases you come acrossRivers state, where people are paraded and recorded and the videos are circulated across thecountry.
Societal perception and discrimination. The treatment by state and non-state actors remains
hostile towards LGBT persons. This is reflected through human rights violations documented
by LGBT organisations. Like I said, a lot of the cases are cases in which nobody has been caught
in the act. We have never had the case where police have come out publicly or someone said,‘I have been caught in the act’. It has all been based on perception.
LGBT persons have been subject of harassment by individuals and by family, but there werealso cases where family members themselves have blackmailed people within their family
because they knew they were gay or suspected them of being gay. Often, it is an initiative forcommercial gain: ‘I am not going to tell anybody but you have got to pay me an equivalent of$500 and nobody is going to hear about this’, or they have something they hold on to on theirfamily member. Therefore, there are a lot of commercial transactions that go on as a result of
not being outed. People fear being outed when they are not ready, not because they do notwant to be outed, or not because they do not want to come out with their family. However,they fear the social repercussions that they will have to face from family, because when thefamily who is supposed to serve as your immediate support system fails you, then you cannot
rely on the society or on the system itself, so it becomes a problem. Therefore, people face
three layers of problems: the family will fail you, society will fail you, and the system, the state,
will fail you.
Political actors and policy makers who could have created an enabling environment for LGBT
persons continue to be the people who would see the issue of homosexuality as a tool forpolitical gain. You only get to hear about the issue of homosexuality from government
agencies towards election time.
The importance of sexuality towards political gains and towards election - we are now justtwo years away from another election in Nigeria, and we have begun to see many government

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officials make statements about homosexuality, because unfortunately that is the one
common thing every Nigerian seems to agree on across Nigeria. I think the political class uses
things to distract people and homosexuality is one of them. Therefore, you have policy makers
or people seeking political office who use the issue of homosexuality as a promise in theircampaign, saying ‘I will eradicate homosexuals. I will deal with all the uncultured and withthings that are not part of our culture.’ I do not think that I need to overemphasize how acrossthe African continent the issue of sexuality, specifically homosexuality, is seen as a Western
import. I think that Nigeria is one of counties that see it as such, but we also must not forgetthe role that western religious bodies whether from Europe or from North America play inthis narrative and the investment that they put into emphasizing such narrative in countries
like Nigeria, Uganda and other places alike.
Recently we went into partnership with NOIPoll, a polling company. They started conducting
polls independently on their own around the issue of LGBTI rights. Actually, they started withsame sex marriage in 2013, but we felt that it was good to engage them and structure thequestions beyond just same-sex marriage, because we believe and we realised that same-sex
marriage is not actually the issue. What we are yet to discuss is the ability of people to be
human and to enjoy their free humanness without having any limitations as a result of sexual
orientation.
We commissioned NOIPoll in 2015 and then again in 2017. The 2015 report can be found on
our website, or you can just google ‘NOIPoll LGBT Survey’ 5. In the 2017 report, which was
released on the 17th May, only 13% of Nigerians surveyed said they would accept a family
member being homosexual compared with 11% in 2015. In 2015 we had 11%, saying theywould accept family members who were homosexuals but that went a bit higher to 13%.
However, it is still a shame that in a country of 18 million only 13% would accept a family
member that is gay. You can see it by gender nationwide, age group and geopolitical zone.
Among the Nigerians surveyed, 39% accepted that lesbian, gay and bisexual Nigerians haveequal rights to public health care, housing and education, which is a 9% increase from 2015
when it was 30%. Now, this is a clear way to understand how issues of human rights areperceived when it comes to LGBT. I honestly feel quite disappointed when we have to debate
public health, access to housing, education and ordinary citizen’s human rights. It goes toshow that a lot of Nigerians feel that LGBT people do not have rights to these things.
In the reports that you can download from the website, 90% of Nigerians believe Nigeria
would be in better place without LGBT people, which was also a reflection of a deeper lack ofknowledge because LGBT people are not the ones giving bad roads, bad economy, siphoning
public funds. This goes to show how the issue of homosexuality and sexual identity has
continued to be a tool for political gain within Nigeria.
Perception: LGBT persons are constantly arrested by police. Reports from LGBT organizations
and media have shown this. Often, the arrest is based on perceived sexual orientation,
depending on the arrest and where it happens. For many reasons, that happens a lot in a city
like Lagos, where you often find people bail themselves out because it is a commercial city.
The police in Lagos are very commercial and they horn it, I like them for that. Once you arearrested as a gay man, all they say to you is, ‘How much do you have? Do you want us to go
to court?’ They know you do not want them to go to court; they are very clear. They knowwhat you fear. They know the things that are of concern to you, so they ask you, ‘Let’s sort

5 TIERS, Survey On Homosexuality Perception In Nigeria, 5 May 2014 (http://theinitiativeforequalrights.org/survey-

on-homosexuality-perception-in-nigeria/).

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this out. I can happily speak to my boss, who will do something about it’. So you start anegotiation.
I remember being on the phone with a police officer and we were negotiating the release ofa young man, I think 21 or 22 years old, and we went down from 200,000 Naira as low as
35,000 Naira. I negotiated the 35,000 Naira and they followed him to the ATM machine,
waited for him to withdraw the money and pay them, and they let him go. So the scene hereis this: even though he had just finished paying them at this junction here, there is a possibility
that by the time he gets to another junction somebody else might arrest him and ask him to
pay another amount of money - like that boy had to pay two times in one day in different
areas, one from the mainland and one of the highlands, two different amounts. One was theequivalent of $200; the other was the equivalent of $120. This happens all the time and people
are aware of it and certainly prepared for it.
Those who cannot do anything or do not have anybody to call, do not have anybody to pay
for them, or do not have any means, those are the cases you end up seeing going to court,
because the police would then want to flag you, and want to make a public parade of them.
Many of the arrests are not charged under the SSMPA 2014. In many cases we come across,the struggle and the fear is beyond the SSMPA that was signed in 2014. As a gay man myself,
before the law, I feared the space where I live. Even after the signing of the law, I fear the
space where I live, so for many LGBT persons the fear is beyond the law and the reality of thelaw. It is more a social, cultural and society-related issue of how you are perceived within thesociety.
One of the things that you also see is arrest and how this makes headlines in the news, likethe arrest I already mentioned of 53 men arrested allegedly for gay marriage. The problem
with the northern states is that about 12 states practice Sharia law, but it so happened that
this particular case was not referred to a Sharia court. We have a lawyer currently working on
the case. They have done the first hearing. They have done the second hearing, and they have
now adjourned to another sitting. The interesting part is many of the boys who were arrested
were between 18 and 22 years old, and for anyone who has ever been to the northern state;
this is a big shame for the boys in the north. I remember that at the last hearing, they were
within the court premises but did not want to show up in court because they did not want tobe identified. They were so ashamed and afraid of what people would do to them.
One of the worst experiences in the north was in Bauchi. It was the case of the Bauchi men in2006 or thereabouts, when we walked out of the court in Bauchi state and were literallystoned by citizens and neighbours living within that court area. So you also have the issue thatwhen people are arrested in the north, many lawyers do not want to take up the case because
they fear the attacks that might come on them as lawyers. They target the lawyers of gay
people and the lawyers defending homosexuality. The ratio of lawyers to population in thenorth is quite low compared to that in the south, South West and South South. Many lawyers
who work in the north would not want to engage in a case as sensitive as this when they havelarger cases in which they make more money or which can give them more publicity.
Verification of claims. Often we have had emails or contacts from LGBT people seeking asylum
in countries across Europe and for a lot of those who contacted us, it is very hard to determine
the level of risk that they face. I personally cannot determine their level of risk. The reality ofLGBT persons in Nigeria differs from person to person, and often people recount theirexperience of having to prove that they are gay, even in countries in Europe.
There is no way anybody can prove they are gay, except if you have sexual intercourse withthe person. Even that does not really say that that individual is gay. There are multiple
complex things that people have to prove if they are persons seeking asylum. Now, for a gay

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man who lives in certain areas in Nigeria your reality might be different. I will make a clear
example. For a gay man living in Benin, I noticed that Benin state is quite volatile towards
homosexuals. Currently we have two cases in court in Benin. One of the cases involves six
young men who were reported by their neighbours ‘How can six men live in one apartment?’.
The other was about two boys who were suspected of dating each other. Those two cases are
currently ongoing in Benin.
When people have the opportunity to leave Nigeria and want to claim asylum, these people
have to constantly prove their level of the risk, their level of sexuality, and how scary it is togo back home. I know there are a lot of people wondering, ‘There are organisations like TIERs’;
people often say ‘You are there. You live there. Why didn’t they attack you?’.
However, you cannot use my reality as a gay man to judge the reality of many other people.
Before I started doing LGBT activism work, I came from a management background, so I
already had a certain level of economic power. It is also important to understand that for me,
living in Nigeria, there are a lot of resources which go into securing my own personal safety. I
cannot live in a house that does not have 24-hour security. Looking at the economic situationof Nigeria, how many LGB persons can afford to live in that kind of an area? I live in the
supposedly highbrow area in Lagos, I live in Lekki, and I have security in my compound, whichis part of the rent agreement. Probably one in every ten gay men have such opportunity or
the luxury to live like that. Still, living in Lekki I am still subjected to some security threats. It
does not totally guarantee my safety. Between October last year and last month, I havereceived email threats once a day from an email address I do not know. The email message isalways, ‘We hope that you have a visa to get out of Nigeria because when we start with you,
you will not know what came on you’.
Receiving such threats, I imagine seeking asylum in a country and having to (1) prove mysexuality, but also having to (2) prove that those emails came from an unknown source. It is ahypocritical system - the fact that you live there does not mean people do not suspect you or
do not check how many visitors come to your house. They see how many male or female
visitors you get. They hear every sound in your house, the conversations and things that
happen in your house. Rich or poor, the level of risk is still high, meaning a gay person could
be lynched, depending on the area where they find themselves.
Verification of claims: One of the best methods for LGBT persons applying for asylum is topresent a letter from a local, trusted LGBT organisation. We have done this many times forpeople who have reached out to us, and we do not only provide this letter because we thinkthey are LGBT, we also do a background check. One thing I want to make clear is that as muchas I care for LGBT persons who are under threat, we must also remember that there arestraight people who would want to use this opportunity as a means of integrating within theEuropean system, which is a reality. That does not mean that everybody you come across thatwants to seek asylum is straight and is pretending to be gay, and they have to prove theirsexual orientation.
One of the things you can do is reach out to the organisation locally and they can help you
find out, do the fact-checking, and trace their history. No matter how discreet you are as agay man, there would be one person you confided in in Nigeria. That person can be family,that person could be a friend, that person could be anybody. Usually when people reach out
to us we say, ‘Is there anybody we can speak to locally?’, and we speak to them, find out who
knows them in their network of friends, try to check. Because of the way that Nigeria is, there
are small pockets or circles of LGBT people. People form small cliques and friendships as aform of engaging and just belonging, in order to have a sense of belonging within the society,so there would always be one person to verify your claim.

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Let me also clarify that you would come across cases where people have not experienced
physical violence, but that does not mean they have not experienced other forms of violence.
Physical violence is not the only thing that can make it unsafe for LGBT people to live in
Nigeria. Just the fear of knowing that you are not accepted within the society is enough. The
fact that, especially for effeminate gay men, you constantly have to present yourself as being
masculine so that you do not face any social abuse or physical attack represents enoughemotional and mental abuse. People handle the issue of mentality differently from eachother: some people have the power and the money to be at peace; other people do not.
The family support system is one of the things that people often have in Nigeria. Families
worry for their own children and what they would face; they would prefer that the child is notgay, so he does not have to go through public humiliation and they do not have to go throughthat themselves.
The return to Nigeria for LGBT people seeking asylum - the fear of going back to a place thatyou left because it was unsafe is enough for you not wanting to return. Often, I have seen
online, I have seen campaigns where people call for persons not to be deported. We need torealise that the more public campaigning goes on for people not to be deported, the more risk
we put them at when going back home. Once somebody’s picture is already online, it iseverywhere in the media. How do you expect such a person to go back home? How do you
expect them to be safe in that kind of environment?
Online you can find the case called Chibuihe Obi, a boy that was kidnapped just about a weekor two ago, just for writing about the reality of queer people in Nigeria. He was not kidnapped
for being gay. He was not kidnapped for being caught ‘in the act’. He was kidnapped for writing
about what it means to be gay in Nigeria on an online journal.
The kidnapper overtook his Facebook page and sent messages to everybody in his contact list,
asking for money, a ransom. Finally he was released late at night on a Monday. In a case likethat of this boy who was kidnapped, and whose case was everywhere in the news, on Linda
Ikeji, BellaNaija…, all the major news outlets, he should have the opportunity to move abroad.
The trauma, the experience of being held captive for three days, is enough reason for not
wanting to go back home, and it is a reality for him. He may not fear that when he goes backhe is going to be attacked, but he still lives in that reality of being attacked, and that is enoughjustification for not wanting to go back home.
He is currently in a safe house. He will stay there for the next 2-3 months, but all he says is ‘I
just want to get out. I do not feel safe. My picture is everywhere. People have seen my picture.
I could be attacked anywhere’. Those kinds of things are valid.
We see people whose pictures are now released online, publicised across online media. We
see that they all have the same amount of fear, and they just feel unsafe being in thatenvironment. Often, when you are deported to a country like Nigeria, you need to have a local
contact who is going to help you, speak to the immigration people… So, immediately after you
land, somebody goes to the gate and picks you up.
Without that, once you are deported you are handed over to the immigration officer thatwants to know why you were deported, what happened, why you were seeking asylum, andmany other questions. The moment that the reason for seeking asylum is found to be theissue of sexual orientation, you would be publicly humiliated. You would be abused, and a lotof the abuse might probably not be something that makes it to the media, but just beingbullied by that immigration officer alone is enough. That is a first-hand experience that you
get in a country where you already have a perception of not wanting to go back to.
It is also important to realise that out of all the LGBT cases you will see, not all are facing
immediate attack or a threat. There are also people who are just tired of the economic

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situation as a gay person, tired of the environment, tired of living in a country where you
cannot be yourself. Based on that reason alone, they just want to relocate.
I have a lot of friends who went to get a Master’s degree in England and other parts of theworld, like the US and Canada, and after having obtained their Master’s degree, they have anexperience living in a country where people recognise your humanness, so they do not want
to go back home. They are happy to live in a society, in a country, for a year or two, where
they feel safe and secure, and where they are not constantly reminded of their sexual
orientation.
It is a place where your sexual orientation is not a tool for blackmail or extortion, so theywould want to live there, after having spent two or three years there. Therefore, sometimes
you also see these realities of people who just want to leave Nigeria for that purpose, andwho do not want to go back, so it is not just because they are under an immediate threat.
All of these are valid fears that we must recognise and we must respect. There is no right orwrong way to be gay. There is no way to show your level of threat. There is no way to provethat if you return you will be killed. There is no way to prove any of those things. However, allare valid.
We can assess all people’s cases, on a case-by-case basis, and find out where they are comingfrom and what their situation back home is. I think that the reality of people who get returned
is not far from those who get returned for trafficking and all of that. They have nothing to fallback to, especially for those who have been in the system for a year or two. They have left
Nigeria. They have left their job and their family.
When they are back to Nigeria, they are back to nothing. They are in the street and they
become extremely vulnerable. Returning people must be done very carefully, and after being
able to examine the entire situation.
You can help limit how many people are returned back home to face further social prejudiceby just contacting local organisations, or by having them contacting a local organisation
themselves. These local organisations can give them a reference letter based on findings andthe information gathered.
Trauma is one of the things that most LGBT people face. People ask me how I survived thetrauma myself after having lived in Nigeria, and I often say to them, ‘It is the only option I
have. I have to get out of town every now and then’. This reality is not the reality of an average
Nigerian.
Many are stuck in Nigeria, dealing with family; especially for gay men who are often
considered as a head of the family, in almost all cultural contexts in Nigeria. There is thepressure of looking after your family members, of getting married. There is a lot of pressure
you are facing from home.
Then there is the pressure related to being gay. You have to face that pressure at work, fromcolleagues who are wondering why at 35 you are not married. You have to face the pressureof neighbours who think, ‘Why is a single man living in a 2- or 3- bedroom flat and he is notmarried?’ You have to face the pressure of people in the neighbourhood who only see men,or who think that you are too girly, or that you are too masculine if you are a woman. All theseare very valid reasons for people to want to seek safety.
Finally, if the risk is high enough, most of the time the person returning home is not safe, so
we have to know what people are running away from. If somebody is running away fromattack, returning them back home is not safe. But they might be running away from familypressure - like the case of the 27-year old girl who was going to be married off in an arranged
marriage. Her family suspected that she was a lesbian and tried to marry her, but she did not

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want to get married. She moved abroad and applied for asylum in Belgium, where her reasons
were not enough as ‘she was not facing any threat’. Decision-makers in the EU have to realisethat it is not only human right defenders that face risks by working on LGBT issues. LGBT
people face the same risks just by being in Nigeria.

Discussion[Question] Would it be possible that TIERs is at Lagos Airport to welcome returned failed
asylum seekers?
[Makanjuola] It is impossible, because an organisation like TIER is not even supposed to be
operating in Nigeria according to the SSMPA. How can we even work with the government toensure that those who are returned are fully integrated back into society? It is difficult.
[Question] I have a question about the Zaria case. The last thing I read was that there werestill four men facing prosecution. I was just wondering if you can give us an update on that.
[Makanjuola] The Zaria case: the initial arrest was 115, but out of the 115, it was only 53 menthat could not pay their way through with the police. Those 53 were the ones who wereoriginally caught but at the moment, out of the 53, the number of those who we have notbeen able to get out is 15. One of the things that our lawyers decided to do is, instead of
waiting and prolonging the trial for those 53, have the court proceeding on the 15 that wewere not able to get out all together, so that we would not have to prolong the trial.
[Question] when I was in Nigeria a couple of months ago I spoke to the Heartland Alliance,
and they said that it is quite a common practice, particularly in the north, for men to cometogether in gatherings like that, and the common term is ‘Ajoh’? Is that right?
[Makanjuola] Yes, it is common practice in the north for men to gather alone and women togather alone, and it is common practice for these kinds of arrests to happen. One of the things
that you would however not see is people from the north having the privilege and theopportunity to go abroad and seek asylum. I think this is due to a complex number of things
generally: education, environment, access to this information, etc. Many times you see people
from the South South, South East and South West having the opportunity to go abroad toeither study or seek asylum, but I have come across very few people from the north who seek
asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Finally, the culture of silence around the issue of sexuality is much more extreme in the north,even though the realities we see in the north. It is something you must not talk about andnever mention. So, even when you have been caught or there is a rumour being passed
around, nobody can talk about it.
[Question] Thank you for highlighting how LGBT people who are not at immediate risk often
have very valid reasons not to be willing to return to Nigeria. I wonder however whether all
LGBT people asking for asylum are fully aware of the legitimate character of their fears, since
my impression is that some people who do have diverse sexual orientation or gender identity
are pushed by the logic of the asylum system to overdo it a bit and maybe invent some security
incidents which in the end are found not totally convincing, casting unduly doubts on theirreason to leave.
Do you have any advice on the issue of exploring beyond and above the immediate reason
for leaving, and whether you could give us some advice on the best interview techniques tobe applied in relation to Nigerian applicants seeking asylum on that basis.
[Makanjuola] From past experience of cases of people I have met, there is the ideology that if
you do not have a very sympathetic or a very violent story to tell, often people do not give theEASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 71

full story, just so that you can believe them. They can see that there is a doubt, that you do
not believe them, that you do not trust them.
We have to create a system for people that passes the message that you do not have to haveexperienced physical violence to seek asylum. People might then be honest when they apply
for asylum. A lot of the cases you see are very much the same cliché: ‘I was beaten, myneighbour knew…’ because they feel that that is the only story that is ‘sellable’ for asylum.
Once you can make them clear from the beginning that they do not need to have experienced
physical attack or physical violence to apply for asylum, that they can have another reason
not to feel safe, whether it is verbal abuse, indirectly, and in many other ways, people would
be honest. The decision to determine whether they are [eligible] is valid. It comes in different
justifications.
I feel that we have to give people the opportunity to be honest - and the only way to do thatis by not quickly judging -, even when there is no evidence of bloodshed, no evidence of hate
mail, no evidence of phone calls. People would go to any length just to prove that and would
go through any means to generate that proof, just to prove that they are not safe. That is not
helpful in many cases you come across, because in between you might miss people who are
actually going through a very traumatic experience at home from their family, and because
they feel that their traumatic experience is not valid for you, they have to lie. Sometimes thetraumatic experience is even more dangerous than the physical violence that people express.
[Question] Do you think that the level of education influences the capacity of sharing yourtrauma with the interviewer during the interview?
[Makanjuola] Yes, the level of education can, but I also feel that for people who seek asylumon the grounds of their sexual orientation, first you have to know where they are coming from.
They are coming with the mindset of ‘I am going to be judged. I’m going to be bullied’. That iswhat they have always known, what they have experienced in their life. So they do not trustyou, and may feel like you might not understand the trauma.
There is also a network of people sharing experiences, so when an asylum case has been
granted, others would ask ‘What story did you give? Why was asylum granted?’ and theanswer would be ‘This is what I had to say.’ Applicants would then think, ‘But I don’t have thisexperience. I have never been beaten; I have never been publicly humiliated. My family
subjecting me to all kinds of pressure and traumatic experiences in the house’. Therefore, they
already have a perception that unless they give [the interviewer] that kind of experience, they
will not be believed. It is very important to understand where they are coming from, especiallythose who are seeking asylum as soon as they arrive. They are fresh and they just came outof a system, an environment and a cultural space where they are constantly bullied andrejected and they think you are not going to be any different from the people they see everyday. It will take time to build a culture of trust with those individual cases. I think that in thisprocess [authorities] feel that people are not being honest. We should give them the chance
to just take their time and let them know that there is no reason for them to lie about violence;
also reassure that the absence of violence does not mean their application will be rejected.
Finally, the major reason why people sometimes do not share their traumatic experience isthat they fear they will be returned to Nigeria. They think that a traumatic experience is notenough to get asylum. The understanding of asylum in Nigeria is that you must be facing aphysical attack to request asylum. That is why almost all the requests are about physical attackand violence. LGBT people come with that understanding that they have to say that they havebeen physically attacked.
[Question] Lagos is, in my opinion, a very cosmopolitan town compared to the rest of Nigeria,
so I believe there are thousands of people that are homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, etc.

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Is there something like an underground scene in Lagos where LGBT people can meet?
[Makanjuola] There used to be many underground scenes in Lagos. I remember when I firstcame out as a gay man, there used to be places where people go to and hang out and there
were specifically gay areas, gay clubs or gay hangouts. However, there was no sign, there wasno advert. There was nothing. I am talking of the early 2000s, 2002-2003. During those years,
there was not so much violence like the one we are seeing now. People now hang out mostly
in their private houses. I can invite ten, fifteen or twenty friends to my house to have a small
party, compared to four-six years ago, when there were pockets of clubs. Some of them were
specifically gay clubs; they were very accommodating of gay people. One of them was
Caliente. They were really close to the highlands. They were quite accommodating of gay
people but somehow something happened and they became very hostile towards gay people.
I would relate that to the Prohibition Law that was signed in 2014, because nobody wanted tobe caught. When the law was signed, everybody was afraid of being caught and being beating,so people were literally segregating themselves. They did not want to be seen with a gay
person, or being seen that gay people are patronizing their business. Therefore, that is what
you have: more underground activities, but very coordinated. Today people use Grindr or
Manjam, and all social sites. You become friends with some of them; and you just meet someof them casually and then you move on, but once your friends are there, you are linked to anunderground network and you become friends. These are the kinds of parties which you see
happen, very, very private and discrete.
[Question] Just a follow-up question on that. Some research on Uganda has shown incidents
where members of the police force have used Grindr or some of these social media outlets
to lure and potentially identify people who may be ‘different’ individuals and then arrest
them. Have you seen similar incidents or cases in Nigeria?
[Makanjuola] Yes, we have, but it is not as much of an issue as it is in Uganda. What we haveseen more of in Nigeria are non-state actors or individuals using those methods to blackmailpeople and then stalk them. You register on Grindr, for example, and you chat with somebody
because it is supposed that everyone who goes on Grindr or Manjam is actually gay or lesbian
or bisexual. So people go on a date and then realise that they are actually being set up. They
are beaten, their funds are collected, they are stripped naked of their items, and sometimes
even raped. We have had a case of a lesbian woman who was raped by seven different men
in one day. People may report or they may move on. One of the security situations that getsto people is when you have people coming to your house or you go to them. In a conflict zone,
the level of risk is different when you travel to them, and especially in an area you do notknow or where you don’t have anybody that you know.
[Question] People from civil society organisations tell me that most of gay people in theircities are more or less limited to an association. Do you think that in Lagos TIERs and theothers can reach most of the gay community people, or do they reach just a few of them?
[Makanjuola] I think the problem is just like in any other part of the world if you are in a city
like London, Brussels and everywhere. Either way you do not have a structured system: youwill never reach out to a gay person, not because you do not want to reach out to them, but
nobody is walking in the streets of the city carrying an ‘I am gay’ sign on their head, so you do
not know who is gay except through media services. In Lagos there is a population of
20 million, and there are many gay people underground. Many gay and bisexual people are
married. I have friends who would never go to parties really publicly, because the moment
they are seen publicly, people can put one or two persons together and say that they mightor could be gay. There are a lot of people who go underground. When they talk to people inassociations like mine or in another part, what they would majorly request is condoms,
lubricants etc. and they would not come to your office to get it, so you have to meet them

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 73

somewhere, or you drive yourself to them and then you move on. When they have somebody
trying to blackmail them, that is when they remember there is a gay organisation in Nigeria.
However, when they do not have problems, people just want to conform, because sometimes
there is a vague ideology, ‘Maybe if I conform, maybe I will just be happy and I might just havepeace of mind’. In my work, I see that people are constantly looking for anything that will givethem peace of mind. If conforming will give them peace of mind although they might not be
deeply happy, they will try to just conform for the sake of acceptance within society. You seethat more commonly in cities like Lagos, Port Harcourt, Abuja and major cities in Nigeria. Thiskind of thing is very common. In all those small pocket states, there are no organisations atall, so they do not even know anybody. They do not have anywhere from where to get
information; they do not know anybody they can speak to and therefore, they just go
underground.
[Question] What crimes are prosecuted by federal police and what crimes are prosecutedby state police? Is homosexuality prosecuted by federal police? Is the high court is a federal
court or is it a state court?
For us this is very important to assess the credibility of the applicant and to establish what
force is involved in prosecution.
[Odiase] We don’t have state police in Nigeria. The Nigeria Police is a Federal Agency with
offices in the States and Local Government Areas. First, the police does not prosecute crimes.
What they do is arrest, investigate and then hand the case over to the Ministry of Justice, butthere is no distinction between state crime and federal crime. A crime is a crime. The police
can initiate the prosecution process at any level. The difference is with respect to which court
the case goes to. If it is a misdemeanour, a magistrate court can start and then it can go on
appeal, to the High Court, Court of Appeal, etc., just like in any other country. As such, there
is no distinction in terms of the powers of the police in the federating units and the police at
the centre.

74 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

Ritual killings, cults and chieftaincy
David Pratten, Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa;
Fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford
I have been asked to discuss three issues today. I will try to deal with them separately though
you will appreciate that they are interconnected and are linked to problematic andcontroversial aspects of Nigerian culture and society. The three issues are:

murder for ritual means,membership of proscribed criminal cults, andconflicts sparked by agitation over traditional leadership positions.

These are topics that you might be forgiven for thinking are ‘traditional’, residual featuresof former, even precolonial cultural practices. But they are in fact always very ‘modern’ –and articulated to contemporary economic and political fears and tensions. Indeed, inrecent years, with the onset of economic recession and rapidly increasing unemployment
figures in Nigeria these issues of crime, cults, and chieftaincy conflict sadly appear to be
assuming a more pronounced position.
I have also been asked if I can orient my comments to address issues of children and youth
too - so I have also included examples on those points where relevant.
My own expertise on these topics is drawn from 20 or more years of working in southern
Nigeria – specifically Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Cross River States. I am a social anthropologist
and my work has focused on histories of violence, the contemporary chieftaincy politics andyouth gangs, cults and vigilantes.
Ritual killings
I will start with the very problematic issue of ritual killing. Here I am going to discuss the
problems faced in interpreting ‘ritual’ killing; questions of definition; prevalence, victims, andpolicing.
I will start with the Adam case – 2005. Is perhaps the most notorious ‘ritual killing’ inNigerian history. It was referred to in the press as the ‘torso in the Thames’ and was theshocking account of how a young boy’s body had been mutilated and dismembered andthrown into the river in London. With only his torso - no arms, legs or head- to identify him,
the initial police investigation focused on possible ritual motives for the murder. Initial
expert opinion corroborated this view and sent the investigators to South Africa to examine
links with a possible muti or medicine murder. Proving fruitless, the inquiry diagnosed
stomach contents to pin point the boy’s origin – from near Benin in Southern Nigeria.
Candles and Yoruba language writing found on the riverbank suggested again that there might
be ritual, sacrificial elements to the tragedy. But after extensive further investigation, albeit
without prosecution, the metropolitan police concluded that the dismembering was not
ritually inspired at all, but the means by which a people-smuggling gang had chosen to hideand dispose of their cargo when they thought that their operation was about to be discoveredby the police.
It is a salutary lesson, reminding us that the interpretation of ritual killing is deeply
problematic. My own research on a series of murders in the 1940s in Nigeria where bodies
were mutilated to imitate leopard attacks played out a similar scenario. The police thought

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 75

they were ritual murders but this was a conclusion based on prejudice and assumption notevidence.
The common definition of ritual murder in this context is that they are performed to procure
body parts for ritual practices that can enhance a person’s power, virility, wealth orprotection. This might be for the production of ‘medicines.’ The terms juju and fetish are often
used in this context – but the local terms for the word medicine captures a very ambiguous
meaning of substances that are thought to heal, protect and empower and that are producedby combining ingredients that might include specific human body parts. The difficulty then, as
in the Adam case, is to understand the meaning of body mutilation or the removal of bodyparts. There is a strong association between these forms of murder then and specialists informs of animistic practice – herbalists, healers, shrine priests who might commission murdersof this kind on behalf of their clients. Perpetrators are also said to include ‘cultists’ membersof secret cults that I will come on to discuss in a moment – but this is a very general term andtends not to capture the very local conspiracy to murder that most cases involve.
There are several footnotes to add to this broad definition – One is to mention briefly the ideaof ‘human sacrifice’ – i.e. the killing of a person as a ritual act. I have only really heard of thisrumoured in relation to burial practices of very senior chiefs, and no published corroboration.
Second – broadening out the definition of ritual murder to include deaths linked to ritual belief
and practice - many deaths are explained as a result of oath-swearing. I.e. in a dispute, aperson might swear that they are telling the truth by consuming or invoking a substance withsupernatural powers. If the person dies within a stated period (usually a year), they are said
to have been killed by this substance - often displaying visible symptoms (swellings in the legs)
as a clue to the cause. Third, just like these oaths there are also ordeals which people
sometimes undergo to determine the truth – such ordeals used to include the consumptionof poisons. Possession of body parts may be linked to desecration of graves. And to a common
practice of seeking empowerment or ritual substances from graves.
As I say – there are very contemporary motivations for these forms of murder. Getting richquick is probably the primary one. In 1996 the city of Owerri in South-eastern Nigeria
witnessed riots when human body parts were found in a car – the ensuing violence was
directed at those who had become rich – chiefs, churches, con artists.
The prevalence of ritual murders is notoriously difficult to ascertain. Sometimes there arespikes or ‘moral panics’ in the press and popular consciousness that may or may not be borneout in the numbers of actual attacks. Overall, the numbers of such attacks is low and I would
agree with colleagues at SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies] in London who
authored a report in 2012 that ritual murder is NOT a ‘systematic practice’. Reporting fromacross Nigeria suggests that there is no real ethnic or local distribution to be aware of though
there are probably fewer incidents in the northern states of the country.
Nevertheless, it does occur in Nigeria as elsewhere. The victims are generally identified at
random and usually because they are relatively soft targets. These would include thoseyounger and or who were mentally or physically challenged. Unlike Tanzania, which has seen
an upsurge of cases where albinos were killed to produce protective medicines (possibly for
artisanal miners), skin colour does not seem a major factor in Nigeria. I have heard many manystories about those with kyphosis being potential targets – i.e. hunchback.
Child ‘Witches’
A footnote to this re youth and children. A very worrying development over the last decade isa form of assault on very vulnerable minors and children which is linked to ideas that children
possess occult powers and cause fatalities or failure. This is a phenomenon that has emergedin various African cities and in the diaspora in Europe:

76 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA












Cases of murder, attempted murder and abandonment of children have beenprevalent in the Akwa Ibom state of Nigeria. One organisation puts the figure ofchildren accused at 15,000.
The motivations for family members to turn against their own children and accuse
them of witchcraft has presented a real puzzle. Is it because of Malthusian pressureson the household economy – is it because of a fear of children’s militancy/childsoldiers?
It seems that the common factor spreading these anxieties is to be found inPentecostalist church preaching. Church sponsorship of popular movies depicting
children as witches seems to have set this process in motion. In addition, practices of
exorcism and deliverance in church services are key parts of a living church, a churchthat can identify the enemies of progress, the reason why the business, the family are
not progressing, not becoming wealthy/prosperous is key to the competition
between churches.
There has been international attention focused on this problem in southern Nigeria
with an international NGO campaigning (stepping stones – no safe child) –documentary films.
Akwa Ibom state to ratify a Child Rights Act (2008).
This has drawn attention not only to the problems of witchcraft accusation againstchildren but trafficking and child abandonment too. Though enforcement isnotoriously difficult.

In terms of the legal and policing dimension there is no specific unit set up to investigate thesecrimes by the Nigerian police. They of course are treated as murders under the 1990 Criminal
Code and the Northern Penal code. Possession of human body parts is a criminal offence. Trial
by ordeal is also criminalised – and is liable to the death penalty.
The criminal code also states that it is a misdemeanour to:






Be in possession of human remains intended to be used in connection with theworship or invocation of any juju
Illegal to make or sell or assist in making any juju, drug or charm intended to preventor delay, compel or possess the power of causing any natural phenomenon or any
disease or epidemic.
Illegal to direct, control or preside at the worship or invocation of any juju that isprohibited.
Make or use or assist in anything being or believed to be associated with humansacrifice or other unlawful practice.

Accusations often map onto existing axes of social tension – old and young/locals vsforeigners. Brings ‘traditional healers’ into the frame. To accuse groups of people of ritual
killing is a bit like the sort of stigmatising act an accusation of paedophilia might enact. Youthoften accuse elders, traditional rulers of ritual killing, suspicion of authorities and of strangers
or non-indigenes. If you review very recent press reporting on police investigations into ritual
killing in Nigeria then the common terms used are ‘money ritual’ with the use of humanhearts.
Problematic conclusions – a number of viscious attacks on families with murders of children
reported – much speculation that this was ritually motivated, but there is no evidence that
we are privy to.
A case in Lagos in March this year involved a muslim cleric (stoning a small child while
incantating). And another (reported internationally – the Times) reported on the case of twins

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 77

infanticide. And that missionary groups still provide havens for twin babies – thought to be an
abomination of the spirit.

78 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

Chieftaincy
The second topic I am going to address relates to chieftaincy – to traditional rulers. Here I am
going to outline issues to do with their definition, why these positions are highly sought after
and the lines of conflict associated with them.
The legacy of the colonial policy of indirect rule (i.e. ruling indirectly through local chiefs),
along with post-colonial policies that promoted chiefs (often as alternative lines of politicalallegiance) has given chieftaincy a central role in Nigeria’s contemporary political constitution.
The first important thing to say about chiefs and traditional rulers in Nigeria, however, is that
there is huge variation in what constitutes a chief, what constituency a chief represents, who
can be a chief, how a chief is appointed. So talking about chiefs, we have to remember that
we can sometimes be talking about rather different institutions.
The second important thing to say is that despite this legacy and the labelling as ‘traditionalrulers’ these are very modern institutions and the problems and tensions associated withthem are directly linked to contemporary trends in the country. The idea of chiefs as old
illiterate custodians of centuries’ traditions is very outmoded.
At one level – the Oba of Benin, the Obong of Calabar, the Ooni of Ife, the Emir of Kano – theseare first class chiefs who are often highly qualified, successful, wealthy members of thepolitical establishment. And at the very local level of a village chief, the day to day life might
appear rather mundane – dealing with local disputes, validating identity documents, androlling up for every local event. However, in both instances and for all the levels of chieftaincy
in between there is a strong incentive structure to vie for these offices.
This brings me to my third introductory point, which is very closely linked to the first two which is that while chiefs are about tradition and custom they are tightly woven into the state
constitution and structure. Chieftaincies on the whole tend to map onto the country’s
administrative structure that recognises wards, villages, clans, local government areas andstates. Parallel courts and councils exist presided over by traditional rulers that are funded by
the state. Moreover, many state recognised positions are remunerated – meaning thatchieftaincies in Nigeria are actually part of the state bureaucracy and therefore part of the
Nigerian petro-state’s redistributive patronage structure.
As such they are highly sought after positions and the competition for accession – ie thedisputes over chieftaincy positions can become sources of conflict in themselves. One of theexacerbating factors here is that the rules for choosing a new chief are rarely fixed or clear; oreven if they appear to be they will be subject to debate and conflict.
What is also flexible and changing is the relationship between a chief and the community theylead. There is a flexible relationship between local customary identities (whether that is ethnicor sub-ethnic) and state administrative constituencies – with one often being shaped to theother over time. So in the local government area where I live each village has a village head,groups of around 20 villages are organised under five ‘clans’ and then there is a paramountruler for the whole local government. However, in fact, here are only two real ‘traditional’clans in this case - and there is ongoing tension in the system to control the top-spot and to
manage the hostilities between the two-clan factions. In addition, there is continual pressure
to create more sub-units – by splitting a village or a clan into two to create more heads and agreater number of smaller constituencies.
These are the persistent lines of tension when it comes to chieftaincy politics. Indeed, it isprecisely because these offices are patronage positions with the state and precisely becauseof the awkward and flexible fit between administrative and chieftaincy constituencies thatproblems arise.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 79

So as figure heads of these ambiguously organised ethnicities and polities chiefs are also often
in the firing line in border disputes. But I will just dwell on this idea of their precarious positionas patrons in the Nigerian system.
Chiefs are often highly respected custodians of these offices, but they are also in a precarious
position as patrons. As such they are brokers between local communities and outside interests– a position that can be lucrative but which comes with expectations that leaders will be acting
in the community not personal interest - and they are often accused of abusing their positions- especially of failing to keep law and order by accepting bribes from criminals, or of notredistributing the spoils of their office to their local communities.
To give you the clearest example: in the oil rich Niger Delta it is well established that oilcompanies would provide compensation for land or for pollution to oil-producing
communities through their chiefs (rather than through representative bodies or local
government structures). Chiefs in this context stand accused of colluding with outside
agencies – it might be contractors, state officials, political parties and denying community
members of rights and resources.
The most vocal constituency in this context is the youth – these are not necessarily ‘young’
men and women in terms of age, but those who are not regarded socially as elders and who,on the whole, experience high levels of underemployment and political manipulation.
Tensions often arise, therefore, along generational axes with youth and elders, youth andchiefs coming into conflict.
Chiefs and the councils they preside over can control lucrative economic niches – security
patrols, motor park licences, market permits. In a very recent case in the village where I haveworked a chief was assassinated because he revoked access for youth to run the concession
to a small palm oil plantation. The reports you read of chief’s palaces and compounds being
attacked or of assassinations of chiefs are very often the culmination of protests about abusesof office from young men.
There is no special policing provision for the violence and threats to life that chieftaincy
disputes – or disputes linked to chiefs – involve. And as I’ve explained there is very little by
way of standardised legal provision defining the positions of chiefs and their roles. Yes, there
are traditional rulers’ edicts and councils who enforce them, but ultimately chiefs can be held
accountable to the communities they represent.
Varsity [university] cults
My third and final topic to discuss is varsity cults. I’ll briefly mention some of the history ofthese groups along with their role on and off the university campus.
No doubt many of you will be aware of the North American university confraternities andsororities – male and female clubs, often named after Greek letters and with selective
memberships that undergo brutalising initiations. Well, in the 1950s when the some of thefirst Nigerian scholars studied in the United States they returned with this model of theconfraternity and adapted them to the Nigerian context. Indeed the Nobel prize winning poet,
Wole Soyinka, has the dubious distinction of being one of the founding members of the first‘cult’ the Pyrates on the University of Ibadan campus in 1952.
From these beginnings – as a club, dressing up as pirates and protesting elite, colonial culture
and promoting a pan Africanism, the history of campus cults in Nigeria saw them expand
rapidly across new federal and state universities and to split into new groups, the Buccaneers
Confraternity, the Black Axe Movement, and the Family Confraternity.
The varsity cults have become so prevalent that through the 1990s and 2000s they closed
several universities:

80 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

•

•
•

•

At the time it was unclear how to place these groups – were they secret cabals
orchestrated by the military elite to counter the leftist student unions – or perhaps
they were student pressure groups – protecting students from the exploitations oflecturers and the authorities.
Either way they found fertile ground in contexts where secret societies – modes of
initiation into manhood, and secret associations linked to political mobilisation (likeOgboni) are part of local historical landscape.
Widespread set of ideas that political process and organised crime (sometimes these
are the same thing) are orchestrated by covert societies, syndicates, bonded by oathand secrecy. Indeed, there is a lot of discussion around the links that these cults haveamongst senior political circles – and alumni of the cults themselves.
Yet there is also much debate with groups trying to rehabilitate their image and claimthat they are not a cult.

Despite very clear and well-known laws against membership of secret cults, state level laws
listing proscribed organisations, and concerted campaigns to keep the cults out of campuses,
it is clear that they are as much of a problem there today as they have ever been. As they
expanded so their reputations rapidly deteriorated, and although they are known as ‘cults’
they have become forms of gangs (or at least they are more like gangs than they are likereligious cults following charismatic or millennial prophets and preachers):

•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

•
•

Young men (in particular, though not exclusively) join cults for protection andbecause of peer pressure – just like gangs. First year students are targeted – reports
point to voluntary and forced conscription.
With enrolment in higher education being so high – and cults operating in secondary
schools, polytechnics, state, private and federal universities young people ineducation are very likely to be exposed to them.
Cults tend to recruit across ethnic boundaries.
There is a spiral of violence linked to cult vendettas and revenge – some of this islinked to assaults on members or on girlfriends which then turn into feuds and fights
for supremacy.
Assassinations and street fighting are not uncommon. Violence becomes a mode of
acceptance in the group and of testing masculinity.
Once a person has been initiated – which usually involves a violent beating (withmany reports of rape) – it is very hard for them to leave or to talk about theirexperience beyond the group.
In interviews I have done with cult members, we do not introduce ourselves and wemeet very privately – oaths of secrecy are very seriously enforced.
The ritual ‘cultish’ forms that these groups take are not consistent. They observe
very strict linguistic and sartorial codes, handshakes, music, - perhaps there are rites
observed during initiation and for a members’ burials and they use forms of
medicinal protection (charms) – though they are not alone in that.
Associations between cultism and forms of animistic worship are persistent – andcalling someone a cultist is accusing them of being like a witch or committing occultforms of ritual – even ritual killing.
Distinguishing between ways of speaking (modes of accusation) and actual beliefs
and practices is notoriously problematic. As the accusation of cultism is so loaded,and powerful, it also becomes a very problematic way of justifying attacks, including
extra-judicial killings on otherwise innocent young people.

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 81

One of the most notorious cases of this came in 2012 with the lynching of four students of the
University of Port Harcourt (the so-called ALUU 4) – perhaps they were suspected to be armed
robbers or members of the mafia confraternity – they were killed by the local vigilante group.
Recent trends have seen the university cults move beyond the campus and onto the streets.
There have long been street gangs in Nigeria’s cities. Since the 1980s these were known as‘area boys’ (some of the groups, like the ones I work on have strong links with masquerade
performances). But in recent years young men without university educations have formed
gangs, also known as cults, which look and act much like their counterparts on the campuses.
These groups – like Debam and Dewell in Port Harcourt – are routinely hired by political bosses
during elections; they feud between themselves; they are the basis for armed robbery,
prostitution and kidnapping gangs.
So these are so-called street and creek wings. Klansmen/Debam Vikings/Dewell – Dewell also
closely linked to Icelanders and Outlaws – who were linked to MEND.
In 2004 the Rivers State government banned over 100 cults in the aftermath of violence that
had affected the state with the sponsorship of these groups by politicians in the 2003
elections. Neither these attempts to ban cults or more recent initiatives to provide an amnesty
for cult members (like the amnesty in the Niger Delta) have had much impact.
There are three consequences of this trend:
1. One is that in the oil-producing regions of the Niger Delta these gangs have formed
loose alliances between university, street and creeks – linking groups of armed young
men in strong factions to the militant violence of Delta politics.
2. Second - these groups are no longer confined to urban or university contexts. The
groups are highly mobile and violence and crime associated with cults can emerge inotherwise remote and quiet rural communities. The village I work in has been besetwith a cult war since last November despite the stationing of police special response
squads and the indications are that the situation across southern Nigeria, linked to
the recession, is worsening.
3. And finally cults are also the basis of international criminal syndicates - smuggling
drugs, selling stolen crude oil, and/or trafficking people. In January last year, theSupreme Eyie confraternity was implicated in a sex-trafficking operation in Spain.
Extensive legal provisions are in place prohibiting affiliation with proscribed societies:

•
•
•
•
•

State and national level (i.e. criminal code provisions against unlawful societies).
These cover forms of traditional secret societies, societies linked with political
networks like Ogboni and the varsity cults.
Secret Cult and Cult Related Activities (Prohibition) Bill, 2004.
Rivers State enacted the Secret Cult and Similar Activities (Prohibition) Law in2004.
in 2000, Edo State enacted a Secret Cult (Prohibition) Bill which prescribed 21
years in prison for "cult members in public and educational services".

There are numerous problems relating to the policing of cults:

•
•
•
•

Prevalence,
Relevance of gang structures in context of insecurity,
Identification of members,
and patronage protection.

82 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA

It is very difficult to tie these three issues together. They map onto familiar generational
tensions in Nigeria, and onto the geographies of belonging that are so fiercely fought over(just recently the Northern threats against Igbo youth in the north bear this out explicitly). I
am no expert on asylum applications, but clearly the ‘cultural’ context for applications havebecome more significant over time. One of the key reasons for their prevalence is not because
forms of ritual, chieftaincy or cult practices are somehow backward or traditional, but
precisely because they are articulated to modern, contemporary axes of inequality,competition and vulnerability.

Discussion[Question] How are these different phenomena discussed among the local population?
What kind of apprehensions, fears and thoughts do people have about them?
[Pratten] One of the ways in which I’m trying to describe some of these processes in my own
work looks at insecurity not as a temporary phenomenon, and at these states of uncertainty
and anxiety not as kind of temporary or episodic but all the time. I suppose that’s one way of
explaining a way of coping that is incredibly vigilant in relation to new and suspect people inthe community. So, there’s a kind of vigilance around difference, which I suppose is one way
in which people express these forms of anxiety. Although I haven’t provided an umbrella idea,
there’s an underlying belief in a set of discourses and practices to do with the occult andwitchcraft. I’d be very very hesitant to go down that kind of line. On the other hand, there aresome features in the ways that forms of accusations about witchcraft map onto these kindsof tensions I’m talking about, whether it’s against exploitations of very powerful wealthy
individuals in the society, the kind of accusation that someone is a ritual killer. There’s ametaphor being consumed by powerful patrons or in the way in which witchcraft accusations
work the other way, not a levelling mechanism against the powerful, but actually a mechanismthat diagnoses the vulnerable and identifies weaker members of the community. That is theassociation with child witches and more marginal figures like cult boys, who themselves have
limited economic resources. There is a popular discourse that has a very high level of anxiety
around cultism. It penetrates and permeates many more features of everyday life than theyused to. There’s recourse to sources of certainty and sources of security like Pentecostal
Churches, but they are themselves diagnosing differences and identifying evil. They can
actually spiral some of these prejudices, so they can be problematic.
[Question] Some children say, ‘My father was the head the village and he was part of asecret society, and therefore I was contacted to take my father’s place. I wasn’t accused ofwitchcraft or anything, but in order not to be punished, since I didn’t want to be part of thisgroup, I just escaped’. To what extent does this correspond to a certain territory? Thesestories are always told in the same way in various parts of Nigeria.
[Pratten] This is a really interesting question and it’s very challenging to answer, precisely
because of the point I was raising about the specificity of chieftaincy disputes and how
precisely modes of succession sometimes differ from village to village within the same
linguistic, ethnic community. If I had to say whether it is credible that in a particularcommunity an individual was being forced to inherit a position, I suppose it is conceivable. On
the other hand, these are usually quite public offices. To be a head of a village is quite atransparent process. The identity would be known within other councils, so the idea of villages
only run by kind of secret cabals without some recourse to other transparent mechanismsthat might be able to shed light on a problematic constitution in a particular village is… Thereare counterbalancing forces that would suggest it would be hard to run a village like that!
However, as I said, the specifics do strike me as being the kind of nostalgia for a kind of way
in which villages might once have been governed by secret councils or secret councils of

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 83

elders. My experience is that traditional rulers, councils and their courts are held in the open,
and people can go along and challenge them. It is not that it is a democratic thing, and it’s
clearly gerontocratic, but to be coerced into that position, it’s conceivable but I guess it’s not
likely.
[Question] Does forced recruitment occur in the cults in cases of sons of former members?
[Pratten] I don’t think we have that level of sociological evidence in terms of who is a member
from the very beginning level, let alone whether these are family lineages. It is quite
conceivable that if your father was a Viking you are Viking. That seems to make sense to me.
On the other hand, I don’t know if there’s any compulsion. The leadership of these cultschanges of course over time, whether they’re at university, how long they’re at university,and how this kind of lineage successions would be policed. I doubt that they could be, so I
would be sceptical.
One often finds that children who go to university follow a different church or they go to adifferent university. There’s huge variation and variety, so I don’t think there is any particularpattern that you could discern. As I said, we have no data about who is a member. There wasa lot of suspicion that the core members were very elite, or sons of elite. That seemed to bea rumour about powerful people controlling university campuses, because they could do sothrough covert means. So I think it’s again inconclusive, I am sorry, but is seems a little bit
unlikely that that pattern could be produced.
[Question] It’s not totally clear to me whether a specific group named Ogboni actually exists,
or whether the word is used to indicate different kinds of groups since one obviously has asort of copyright in the world. I wonder whether the information we find about the most
famous Ogboni group that formed the Ogboni Fraternity (which is normally something likea Rotary club) is valid for other possible groups having the same name.
[Pratten] Again, it’s a very difficult question and I am not an expert on the question of Ogboni.
The region of influence of the Ogboni society maps onto the mid-west, Yoruba-speaking
states, and not anywhere else really. So there is a regional specificity to Ogboni. I’m an expert
on the South East of Nigeria and we don’t have the kind of Ogboni issue really, so it is very
regionally specific, but it is a real thing. And it’s certainly been very prominently implicated to
the Reformed Ogboni society in relation to political movements over the decades. Of course,
it’s important to recognise that many of these organisations that are called cults tell you thatthey are not cults. You find this with The Buccaneers and The Vikings, just as much as you dowith Ogboni. So yes, it’s a thing. Are there imitations? Well, there are often lodges or different
club houses of these kind of organisations that you find in different places obviously, but theyfall usually under a federated umbrella. Members from one organisaiton should be able toaccess the other, so in the university cult context that often means that you can be a
Buccaneer in Port Harcourt and walk into a Buccaneer confraternity meeting in Ile Ife. So you’dbe among like-minded initiates. There are national networks of some of these cults. The
Ogboni is quite regionally-specific really.

84 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAQuestions and Answers with experts
Indigeneity[Question] Referring to individuals who are moving from one settlement to another, doesit matter if you are indigenous or a settler when it comes to access to the land?
[Makanjuola] When it comes to land, it is very important. For example I am from South West,from one of the states in South West, and my mother is from South South and my mother’smother is from South South Edo, so if my mother has land in Edo state I would not be able toget access to it because I am not considered from Edo state, because what you have is yourfather’s side only. My father is from Osun state and because I am not from Edo state, I do nothave access to their land. That is also commonly seen played out when it comes to anythingthat is actually quite material or power-driven. You see the issue of indigeneship being playedout within the country. When there is nothing material or anything commercial or powerdriven, everybody is Nigerian. That is why you often hear the Niger Delta claim to the oil
resources because they claim, ‘it is our oil’. At that point they are not Nigerian but from Niger
Delta. ‘It is our oil’, because it is about the resources and the power. That is the only time we
do not get to be all Nigerian.
[Question] is there any recent research on the topic of indigeneity? Human Rights Watch
did a report on it some 10 years ago, and Crisis Group even a couple of years before.
[Turnbull] Laura Vinson, at Oklahoma University will have a book coming out soon about
violence in Jos and Kaduna state. I think it touches a lot on this topic of indigeneity, so if
anyone is curious I think that may be a good resource.
[Pratten] I do not know whether you are aware of Laurent Fourchard’s work on certificates ofindigeneity. He led a French research project on autochthony and he is currently at CRS in
Bordeaux, but I think you will find it. He is still giving papers on it. Some of them are publishedin Africa, the journal, so you might find that of use. He has noted how recent in fact certificatesof indigeneity are. They do not go back a long way; they are quite a recent phenomenon, andin many ways the kind of indigeneity issue around certificates criss-crosses with a kind ofyouth-elders generational axis. Who are the people that need to prove their status most? Its
students to get on to bursaries and scholarships at university. Graduates who are applying forcivil service positions. In many ways, as Megan [Turnbull] was describing in relation to the
Delta, youths who are trying to prove that they are from a certain place to get employment
with oil companies or amnesty programs or whatever it might be, and need these as well.
Therefore, if you are an elder and settled down, you might come up in relation to land andthose kinds of issues, but on the whole, the people who come to chieftaincy offices or local
government offices asking for certificates of indigeneity are pretty young people, students on
the whole.

Why Edo State?
[Question] A very large percentage of the migrants and asylum seekers in Europe are from
Edo, and this even though Edo state is maybe not the poorest in Nigeria. The population of
Edo is fairly small, maybe 5% of the population as a whole, but still people from Edo arevery much overrepresented in comparison, for instance, with the Igbo, with Yoruba, with
big southern groups, much bigger southern groups. What is the possible explanation for
that? Why Edo?

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 85

[Makanjuola] It is quite amazing to see that Edo has the highest number of asylum seekers,
especially in Italy, so we should not just talk just about Edo asylum seekers abroad; we should
also look at it between Edo and Italy. One of the things to quickly point out to is that I think
the relationship between Edo and Italy goes way back to the early eighties. When I was
growing up in Edo, I spent quite some time with my grandmother and one thing I could quickly
remember is that every household in Edo state is mandatory to have a family member abroad.
It was a status symbol; it was a way to show class, it was a way to show ‘my son is going tosend me money’. So if you do not have a child abroad, as an aged mother or as an aged father,
it is an insult, it says that your children are not doing well. So, first of all you have to look at itfrom that perspective. When it comes to class and power, for them it is just a ‘show’. I would
say there is also the culture where women have oftentimes been transported within states to
go to Italy. They start from Italy to go back to it. Libya is one of them. Mali is one of them.
Usually they start their journey from Lagos to Abidjan, in Cote d’Ivoire. They end up in Mali
and then head up to other places before they finally get to Italy and the other places theywant to go to. That is mostly for women.
For men, mostly, it is the cultural context where the man is expected to be the head of thefamily and as a first male child in the house, there are certain responsibilities you must take,which you are expected to take. Every Christmas people go home; the only people who do notgo home for Christmas are people from South West. My father is from Ogun state. I do not go
to my father’s village for Christmas. However, all the South South people have a tradition ofgoing back home.
Whenever people go back in December, they come in new acquired material things. People
come to show off, so if I am the head of the house and I do not have the same fortune, mymother is embarrassed for me and she says, ‘Look at him, look at him, look at him’. They goabroad, which is why you often see a lot of them want to get their residency abroad. You haveto always make sure to go back for Christmas because it is a symbol, and for them it is a way
to show things when going back home.
Once you are over 30, you have to go abroad. That is the ideology: that you can make it when
you go abroad. In Italy, Edo people have established such a strong force within the Italianenvironment through either the sex trade, drug, arms and all kinds of business. When you
look at it carefully, you see that when they come here, they get into the same kind of businessdeals and they give the perception back home that it might be a quicker road to make money.
You might think the UK, which has closer ties with Nigeria, should be the major point for
migration, but no, many people do not find the UK quite attractive. It is either Italy or Germanyor the Netherlands. Those three places are very important for Benin people. I think there areissues that go back a long time: how men from Edo state, black men or women generally, aresexualised; the culture of farming/agriculture in those two countries; and also thetransportation of women within those states. I have been coming to Italy for the last 5-6 years,
and from personal experience there have been many times – I have been to Napoli manytimes – that I have been sexualised in Napoli. When you try to engage people and they knowthat you are from Nigeria and you are black, there is a kind of sexual response or sexual
reaction that you get oftentimes. All this put together shows that kind of relationship, but I
am sure there might be other deeper relationships that existed before the early eighties that
I might not been aware of.
[Plambech] A lot of these issues certainly form the migration trend to Italy. I usually talk about
the connection between Edo state and Europe and Italy as a mix of multiple things at the sametime. There is not just one explanation. As a migration scholar, it is not unusual at all to seethat there are specific places from where a migration hub develops migration hubs like Benin
City. That is what Benin City is perceived as today.

86 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIAIn the early eighties, one of the reasons why the connection was made with Italy, and also
France, was through companies that established businesses in Edo state. Some Italian men
went back to Italy with Nigerian wives, so that was one of the first groups of women who
invited family members or arranged travel to come to Italy. So that is just one of the ways how
the migration system started. It is always really important to look at how a migration systemstarts. Then at the same time there was also a demand for labour in Italy, in agriculture, andsome of that labour turned into sex labour, particularly at the time when women started toborrow more and more money in order to come to Italy, and the fastest way to pay back thedebt is through informal labour in the sex industry. That is where you earn the most money
and it is the quickest way, as you also talked about.
Therefore, there are multiple reasons why it is Edo state, but primarily it is a state where evenin the 1920s when the British were still there, there was a debate about women who were
migrating from Edo state to other states within Nigeria to sell sex. The British were trying tocontrol that and to get them back to Edo state because it was embarrassing for Edo state thatwomen were leaving, and it is still embarrassing! Now it is embarrassing for Nigeria, which isthe debate. Therefore, it is nothing new in particular but it has become transnational.
In addition, for some of the routes that they travel through, Niger and Libya, all kind of goods
have been transported through them to Italy and now they have become migrant routes,
which is something we also see in other areas of the world where you had other kinds ofgoods, and now it is migrants who are using these routes. I am always getting that question:
Why Benin City? Why Edo state? There are several reports being made on that, some of themby IOM as well. There are multiple reasons.
They would say it is because women from Edo state are very particular but the women wouldof course say, ‘No, we are just like...’ There are many cultural explanations that I think weshould pay attention to, but more often, I think it is important to look at the political economy
of how this migration system was started and how it was linked to previous connections
between southern Europe and Edo state. ln northern Europe where I am from, Copenhagen,there also women from Benin City or men from Benin City, so it is not only that they comehere to Italy and stop here. In Northern Europe, there is the same percentage of people
arriving or who are from Edo state, so it is just a very particular migration system. To finalise,
I would just say one more thing: there are between six to eight places around the world where
the ratio of women to men entering the sex industry in Europe is higher. Edo state is one ofthose places. Then we have northeast Thailand; we have places in the Philippines, northeast
Brazil, northeast China, and eastern Romania. Therefore, as a migration scholar, Edo state isa particular migration hub.
[Plambech] While we talked so much about Benin City, recently what I see are also several
migrants who are not from Edo state but who have spent several years in Benin City before
moving onwards. A group of women that I have worked among who are actually from northeastern Nigeria - Adamawa state - wanted to migrate to Europe so they went to Benin Cityand spent several years there waiting for an opportunity to move onwards. Therefore, I think
it is important to look at Benin City not only as the place where people from Edo state aretravelling from; it is a place from where many other migrants are travelling. It is a migration
hub in the same way as Agadez, or Sabah or Tripoli, so if you want to travel from Nigeria yougo there because that is where there are a lot of migration facilitators who are able to produce
documents or who know the routes.
I would also say it is increasingly not a migration hub; it is a deportation hub, because manyof the migrants that we are now returning from the EU are going to Benin City, they are
returned or they are deported. Now I see incidents where they are using their skills as
migrants to facilitate new migrations. They know how to go to Europe; they cannot go there

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 87

themselves so they are helping others, it is just circular. They know what is needed, so we also
have to think about the migration knowledge that we send directly back to the areas where
migrants are just waiting to move onwards.

Treatment of failed asylum seekers upon return to Nigeria[Question] Can you say something about treatment of failed asylum seekers upon return toNigeria.
[Makanjuola] The social impact of returnees is a very interesting subject, for not only Edo but
generally all across the country, regarding movement and migration beyond Edo state. Even
returnees from the UK or the US, they understand the system, they know how the [trafficking]system plays and they know how to get back into the system or to get other people into thesystem. They think, ‘I know how to link those people on my link and in that system where I
used to be.’ But I think the realities of returnees differ according to what got you to seek
asylum in the first place, and they would tell me how vulnerable you may be when you return.
If it is the case of threatened lives, it depends why there was a threat to your life. If it is related
to your sexual or gender identity, it depends what your economic power used to be and what
your economic power is right now.
One of the things I always find quite interesting or you need to be worrying about is this: manyof the returnee cases I often heard about in the news when there is a campaign. This has been
happening especially for the UK – we worked on many cases in the UK where people are about
to be returned and there is campaigning, whether through AllOut or Change.org asking thegovernment not to return them. What we often do not understand is that those campaigns
actually make people vulnerable, depending on how they got out of the country in the firstplace. If they finally are deported to Nigeria at the end of the day, because of the kind ofsystem, they will be handed over to the migration officer who would want to know exactly
why they have been deported, and they will probe. I do not know what kinds of documents
are given to anyone when they are deported. Some people buy their way out; this is also thereality of the country. If you or your family have enough money, the moment you are deported
you can contact your family in Nigeria and they can look for some ‘back door’, arrangementswith the immigration officer or police. So the moment you are landing, somebody is at thegates with your name waiting for you, and they would just pick you so you do not have to go
through that procedure of being handed over to the immigration officer or explaining why
you have been deported or why you were arrested and all of that. However, for other people
who are deported, they just wake up one morning and the next thing they know is that they
are put on a plane for deportation.
It is different for them because then you have to think of the social impact on them when they
get back. Persecution is always a problem and if their reason for seeking asylum is quite
genuine, people often fear returning into that system. This will also have a social and mental
impact on them generally. However, the problem is for those who return who probably
applied for asylum not because of a particular reason, but just to find a route to migrate andget into the system.
People might see it just as a route to become documented within a system and then get
employment and be able to get access to social welfare. There are people who are like that,
who just leave the country not because they are under any threat but because they just feel
it is an opportunity, or they are people who have lived abroad for 20 years and have tried toget a residency permit but failed many times and they feel that their last resort is to seek
asylum. How do you deal with this kind of people? It is good for us to know because people
come to us and claim they are gay, for instance, and I get them an application and I find thatthey have lived in Italy for five years before finally seeking asylum. For sure I will be wondering,88 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA‘Why are you doing this after 5 years? Why did not you do it immediately when you got into
the system, if you are genuinely under threat? Why did it take you 5 years to think about it?
[Plambech] I wanted to touch on return and deportation. We recently did two research
programs, one looking at how to compare those who are ‘assisted voluntary returns’ withthose who are ‘forced returns’ - How do they fare when you look at that over long time andnot only during the time when people are monitored or they are in the assisted system when
they return to Nigeria? The other one was more to look at the connection between thereasons why you left Nigeria and how you then fare when you come back. There are manythings to say about that and I will talk about that tomorrow.
Even though I have said that several go back to Benin City, one thing that we saw is that at thesame time many people choose to stay in Lagos, because it is embarrassing to return to theirvillage or the place where their family is, and some people cannot find their family because
they have been away so many years and the family has changed, and for some women inparticular it is difficult to locate where the family is when they come back. There are a few
NGOs assisting with that.
Within the next couple of years, I would say, Lagos will turn into a new kind of migration hub,consisting of deportees who are returned from Europe and waiting to migrate yet again. It is
becoming what other scholars have called a deport-spora, rather than a diaspora. We will see
how that that will influence the migration to Europe. The other part is that when we compare
those who are ‘assisted voluntary returns’ and those who had the asylum application declined
and are then sent back, after one year they fare almost the same. So even though they are‘assisted voluntary returnees’ under IOM and they have been offered different kinds ofhumanitarian packages, opening up a business– there is difficulty in establishing themselves
when they are back in Edo state or wherever they return to. The reality of Nigeria is socomplicated, so that when you have been six-seven years in Italy or in Europe and you aresent back with the message that you have to re-establish your life with a small sum of moneyand open up a business, that will work for three-six months while you still have IOM and NGOs
supporting you and monitoring you, but after a year or two, we could not see any difference
between those who are ‘assisted voluntary returned’ and those who are sent back otherwise.
Therefore, the re-integration and the ‘assisted return’ scheme really needs to be adjusted andbettered, which is very complicated.

Inheritance[Question] Many of our applicants declared that their father had died and that they cannot
get their inheritance. So how is inheritance ruled in Nigeria? How can you prove that you
are the true heir? Because most of our applications now are focused on the land that yourfather left you and you cannot get.
[Makanjuola] On average, people do not do wills in Nigeria, whether they are educated or not.
I had the same problem when my father died in 2000. We discovered that he did not have any
will before he died. He was an educated man but he did not have any will. Therefore, it playsout differently in different families. Some families will find a sensible, amicable way to sortout the inheritance and prioritise the children of the man and his wife. Some very greedy
families, which is what you might often see, want to predate on their brother’s property, land,house, car. What I am not sure of - and this is not to discredit those people who seek asylum
application based on that, because my case might be different - I am not too sure how nothaving access to your father’s inheritance can make it unsafe for you to live in Nigeria. I am
not too sure, I might not be able to speak from that view. We have seen cases in Nigeria locallywhere brothers of the late man literally send a hired killer to kill the children, because maybe
their own brother would have left all his properties to his children but they want that

EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA — 89

property. Therefore, you might see a case where the family send a hired killer so that they get
rid of all the children, and then they can inherit the property and have access to the property.
In that case, I can understand why people might want to leave Nigeria for that purpose, if yourlife has been put at risk through a hired killer, or murderer, or all kind of things really.
However, if it is just a case of ‘I want this land, I do not want that land’, I am not sure how it
plays out. I think it is different from family to family and how families are able to settle thesethings amicably.
Surely, the issue of inheritance is a big deal in Nigeria, not only for the children, but even for
the wife. The moment a man dies, even brothers and uncles you have never been aware offor your entire life, will show up on the very day he dies and they will claim how they havecontributed to sending him to school or how they contributed to starting a business for him.
That is a clear reality, whether they are educated or not educated, it is the same, but as I said
families will handle this differently from each other.
[Question] is violence common in cases of inheritance?
[Makanjuola] Yes, it is. It depends on where you come from. If you are from South East, it isquite common. Actually, in South East, women are not entitled to inheritance, so if you are
the first female child in the family you are not entitled to your father’s inheritance. You are
only entitled to inheritance from your husband’s house when you get married, and if you do
not get married, it means you do not have any inheritance. You can only get part of it if yourbrothers decide to give you some of the inheritance. This is how it plays in South East. In SouthWest it is also the same thing – women are not entitled to inheritance, but the problem with
South West, where I come from, is the dynamics of power. Women are considered asecondary object within the family. All the male children must have collected their own shareof the property before they give any to the women, and when you try to be stubborn, that iswhere we have seen cases where it can become really violent and diabolical too, especiallywith land, through juju, a very diabolical way. There are many things that people would
generally fear. It depends, like I said, on the family; it depends on how much you are successful
yourself. Therefore, some people who are already successful will let go. Another case might
be a child who might just be hoping on that property that his father left, or that land that is
all he has left in his entire life. Then he would want to fight back, and when he wants to fightback, it gets violent and obviously, they would have more power than him. So this is the reality,
but it differs from family to family.
[Makanjuola] There is no state protection for widowers or widows. I would think theseapplicants are mostly women who are widows because women who have lost their husbandin Nigeria often have to contest their husband’s property from their husband’s brothers. It isa reality for the women and even when there is a clear will from the husband people stillcontest that. You also see this being played out between two brothers, so if a man has twosons or three sons and has a favourite among the sons, he would probably leave all his
property to him. The other two sons would surely get violent. It could be physical, it could bediabolical, and it could be in many forms. They will get violent however way they can getviolent. It is a general reality, and it differs from place to place. If you are already successful
as an individual, you can let go and continue your life and acquire your own personal property
for yourself, but if all you are dependent on is your father’s property, then you have to do
everything possible to get hold of it.

90 —EASO COI MEETING REPORT NIGERIA