By Rev. Fr. Terwase Tyosenda
A couple of months ago, the chairman of my Church reported that two of his children were missing. The neighbours, in solidarity and in collaboration with the vigilante group, mounted a frenzied search around Katsina-Ala town and its environs, but found nothing.
Three weeks later, a parishioner reported that her nine-month-old baby girl had been stolen. She has not been found. This has occurred too frequently to deny its organized nature. Even last Sunday, in the near-quiet atmosphere of worship, a 27-year-old young lady was caught after successfully luring a three-year-old girl with sweets and biscuits, and was almost gone with her.
Just before last week, a woman confessed to having sold seventeen children in what has become not just a source of livelihood but a lucrative venture for her. The drama is endless. In Makurdi yesterday, another lady was apprehended on her way to Gboko with a stolen child, probably for sale. Few months ago, a “CWO” member from Gboko trended for her involvement in the sale of babies. This is frighteningly worrisome, as this orgy continues to assume unmitigated regularity.
Where is our value for human life? Where is our sense of brotherhood? Where is our Christian faith?
There is a famine loose in Benue State, and it is not the kind that withers guinea corn or dries up the Katsina-Ala River. It is a famine of conscience. It manifests in a trade so unthinkable that our ancestors would have struck dead any man who dared whisper it aloud: the buying and selling of children.
What was once a rare and shameful crime, spoken of in hushed and horrified tones, has today hardened into something else entirely: a market, with rates, middlemen, and a growing clientele. Children are being weighed, priced, and exchanged with the casual efficiency of livestock at a Buruku or Ugba market. That such a thing can happen with any frequency at all is a scandal to our state. That it is happening almost daily, spreading faster than the churches that dot every street corner, is, to say the least, a moral emergency.
History speaks in telling strokes. Scripture does not flinch from showing us what desperate hunger can do to the human heart, even the maternal heart, which we would like to imagine is beyond corruption. In the Second Book of Kings, we are told that the city of Samaria lay under a merciless siege by the army of Ben-Hadad of Syria. The blockade was so complete, and the famine inside the walls so severe, that a donkey’s head was sold for eighty pieces of silver and a small measure of dove’s dung for five. These are prices no sane economy would ever tolerate, prices that only starvation could invent.
It was in this atmosphere of desperation that two women approached the king of Israel with a case that ordinarily ought never to have needed adjudication. One woman cried out that they had agreed together: “Today we will eat my son, and tomorrow we will eat yours.” They did as agreed. The first child was cooked and consumed. But when the second woman’s turn came, she hid her son. The king, hearing this, tore his clothes in horror. It can be deduced that this was not at the audacity of the complaint, but at what the siege had reduced his people to.
This is, unarguably, not a comfortable passage. In fact, it is not meant to be. It stands in the biblical record as the clearest possible illustration of what total desperation can do to the most sacred of human bonds, the bond between a mother and her child. When hunger becomes total, and hope becomes extinct, even love can be starved into betrayal.
The women of Samaria were not monsters by nature. They were ordinary women crushed by an extraordinary situation. Admittedly, Benue is under a siege of its own, not by a foreign army with chariots at the gate, but by poverty, displacement, and the consequential idleness that has become truly disturbing. Farmers who once fed the nation as the food basket of the country now farm under the shadow of insecurity, with many pushed off their land entirely. Young men and women sit idle in overcrowded towns and internally displaced persons’ camps, their energies and skills unused, their ambitions shrinking with every passing second. And into that vacuum of hopelessness, traffickers have walked with open arms and open wallets, plying their trade in abominable human transactions.
Let us not deceive ourselves that this is happening at the margins of society, in some remote corner untouched by faith or family. It is happening among us, in communities that once measured themselves by how tightly they held their kin, not by how quickly they could part with them.
To appreciate the depth of this fall, one must understand what is being lost. The Tiv people did not simply tolerate children as a demographic fact of life; we revered them as “angbianev” living continuations of the lineage, as wealth that could never be converted into currency because its value was not economic but sacred. The extended family system regarded others outside the nuclear home as “mgbanger u ya”, the bigger compound of shared oneness. It was built precisely so that no child would ever be so surplus, so burdensome, or so friendless that a stranger’s silver could seem more valuable than his life. An uncle absorbed the orphan. A grandmother took in the child of a struggling daughter. A whole clan stood as a guarantor against exactly the kind of desperation now being exploited by traffickers.
That such a system could ever produce a marketplace for children would have been unimaginable to our forebears, not because they were naïve about hardship. Indeed, they knew real hunger, real war, and real loss, but because they had built structures of love strong enough to absorb hardship without surrendering their young.
What has changed is definitely not the presence of poverty. You may agree with me that poverty is as old as man. What has obviously changed is the erosion of the communal structure that once made poverty survivable without betrayal. Today, the sale of children is becoming so rife that it does not dread daylight. In other words, it is a crime assuming the status of a broad-daylight business.
In the midst of this, there seems to be an incriminating silence for which history will indict us. We seem to be talking about it with noncommittal abandon. There is something we can do as a people. Benue State is not lacking in churches. Every few hundred meters, another steeple rises, another crusade ground is cleared, and another congregation multiplies. We are, by every visible measure, a deeply Christian state filled with denominations of every stripe: Catholic, Reformed, Pentecostal, and independent alike. And yet this trade in children thrives in our very midst, growing not in spite of our religiosity but seemingly indifferent to it. One acknowledges the concerns expressed on social media, but these amount to little more than lame objections. This is simply not enough. The loss of children is the eventual death of human society.
This development ought to trouble every pulpit and every man and woman in the state. This ought to worry the government, for there is no government without people. Every government endeavour is built upon the philosophy of a better tomorrow for its citizens. But what then is a tomorrow without due recognition of the people who will populate it? The government has a dire responsibility to shield the citizens of the state with its strategic security apparatus.
Similarly, it is not enough for the churches to preach personal salvation on Sunday while children are being trafficked through the same communities on Monday. Faith that does not confront the concrete evils in its own backyard risks becoming drama rather than conviction. If the Good News cannot move a congregation to organize against the sale of children, to fund alternatives for desperate mothers, to expose traffickers hiding among the faithful, and to make the extended family system a living practice rather than a nostalgic memory, then something vital has been lost in translation between the pew and the street.
On the other hand, it behooves every member of our communities to stay alert and watchful, to scale up their sensitivity to happenings around them, and to re-ignite the concept of being our brother’s keeper. No issue is ever settled with mere lamentations.
It can be read that Samaria’s horror ended because the siege was eventually broken and the famine lifted. Benue’s “siege” will not lift on its own. It will take a deliberate, communal recovery of what we once knew instinctively: that a child is not a commodity, that hunger does not excuse betrayal, and that the extended family, reinforced now by the Church, the state, and civil society, must once again become a wall against desperation rather than a bystander to it. It must be known that no amount of starvation, hunger, or economic hardship can absolve criminality, much less the trade in children.
Let this be said plainly too, in the spirit of every prophet who ever tore his robe at the sight of a people’s moral waste: a society that sells its children has already sold something far more valuable than gold and silver. It has sold its conscience, its future, and with it, whatever claim it still had to call itself civilized.
Rev. Fr. Tyosenda Terwase, Ph.D., is a Priest in the Catholic Diocese of Katsina-Ala, and lectures in the Dept. of CRS, College of Education, Katsina-Ala.
