In Calabar, southern Nigeria, hundreds of children have been branded witches and wizards, thrown into the streets where they are viciously abused, sexually exploited, and killed. This has to stop.

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You have probably heard exotic things about Calabar- from its cleanliness to its beautiful cuisines and the legendary hospitality of its people. But what you have certainly not heard is the horrific tales of children, some as young as 8-years who have been thrown out of their homes by parents and guardians, and left to fend for themselves on the harsh and dangerous streets. Over 500 hundred young girls and boys live on the streets. They build makeshift houses at the central dumpsite in the outskirt of Calabar. To survive, they pick from trash, perform menial jobs, beg, steal or prostitute. The majority have not had a day of education, have never seen a doctor or taken medicines. When they fall ill, they depend on luck to survive, several of them just collapse and die when their tiny bodies can no longer bear the pressure and neglect. When this happens, the kids dig graves on empty plots where they perform burial rites themselves. 

These kids dot the Calabar landscape. They band together at recreation parks, street corners, shopping malls, fast food outlets, ATM cashpoints and anywhere they believe they can extract a bit of charity from the public. Their tattered clothing, haggard looks and unkempt appearance stands them out easily from the more sophisticated Calabar ambience. At night, they move to Atekong Drive and ‘Bogobiri’ where they freely mix with the red-light district crowd, gulping leftover beer and food, washing plates for a fee and generally mingling with the adult crowd. They hang around the Mary Slessor roundabout, where they offer to watch parked cars in return for handouts. In the early hours of the morning, they retire to sheds in dark alleyways, bus stops, pavements and roadside shops.

Accused of Witchcraft 

In Cross River and Akwa Ibom states, a brand of Pentecostal Christianity mixed with traditional religious practices and spiritualism emerged in the 1980s. The high points of this variety of Christianity include belief in the power of witchcraft and demons to possess human bodies and through them, bring misfortune. They also believe that those possessed can be ‘saved’ through extreme exorcism involving physical torture including flogging, branding with hot metals, starvation, restraint through chaining, exposure to extreme weather, denial of sleep and prolonged incarceration. 

For the religious organizations that promote the existence of witchcraft and sorcery, there is constant need to validate their doctrine through regularly ‘manufacturing’ witches and wizards to awe their adherents.  To achieve this, no negative occurrence, no matter how routine, natural or expected, happens by accident. The crux of their demagogy and trade lies in being able to ‘uncover’ the source of every perceived misfortune, and fixing it through extracting a confession using, shaming, blackmail and torture. It is common practice for church leaders to go into séance where they pronounce people witches or wizards. Cunningly, it is often children, the very elderly and people with debilitating illnesses that are so branded. The reason is strategic, these are the weak and vulnerable who cannot defend themselves. Little wonder that the majority of those branded are the old- mostly women, and children. It is held that about 15,000 children have been branded witches and wizards in Cross River and Akwa Ibom states. A 2010 survey revealed that in some areas, up to 85% of street children were out of their homes on account of witchcraft branding.

Deliverance from witchcraft is big business. Thousands of prayer houses and churches have sprung up in Cross River state offering this exact service. Large open-air sessions ironically called ‘crusades’ are routinely advertised and attended by hundreds with a promise to effect deliverance from witchcraft. All it takes to find a witch is to identify anyone in the audience with any misfortune or unmet need. (This is actually easy since everyone in those gatherings responded to an advertisement promising to solve their problem!). The next move is for the Prophet, Prophetess or Pastor to declare someone responsible for the misfortune. Thereafter, ‘deliverance’ is organized to exorcise the ‘spirits’ possessing those branded. Those who survive the excruciating torture that lead to ‘confessions’, go into the second phase which is the exorcism. 

A key feature of all exorcisms is that the victims are starved and made to ‘fast’ for long periods. This deliberate denial of sustenance causes the victims to become delusional; they see things, make outrageous confessions and generally hallucinate. For the exorcists, this indicates the potency of their art, and they push even more, driving their victims to the brink of insanity- and sometimes death. If the young victims of witchcraft branding do not break and confess, they are more severely tortured in the obscenest form. Kids are known to have been brand with hot metals, chained to trees for days, stripped and marinated in hot pepper or whipped continually until they break. Many street children in Calabar carry scars of their torture and horrific tales of their experience at the hands of exorcists. 

Witchcraft deliverance sessions are not cheap. To effectively conduct a ‘deliverance’, the proprietor of the church presents a list of items needed for the exercise, including a fee veiled as offering. Indigent families living on the edge of poverty have to pull together large sums of money and other valuables to pay for these sessions. 

Once branded, the kids are forever marred in their communities. Exposed in this manner, they are easy targets for abuses; they are scorned by neighbors, avoided by friends and attacked by religious adherents. They are denied access to community facilities like schools, hospitals and recreation. Eventually, they are left two option, escape from home and live on the streets, or get killed by religious fanatics. In majority of instances, it is parents that actually kick their kids into the streets.

‘'Lacasera' Girls

 ‘Lacasera’ girls is an expression used abusively and condescendingly to describe female street kids principally within the context of their availability to be exploited sexually. For the female street children, this is the principal occupation, and there is a great number of them between the ages of 9 and 17, roaming the streets of Calabar. At night, they frequent the street corners around Atekong Drive, sit on the lawns of the Margaret Ekpo Airport, loiter along the stretch of road from Mary Slessor to Calabar Road, and flood the Flour Mill Junction. In short, they frequent everywhere there is a possibility of finding willing male customers. Their small frail bodies, their sordid attempt at revealing clothes and their drug deadened eyes are markers to the lives they are forced to live.  

Some of the girls take up employment as sex workers in many of Calabar's brothels where they hire bed spaces in dimly lit, damp and putrid rooms. In these rooms, they offer 'short-time' sex (lasting anything between 30 minutes and 1 hour) for as low as N500. In the brothels, they are sexually exploited by an average of 11 male clients each day. Much of that income is paid to the brothel owners for accommodation. 

The ‘Skolombo’ Boys

In recent times, the street children phenomenon in Calabar has taken a criminal and violent turn. Influenced and recruited by violent gangs in Calabar, some of the kids have taken to criminality and violence. For this reason, the male street kids are nicknamed the ‘Skolombo Boys’, roughly translated crackheads or psychopaths. For them, a life of crime comes naturally, after spending several years on the streets and on drugs. Some residents of Calabar narrate stories of their unflinching brutality. They operate in large groups, armed with knives, machetes, axes and guns. Their common strategy is to overwhelm their victim in large numbers. What they lack in size, they make up for in numbers and viciousness. 

Blaming the Victim

Public perception towards street children range from cold indifference to extreme loath. On occasions, mobs have killed them with no recursion; law enforcement officers subject these minors to the same standards as adults. Indeed, some have been processed through the system and detained in the same facility with adults. 

The idea of hundreds of children roaming the streets and living in dumps, eating from trash, without care or supervision, exposed to an array of threats including illness and death, should cause public outrage and action. But this has not been the case. On the contrary, the response of society has chiefly been to blame the children for fates they did not choose. In reality, the phenomenon and the dangers it poses are a reflection of the failure of governance, including public and private social institutions. No matter what they have become, they are the victims of failures out of their control.

A government in denial 

The most notable response of the current government of Cross River state to the problem of street children in Calabar has been mostly punitive. In 2015, the state government set up a security outfit named Operation Skolombo- following the derogatory title given to street kids. The punitive disposition of the government to this issue misses the point and fails to unravel the underling social factors driving and sustaining the street child phenomenon. For instance, ‘Operation Skolombo’ does not in any way address concerns over how the kids got on the streets in the first place, and how they survive on those streets. On the other hand, the punitive approach has provided opportunity for the continued abuse of street children by law enforcement officers, and their criminalization. In turn, this has reinforced the negative social perception of these kids who are in actual fact, the product of a dysfunctional society and failed social welfare system. On several occasions, the governor of the state has denied the existence of street children. At other times, government officials have deflected responsibility by claiming they are not from Cross River state. The phenomenon continues despite the existence of an ineffectual Child Right Law in the state, specifically established to address the abuse of children. 

A look into the future 

While the government denies and deflect blame, the fact remains that children are growing-up on the streets of Calabar without any support from family, society or government; without morals, care or concern and without skills, learning or opportunities. Faced with circumstances beyond their making and control, many of them have adopted lives of drugs, crime and prostitution. Without any government effort to take them off the streets, wean them off drugs and provide them an education, they face an uncertain future full of pervasion and unbridled hate. Their vengeance on society can only be imagined.

Please support our Petition, and call on the government of Cross River state to immediately stop this abuse of children by implementing the State's Child Rights Law that prohibits the abuse of children.