Prostitution On Our Campuses

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It is a thing of joy to see parents feel happy that their daughters are in various institutions of higher learning all over our country, acquiring knowledge that will shape their future and make them great women in time to come.

And naturally, parents should have no cause to doubt the behaviour of their daughters, especially when it comes to the issue of chastity, if that child was totally brought up to fear God, respect other people and see her body as a temple of God that should not be defiled no matter the pressure.

However, if the investigations we carried out for weeks in selected cities on campus prostitution is to be used as yardstick, then parents, including the wealthy among us, should have a rethink as to where their precious daughter, so calm, innocent looking and highly respectable is at the momemt, because prostitution on our campuses has gone beyond the level of pastime, it is now a highly organised and digitalized business not only practiced by the female students but also by some boys who act as pimps to the female students and sometimes themselves service the perverted needs of wealthy homosexuals.

According to our reports, campus prostitution crept into our campuses in the late 70s, heightened in the 80s, gained prominence during the military era and has since then been transforming from one level of perversion to another. In fact, it was the return of civil rule with all the glamour and paraphernalia attached to politics that actually made our female undergraduates to embrace prostitution.

At a time, it was practiced with some caution because the girls were somehow afraid not to be noticed that they were into such shameful act frowned at by all in the society. So the mode of operation was as much as possible secretive and somehow confidential. What actually happened then was that any city habouring higher institutions where politicians are having their convention or any other meeting was usually a target.

Before the politicians arrive for their convention, their contact who could be a girl or a boy will take briefings on the number of female sex ‘hawkers’ required, the stastitics of the type of girl each politician wanted and the services the girls are expected to render, which actually determined the price.

It is important to note here that because of the agreement to protect some sources who spoke to us on condition of anonymity, we are going to use imaginary names in some cases in order not to breach agreement and to protect our sources which is very important to us. One of our sources, Grace, informed us that, “The willing girls are carefully chosen to avoid sell out.

“It is almost like a cult because the girls are put under oath of secrecy to protect members. If the clients, whether they are politicians or top businessmen, require short time sexual entertainment by our girls we charge N10,000 per client and if the girls shall sleep over, it goes for N20,000 per girl. However, we have what is called wild party which could hold at any time of the day according to the wishes of the clients.

“This wild party is really wild as any thing goes, including the girls going nude to the admiration of the clients and having wild sex collectively within the closet.” This account by a member of this campus prostitution ring is just an aspect of the information we gathered in the course of our investigations.

In that account, the girls did not move outside their campus arena because their clients came to town for one meeting or the other and decided to go wild on the laps of these bad female students who decided to turn themselves into sex tools, just for money. But we are talking of a situation where female students in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Aba, Calabar, Warri, Ibadan, Enugu and Abeokuta among others will invade Abuja, a journey of over five hours at the least, abandoning their studies for weeks just to hawk their bodies to willing men just for money.

On the other hand, these merchants of flesh in Abuja who are afraid to be seen within their base by people who know them normarlly storm Lagos, Port Harcourt and Owerri, etc. to engage in the notorious trade mostly practiced at night.

For parents who might want to see if their daughters are involved in this shameful act but do not know the possible places to visit, we shall expose some of this hide-outs for them to know. In Abuja, our capital city, these bad girls ply their trade in night clubs in and around the city, with the most popular being Grand Mirage Night Club in Port Harcourt Cresent, off the notorious Gimbiya Street, where the Apo Six traders were extra judicially killed some years ago.

Another busy arena where you can see these girls in large numbers is Rita Lori Night Club, located in Garki area, and also along Lagos Street that is not far from Rita Lori. Lagos Street is a long stretch of road in Abuja and you keep seeing these girls as you stroll along, in various shapes and sizes, wearing skimpy dresses to flaunt the most seductive parts of their body, which could make a highly pious man to become weak at least for some minutes before overcoming this tempting exhibition of their boobs and buttocks.

Still others ply their trade along the road which leads to airport road, near the Abuja City Gate and the National Stadium. Apart from these girls invading the clubs, they also rent rooms in hotels where at least five of them could secretly turn it into brothels as they give chance to each other if a client shows up.

Some of them in the satellite towns like Kubwa, Nyanya, Lugbe, Kuje, Gwarinpa and Maraba among others do rent rooms in some already established brothels from where they hit the clubs in towns at night, where they expect to make more money from rich guys who come to ‘enjoy’ themselves in clubs.

In Lagos, these bad spots are entertainment joints, including nude clubs where some of these girls who have graduated as experts in this flesh trade dance naked to please men for monetary compensation.

The areas highly visited by fun seekers are Allen Avenue and Toyin Street in Ikeja, Opebi Road leading to Sheraton Hotel, where they line up, waiting for interested partners to pick them and Ojuelegba area, mostly along Ayilara Street. Even along the beaches in Lagos, Bar Beach, Takwa Bay, Eleko Beach, Kuramo Beach, all on Lagos Island, these sex hawkers and their clients gather at night to frolick.

In fact, when we visited one of the beaches, some ladies and men who could no longer control their sexual urge and passion were having fun right inside the client’s car with some also cooling off inside rented huts barely covered with palm fronds which enables those with eagle eyes to see the game going on inside, with all the distractive moans and groans by them.

The fact is that in all the towns in Nigeria there are places where the girls gather to have fun. But one may be compelled to ask, are these students really students? The fact, according to Jennifer (not real name), is that “some of us, like myself, are real students who, because of various reasons, engage in prostitution in order to raise money for our school fees and for our upkeep, while some are professional ‘student’ prostitutes.”

She described professional students as those girls who never gained admission into the schools but used money to buy off bed spaces from bonafide students from where the engage in commercial sex, sometimes claiming before their clients that they are real students. According to her, “these professional students could stay for years on campus doing their trade and because men prefer to go to bed with students than engaging professional dirty harlots, these girls could do anything including forging indentity cards just to have the status of studentship conferred on them in order to improve their rating before men. However, that does not rule the fact that some of us are real student.”

What should we do to eradicate this social problem which is rendering most of our female undergraduates and their few male counterparts useless to themselves, family and society at large? We honestly ask if the government is really out to eradicate campus prostitution. We ask this question because if the security agents whose duty is to check prostitution will end up collaborating with the perpetrators, then we are in trouble.

Sometime ago, the Governor of Lagos State, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, irked by the rate at which strip clubs were springing up within the city of Lagos, ordered security agents to raid and close them down. However, after raiding and arresting the nude dancers, security agents who did the raiding ended up sleeping with the girls they were meant to correct and nothing has been heard about that case as investigation showed that the nude girls clubs which have some of these female undergraduates as dancers are back in business. So who is being fooled?

The mosques and churches have a herculean task in inculcating the culture of divine discipline in these girls so that they will have the fear of God in them. According to the Dean of Students’ Affair, University of Lagos, Professor Harrison Dele Longe, “a situation where we have churches and mosques almost at every corner in our cities, preaching prosperity, while our youths are destroying themselves is not good.”

If you do not know the room of her ward in school or the particular yard where she is staying off campus, how can you monitor her through surprise visits, even nocturnal trips to know where your precious daughter is and when she has joined bad company? It is important too for parents to know how much they give their daughters as pocket money to equate it with what they parade in terms of clothes and shoes so that the parents will question their daughters if they discover that they were living above their means.

Importantly, why everything humanly possible must be done to stop campus prostitution is to save our standard of education which has fallen drastically. With constant strikes in our ivory towers which made students to lose months of academic activities, only to be rushed through crash programmes to end the session, our standard of education has nosedived and our degrees are not respected by foreign universities and employers.

The student prostitutes are worse hit as they cannot defend the certificates they parade which were gotten through the powers of the female anatomy. Obviously, it is the collective responsibility of parents, mosques, churches, schools, lecturers, government and other concerned Nigerians to ensure that campus prostitution is eradicated so that our society shall not be inhabited by future mothers and fathers who are already morally bankrupt to the detriment of our generation.

•Ganiyat wrote in from Lagos State University.

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