Child workers rescued in Nigeria

Seventy-four child workers as young as four – their skin broken and palms covered in blisters from months of hauling granite – were receiving food, clothes and medical care in the west African state of Benin today after being rescued from traffickers who sold them into heavy labour.

Children told their rescuers that at least 13 of their young companions had died in the past three months – worn out by smashing and carrying rocks and sleeping, without adequate food, in the open, UN officials said.

“We would break the stones, and the men would come take them away in trucks,” one rescued boy, thin, filthy and heavily scratched, said. He looked no more than 10.

Nigerian police returned the children to Benin late last night, ending what Nigerian police inspector-general Tafa Balogoun said had been more than a year of work in the granite pits.

Tiny boys in dirty T-shirts and shorts, or bare-chested, the children hung out the windows of the buses that brought them back to their home country, staring solemnly.

Health workers were treating the children at a stadium in Cotonou, seaside capital of the port city of Benin.

“The children must be allowed to rest before social workers can start interviewing them to find their parents and return them to their families,” a Benin official, Latoundji Lauriano, said.

Child labour and cross-border labour-trafficking are not rare in West Africa - but rescue from them is.

According to Nigerian police, more than 15,000 from impoverished Benin alone are at work in Nigeria’s southeastern granite pits.