The Edo State Government has restated its commitment to supporting safe, legal migration while firmly condemning the irregular routes that have killed, enslaved, and trafficked thousands of its young people — a declaration that lands with particular weight in a state that has become, by grim reputation, the trafficking capital of West Africa.
Edo State accounts for an estimated 40 percent of Nigerian victims of human trafficking identified in Europe, according to the International Organisation for Migration. The majority are young women and men between the ages of 15 and 30, many from Benin City and surrounding communities in Oredo, Ovia North-East, and Esan West local government areas, who hand over life savings or take on debt bondage to middlemen promising factory jobs in Italy or domestic work in Libya — and arrive instead in exploitation.
The route itself is lethal. Migrants from Edo typically travel overland through Niger State or Katsina, cross into Niger Republic, and then face the Sahara Desert before reaching Libya — a country with no functioning central government and an active market for sub-Saharan African migrants as cheap or forced labour. Those who survive the desert and the detention camps still face a crossing of the central Mediterranean on inflatable dinghies. The UN estimates more than 20,000 people have died on that crossing since 2014.
Edo's exposure to this crisis is not accidental. Decades of a cultural and economic system in parts of Benin City that normalised overseas labour migration — sometimes with the involvement of traditional oath-taking rituals used by traffickers to bind victims to silence — created infrastructure that criminal networks exploited long before the state or federal government moved decisively against it. The Oba of Benin's landmark 2018 revocation of all juju oaths used for trafficking was a turning point, but the networks adapted.
In reiterating its position, the Edo State Government emphasised that it supports migration as a legitimate and often necessary economic choice for its residents, but insisted that safety, documentation, and legal authorisation are non-negotiable. The government called on prospective migrants to engage only certified recruitment agencies and to access verified information through official state and federal channels, including the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, before making any movement decision.
What Nigerians should watch is whether this statement is followed by a reinvigoration of the Edo State Task Force on Human Trafficking, wider deployment of the Reintegration and Empowerment Programme for returned migrants, and concrete coordination with the National Boundary Commission and NAPTIP ahead of the dry season — historically when departure numbers spike. Governor Monday Okpebholo's administration will also face pressure to address the economic conditions in Edo's rural LGAs that make the dangerous gamble of irregular migration feel, to many families, like the only rational option.
Until the state can offer its young people a legal pathway that is as accessible as the trafficker's phone number, the announcement remains a promise the desert keeps collecting on.
