UN expert and renowned US-based law professor, Uche Ofodile has tasked the Nigerian government on the urgent need to consider laws that will effectively protect house helps, considering the numerous ugly stories of abuse and molestation coming out of the country.

Ofodile who is Africa’s representative in United Nations Human Rights Council’s ‘Working Group on Rights of Farmers’, highlighted the plight of Nigeria’s house helps in her statement to mark this year’s DAC whose theme is “Ensuring universal access to water, sanitation and hygiene for every child in Africa”.

In order to make such laws effective, she said FG should seriously consider adopting mandatory reporting rules for those whose work brings them in contact with vulnerable children including doctors and teachers; establish law review commissions to identify loopholes in existing federal and state laws and regulations designed to protect children; impose stiffer punishment on those who unlawfully recruit, transport, harbour, receive or hire Child Domestic Workers. CDWs and those who abuse them; establish and fully operationalise national and state-wide social service system specially targeting children and other vulnerable groups; sensitise the public on the provisions of laws and services designed to protect children from abuse; and also address economic and social barriers to education and justice for children, particularly in rural areas.

She stated: “No Nigerian child deserves to live and die in agony and misery in the name of child domestic work, foster care, or traditional guardianship. Poor children and children in rural areas deserve decent schools and economic opportunities and should not have to sell their very soul to eat, receive education, or access other basic social services.

“The voice of Ochanya, Chiziterem, and thousands of other children who have suffered as a result of abuse and exploitative CDW disguised as child fostering beckons us all. I call on the local, state and federal government of Nigeria and the Nigerian society to immediately pass federal and state house help protection laws.”

The Day of the African Child is celebrated annually on June 16.