The Blossoming Illegality: Inside the Kenya – Uganda Human Trafficking Racket

In August 2021, Stella Nelima was only 15 years old when her father bombarded her with the news of her traveling from Uganda to Kenya for work.

She was not told the kind of work she was going to do, nor the salary she would be paid.

“He never asked if I wanted work or not. He never asked if I wanted to travel to Kenya or not, but I had no luxury of questioning his decisions,’’ said Nelima.

Two days later, Nelima was on a Nairobi bound bus with her destination only known to the driver of the bus she boarded.

After a 12-hour long and tiresome journey, she arrived in Nairobi to find an unknown woman waiting to receive her at the bus company offices.

The woman would later turn out to be her boss. It dawned on Nelima that he had been trafficked to work as a house girl without her consent.

“My mother died when I was 14 years old, and my father remarried a year after. He refused to pay for my school fees and asked me to get married instead but I refused,” Nelima told The Kenya Times in an interview.

For 10 months, Nelima says she worked without receiving a single cent of her salary. Her entire salary was sent to her father back in Uganda and for the ten months she stayed with her employer she was not allowed to talk to her people back home.

Nelima, a church lover narrated her story to a local pastor in Umoja who rescued her from slavery and placed her under care.

The trafficking cartel

The story of Nelima has opened the lid on a well-organized and connected human trafficking syndicate minting hundreds of thousands of shillings through the trafficking of young girls to work as house helps in Kenya, The Kenya Times has learned.

The racket also traffics young men who are deployed to work as farm hands in western Kenya.

In this investigative piece, The Kenya Times investigates how a racket of human traffickers are taking advantage of the laxity of border officials to traffic underage girls from rural Uganda to Kenya where they are employed as house girls.

The trafficking ring operates from both sides of the Kenya – Uganda border in Busia and Malaba and involves traffickers, security officials and drivers of leading transport companies plying the Nairobi-Busia-Malaba-Kampala route.

Acting on information from Nelima and a tip-off from a source who had procured an underage house help from Uganda, The Kenya Times Investigations team traveled to Tororo Uganda, the epicenter of the traffic trade to unravel how a notorious cartel is having a field day and making hundreds of thousands from naive parents and young girls from rural Uganda.

Our writer posed as a client who wanted to procure underage girls to be deployed as house girls in middle income estates within Nairobi.

To facilitate our investigation, our source in Nairobi agreed to link our writer to one of the trafficking ring leaders in Uganda.

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The lead trafficker agreed to meet with our undercover writer on condition that he was accompanied by the source who is well known to the trafficker.

Our undercover writer together with his source met the man who only identified as John at the Busia border crossing point.

John identifies himself as a Ugandan national with Kenyan roots.

During the meeting, our writer asked John if he could find three girls to be trafficked to Nairobi where they were to work as house helps.

John said it was possible if modalities for their transport to Nairobi were arranged and his charges paid.

The Kenya Times asked John how he manages to convince the underage girls to cross the border into Kenya and he said once parents have agreed, the girls have no option than to comply.

“There is a lot of poverty there (Tororo) and most girls are not in school. Parents prefer marrying off their girls or sending them to Kenya to work as house helps as opposed to sending them to school,” he said.

According to John, before a girl is trafficked to Kenya, the trafficker agrees with the potential employer on the salary to be paid. The salary is shared between the parents and the trafficker.

Poverty

After the first meeting in Busia Kenya, John agreed to take us to a rural village in Tororo, some 50kms from the Busia border.

This village is predominantly occupied by the Acholi community, where most trafficked girls come from.

Majority of the trafficked girls are sourced from Lira, Amolatar, Mbale, Tororo, Soroti and Mukono in Western Uganda

John suggested that we use an illegal border crossing point meters away from the official Busia crossing point, but we insisted on using the legal crossing point.

The illegal crossing points are the ones traffickers use to sneak the girls into Kenya before they are transported to Nairobi.

Surprisingly at the Busia-One border stop point, John did not go through the normal clearances as we did.

On inquiry we found out that Ugandans crossing the border have a free way of crossing over to Kenya and back without much scrutiny, something that makes it easy for traffickers to thrive.

What perturbed as even more was when John showed as a Kenyan identification card, he holds even though he is a Ugandan national

“For you to do this business effectively you must have both Kenyan and Ugandan identification documents,” he said.

After the immigration clearance at the border, we embarked on a two-hour journey to Tororo where John was going to help us traffic three girls into Kenya.

Once in Tororo we were introduced to two middle aged men who were parents to two young girls aged 14 and 16. These were among the three girls our contact had procured for us.

John led the negotiations on our behalf. He convinced the parents that we were good people who would take good care of their daughters.

After some 30 minutes of negotiations, the parents agreed to release their daughters to work as house helps in Nairobi. A monthly salary of UGsh 90,000(Ksh 6000) per month for each girl was agreed.

The salary was, however, to be through John who was the broker. He would take his share of Ksh 3000 from the salary of each girl every month before passing the balance to the parents.

We agreed that we would pass by the following day to pick up the young girls on our way back.

It was late already, and John proposed that we visit the third girl’s parents the following morning.

Also Read: 18 Human Trafficking Victims Rescued In Athi River

During our night stay in Tororo, we secretly without the knowledge of John got hold of Gertrude Nyamulima, a human rights activist who has been fighting female genital mutilation and teenage marriages in the region.

According to Nyamulima, poverty and ignorance is forcing parents in the region to release their girls for early marriages or for domestic work in Kenya or the Middle East.

She says the Ugandan government is aware of the trafficking problem but has simply refused to act.

“What do you expect when the immigration officials and police are part of the scheme?’ she posed.

Since 2015, Nyamulima has saved 50 girls from the trafficking syndicate and taken them to safe houses in Kampala.

The following morning, we went back to the village to negotiate for the third girl.

She was barely 15 and had already been married off as a fifth wife to a 57-year-old farmer.

She agreed to come to Nairobi to work as a house-help since her sickly husband could no longer provide for her.

Her terms were similar to those of the first two girls, and we agreed with John that he would traffic them across the Busia border from where we were to link up.

John asked for Ksh 2100 to facilitate the transport of the three girls from Tororo to Busia border.

As John left, thinking we would travel with the three girls to Nairobi, he promised to locate four more girls in one months’ time.

We informed Nyamulima of the plan and she agreed to travel to Busia the following day and pick up the three girls once they had been trafficked into Kenya through an illegal crossing point.

To convince us that he could help us get girls from Uganda, John revealed that he had trafficked 300 underage girls into Kenya since the year 2000.

Illegal border crossing points

And just as we had agreed, John, the trafficking ringleader, called the following day to inform us that he had arrived with the girls at the Busia border and gave us instructions on where we were to link up.

We boarded a bodaboda that dropped us at Marachi border, an illegal crossing point west of the main Busia one border stop point.

The illegal crossing point is a beehive of activities on both ends of Kenya and Uganda with a no man’s land separating the two countries

Uniformed police officers from both Kenya and Uganda are stationed on either end of the border but interestingly no checks are done on those crossing the border into Kenya or Uganda.

To easily cross the border, the young girls are instructed by their traffickers not to carry any heavy luggage like bags and not to look neat.

John said because the traffickers are known to police officers, they have to bribe them for girls to cross over.

On the Ugandan side, border police officers were bribed as low as Ksh 50 while their Kenyan counterparts received Ksh 200 for every girl that crosses the border.

Another illegal border crossing point is Sofia, East of the Busia one stop border point.

Unlike the Marachi crossing point, the Sofia crossing point does not have police officers patrolling it. The crossing point is watched over by Community policing officials who work closely with the trafficking ring.

After John delivered the three girls on the Kenyan side, he demanded a service fee of Ksh 2000 which he said was to be shared with border police officers on both sides of the border.

Bus drivers

To know how the young Ugandan girls are able to travel from Busia to Nairobi without valid documents, we asked John to help us facilitate their movement from the border to Nairobi.

To ensure the girls escape the police dragnet along the way to Nairobi, John connected as to a bus driver of a leading bus company plying the Nairobi-Busia route.

We told the driver that we had three Ugandan girls who needed to travel to Nairobi

The driver demanded  Ksh 400 for every girl, money he said would be used to bribe police officers along the way.

The drivers are also bribed Ksh 200 for every girl he was to ferry to Nairobi. These were his personal charges.

Once the traffickers have booked travel tickets for the girls, they are handed over to bus drivers who are then given telephone numbers of the persons waiting for them in Nairobi.

Ironically at one of the bus company booking offices in Busia town, a sticker warning against human trafficking is visible on the wall

After we parted ways with John, we connected with Gertrude Nyamulima, the human rights activist who had agreed to take the three young girls to a rescue center and facilitate their going back to school.

Busia county police commander Maxwell Nyaema acknowledged the challenge and said the free border was making it hard for them to crack down on the traffickers

“We have Kenyans going to Uganda every day and Ugandans crossing over to Kenya daily. Some have families on both sides, many speak languages from both sides,”

“When you stand at the border you can’t easily tell who is a Kenyan or a Ugandan child, “said Nyaema.

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Nyaema however noted that collaboration between Kenyan and Ugandan officials in the recent past has made it hard for traffickers to freely carry on with illegal activities.

Majority of the trafficked girls cross the border during market days on the Busia side of the Kenyan border. On such days it is easy for one to cross the border with some luggage since traders from both sides are allowed to carry luggage during market days.

According to an immigration official at the one stop border point, there is more focus on transit cargo and individuals crossing in cars than those on foot, something he says makes it easy for traffickers to thrive.

Mitigations

In 2021 Police in Busia District of Uganda rescued 10 suspected victims of human trafficking and arrested seven suspects believed to behind the crime. The ten were being trafficked to Kenya

According to Mathew Tusubira, the Uganda Busia Deputy Resident District Commissioner in July 2021, 43 children below 15 years were trafficked to Kenya 34 in August, and 37 in September.

Tusubira, attributed the increased cases of child trafficking to several porous border crossing points and high school dropout rates in the region.

He regretted that most of the cases of trafficking of underage girls are reported only after the parents fail to receive their share of salaries from the brokers

“A parent will come four or five months after their daughter was trafficked to Kenya and at times tracing such girls becomes hard because they do not have any form of identification,” said Tusubira.

On seeking a reaction from a senior immigration official in Nairobi, he referred The Kenya Times to the National Police Service 

“This matter is under the domain of the police, please talk to them,” he said.

In Nairobi’s Umoja estate, a group of well-wishers under the East Africa Girls Response Forum has been tracing trafficked underage girls and handing them over to the Ugandan embassy in Nairobi or reuniting them with their families.

Terry Wanjera,a resource mobilizer with the group, says most of the girls they have been rescued since 2019 were aged between 14 and 19 years.

Wanjera says they have so far rescued some 87 underage Ugandan girls who were working as house helps in Umoja, Eastleigh,Kayole and Kariobangi South estates in Nairobi.