Yaman park sex market: A global perspective

By Prof. Terhemba Shija

(Part One)

The reports are quite bawdy and provocative. Makurdi, the gateway city between the North and the South, is said to have an illicit sex market; a nightly bazaar that retails hundreds of unripe teenage girls; a harlem for sex tourism catering mostly for middle-aged, sex-starved trailer and tanker drivers from the North.

The Yaman park is a busy spot for commuters in the day time. But it is even a busier place for night crawlers at night. The place sparkles with a million lights in the jungle serenity of the dark Makurdi skyline. It bubbles with the activities of food hawkers, beer sellers, hemp vendors and the likes providing services to huge crowds of people ranging from Okada riders to truck-pushers, menial job laborers, taxi drivers and possibly spirits or Djinns acting in fraternity with the human world.

Then, these daughters of Eve, in provocative skimpy dresses and colours descend on Yaman park like a colony of butterflies to complete the scenes of debauchery. The live music lightens the air, the beers and liquor shoot up adrenalines, the weeds provoke intense vulgarity and the lewd twerky dances motivate a libidinious craze in the clientele.

There’s always no dull moment. For once, you would think happiness has finally returned to Benue
But it is a paradoxical kind of happiness. A happiness squeezed out of poverty and depression. A fake happiness concocted to momentarily escape the trauma of displacement, or the anguish of poverty or the depression of homelessness, since most of these teenage sex workers are either inmates of nearby IDP camps or children of people living in abject poverty.

Yaman park at night is basically a brothel without residential rooms. The giant underbelly of the trailers parked by the roadside provide enough shelter for sexual bouts at no cost to the participants. The gutters surrounding the park reek fiercely with the stench of urine, human faces and rotten fruits, and yet the mirth of the nightlife of this spot apparently far surpasses that of a five star hotel.

Yaman park is afterall merely a prominent spot near the Wurukum roundabout, along Abuja -Enugu expressway. It is not the cause of licentiousness in Benue State. It is just a symptom of a bigger problem of a global scale. Whether we talk about crime, unemployment, terrorism, fulani herdsmen invasion, cult wars, political thuggery, communal conflicts or teenage prostitution, the dynamics underlying the problems are universal and the same.

These problems are closely connected and interdependent. We need to examine the broader picture to understand the structure of the Web, to enable us advance solutions to them. These ideas will be discussed in part 2 of this post tomorrow.