Women’s leader of the Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation in Ghana, Mrs Franca Ani, tells BIODUN BUSARI why many Nigerian women and girls end up as commercial sex workers and cheap labourers in Ghana
Can you tell us about yourself?
I’m Oheneyere Franca Ani. I’m an entrepreneur, devoted wife, and proud mother of twins. I’m also a talk show host and author. I’m the women’s leader for the Nigerians in the Diaspora Organisation, Ghana chapter. I’m a Nigerian, but I married a Ghanaian. My husband is a Ghanaian chief.
How long have you been the NIDO women’s leader?
I’ve been in Ghana for 14 years, but I became the NIDO women’s leader in Ghana three years ago. In the whole of NIDO as an association, it is only Ghana as a chapter that has the NIDO Women’s Wing.
Why is it only NIDO Ghana that created the women’s leader office?
The reason why the leadership of NIDO in Ghana created this office is that Ghana is a special case. Ghana is a special case for Nigerians. Ghana is the closest Anglophone African country to Nigeria.
So, you find a lot of Nigerians in Ghana. When Nigerians think of leaving their country for another African country, they first think of Ghana because of what we have in common, especially language and proximity.
You find out that what NIDO is trying to do with Nigerians in different countries often starts with Ghana, because Ghana has a peculiar case in the sense that it’s easier for a Nigerian to cross over to Ghana.
So, you find out that we have a large population of Nigerians in Ghana. We see that Nigerians in Ghana are the most populous in the whole of Africa. When you count where Nigerians reside, I think Ghana would be about the first in Africa.
Having said this, there’s a need for us to take care of our women and girls who find themselves in Ghana. The women’s leader’s office takes special interest in girls because it’s easier to bring our girls to Ghana to do one or two jobs.
Most of them were promised jobs in Ghana but it was not so. There’s a need for us to take care of the women and the girls, that’s why NIDO women’s wing was initiated.
What is attractive in Ghana that lures Nigerian women and girls?
Ghana is not an easy place to stay because it’s quite expensive. But for most people in Nigeria, they think Ghana is the United States in Africa. It is just an illusion for them because the agents who bring them paint a perfect scenario for them, and they fall for it.
If you make about 100 Ghanaian cedis, it is about N11,000 in Nigeria. So, when the girls are in Nigeria, they tell them that they can make 1,000 Ghanaian cedis. They (Nigerians) will just calculate the money, without thinking whether it is easy to make that kind of money.
Everybody wants quick money and shortcuts. Once they tell them that when they come to Ghana, they will be paid a lot of money as they work in organisations, they jump on any available buses to Ghana through the borders.
I had someone who said she was told that she would be paid 2,000 Ghana cedis in a day which is about N200,000. All these things are not true. They won’t think about it so deeply.
When they arrive in Ghana, they will use them for all manner of things like prostitution and other illegal jobs in the name of making money. They won’t think of food, accommodation and other expenses.
It’s not easy. Nobody gives you anything here. So, that is why when they come, they are subjected to all manner of menial jobs.
Some of them are dying, some are being raped, and some are being used for cheap labour. There’s nothing you will not hear concerning Nigerian women in Ghana.
Who are those responsible for bringing them to Ghana?
The people who brought them are Nigerians in Ghana. Some of them have agents in Nigeria that they work with. They don’t come legally. They come illegally through borders, what we call a ‘back door’.
When they bring them in numbers, they put them in a rented apartment. Ten girls may stay in a room. They collect their phones and ask them to go out at night for prostitution to make money for them. Men are also there.
Why is it difficult for them to go back to Nigeria when they realise Ghana is not the promised land they think it is?
When they are brought in, the first thing those traffickers do is to seize their phones. They disconnect them from the world. They do not have access to the outside world.
We also have a case when some of them ran away. When they run away, they don’t know where to go. They don’t know who to contact. Some of those people, we manage to get in touch with them, and that’s where we come in.
We take them home and start working with the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission to repatriate them. There was a time we had a case of a Nigerian woman who ran away from the human trafficker who brought her to Ghana.
She would sleep at the beach at night and sell weed for miscreants during the day. She became pregnant. When she got pregnant, she didn’t know who the father of the baby was, because everybody slept with her.
The guys paid her money and slept with her right there at the beach. The kind of life she was living could not make her go back to Nigeria. Most of them don’t want to go home.
There was also another case of a lady who was in prison. She was into prostitution and the authorities caught her and she went to prison. She was having a university degree programme and was already in the 300 level while in prison.
After she was released, she told us that she would like to go back to Nigeria. Then she would continue with her studies. Do you know that the girl never went back to school? She went back to prostitution instead.
It was another lady who left the prison two months after her who told me that she had gone back into prostitution. The unfortunate thing is that they don’t want to do legal work that would help them. They want quick money.
Meanwhile, there are some of them who want to go home. If you get them, they want to go. But most of the time, they don’t want to go. They have been away from home for two or three years, and they think people will laugh at them when they go back to Nigeria.
They don’t want to go home with nothing. The same thing is applicable to men. They engage in cybercrime. Last weekend, some of them were captured and they were ready to go back to Nigeria. Some of them claim that home is also not comfortable.
There is hardship and poverty at home. Some of them are also greedy. I tell them that if they don’t go to school, there is nothing for them in Ghana. But they prefer to hang their coat where their hands can’t reach.
Everyone likes to show off even if they don’t have all it takes. They want to go home at Christmas and flaunt their fortune, so that mentality is what makes them stay in Ghana, thinking they need to make illegal money.
When they do what they like here, they know that their people don’t know about the illegal stuff they dip their hands into.
What are the statistics of women and girls that your office can give to help?
Last year, NIDO was able to repatriate about 13 girls for the first batch. The youngest was about 13 years old. At the end of 2025, NIDO, if I’m not mistaken, had taken back about 26 girls to Nigeria. I don’t have the number of the boys, because most times, I don’t deal with the boys.
In general, from 2024 to 2025, I would say that NIDO took about 50 girls back home to Nigeria. Then this year, in January, we took about 13 Nigerians, two women and 11 boys.
There was a woman who gave birth, but her baby was stolen from her in the hospital. We fought for her. Eventually, she went back to Nigeria to reunite with her family and all that. She stayed home with us for 10 days. She’s from Port Harcourt in Rivers State.
What is your office doing to arrest the traffickers behind this menace?
The first issue is the ability to identify them. When you get the girls, they can never tell you where they are coming from or the name of their madam. It’s only on a few occasions that we got and traced their hideouts. They take their photos and all that.
NIDO cannot fight this menace alone. It is those who are courageous who make NIDO act with other authorities.
There was a human trafficker who was arrested because some of the victims talked. They retrieved many girls from his place. He was taken to court and sentenced to 10 years in 2024.
To answer this question, we don’t get to know these people if their victims don’t speak out. In all of these, NIDCOM also plays a major role with the embassy.
There was a time when a number of girls were repatriated; it was NIDCOM that brought buses to take the girls. Some of the state governors where the girls hailed from also came. So, they help, but it’s not enough.
What legal jobs can they do when they decide not to return to Nigeria?
Firstly, Nigerian graduates cannot get blue-collar jobs in Ghana because the Ghanaian government has not satisfied its citizens by providing them with jobs. Have they finished employing their people? No.
The only aspect where they get jobs with companies and organisations is when their offices in Nigeria transfer them because we have people like that in Ghana, like bankers and other professionals.
Nigerian graduates coming to Ghana for jobs are only deceiving themselves. There are other things they can do. They can have vocations. Women can have hairdressing and sewing shops.
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