* A file photo of prostitutes
Runs! That used to be the buzzword exclusive for top girls in tertiary institutions in the country. It means sleeping with multiple partners, including gigolos in a bid to meet one’s needs.
Female students had what seemed to be a plausible excuse to bed men for money – comfort and status while in school, especially if one came from an economically poor background.
Times have since changed and prostitution or ‘runs’ is no longer the preserve of ladies in higher institutions in the country.
Nowadays, more boudoir doors are being opened. Irrespective of their age, more girls are engaging in ass-peddling, citing the harsh economic situation in the country as an alibi.
In Lagos for example, investigations have shown that a lot of prostitutes are no longer found in brothels. Every lady deep in the sex escapades is good a fleshy ware to be bought off by any man who can afford her bill.
Of course, the price tag is not usually unreachable. On a street like Allen Avenue, in Ikeja, hitherto a den of prostitutes and hippies has overtaken nude clubs where men are entertained by bevy ladies for a fee.
Checks indicate that many of these girls come from campuses such as the universities of Lagos, Lagos State University, University of Ibadan and other schools around.
In night clubs in places like Yaba, Lagos, the girls are mostly dropouts, some of them still living with their parents. One of such hookers who hangs out around a very popular hotel near the University of Lagos said: “I come here regularly because I need to take care of myself and then support my family. My dad is a retiree and his pension is not enough to provide all of the family’s needs.”
In places like Richmond Hotel, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Latino Nightclub, Umuahia, Abia State, The Mirage, Calabar, Cross River State and other places around the country, ladies hangout to seek men to bed them for a fee.
Negotiations in such occasions are just as quick and fast as the bills change hands. From inside cars, roadsides, uncompleted buildings, to hotels, the girls are ready to let men in, in exchange for money.
Some who can’t afford to leave home to stay in brothels or clubs, the social media has come as a solution. Whether it’s facebook, Blaberry Messenger, twitter, Whatsapp or other forms of the new media, sex is one of the articles of trade most people hawk on those platforms in the country.
And apart from a fraction of those who indulge in it for pleasure, very many others explore sex as a way of augmenting income from other financial streams. Even some small income earners like Ada Okere, who sells second handed clothes at Berger area of Lagos still has a retinue of men she satisfies after meeting on the social media.
The manner the young lady bargained the price made correspondent wonder if she, like workers in some business concerns, has a target to meet.
Okere simply replied that she was merely using “what she had to get what she wanted,” and with her ravishing beauty, her body is succulent enough to bring her the fortune she craved, at least for the moment.
Sob stories bordering on poverty are very rife. Oyingbo, one of the slums in Lagos accommodates five spectacularly decrepit guesthouses where girls inhabit to hawk their bodies, with the rail line as a runway where their barely clad bodies are displayed.
A visit to the place, revealed some under aged girls, some of them cited the inability of families to cater for them as the impetus for their taking up prostitution or as they put it ‘hustling’ to help themselves.
For Happiness Odion, who plies the trade in one dingy house called Niger, “Life is difficult in Nigeria.
“I’m not supposed to sleep around with men before I can get money to buy the essential things that I need. My dream is to make some tangible money, go to Europe where things are better. But not for my poor and aged parents, I would have gone even with the little I have made already. But, I need to be sure that I leave something for them before I travel out,” she told our reporter who visited the enclave feigning as a customer.
Saddiq Radda, a lecturer at the Bayero Univeristy, Kano, who felt exasperated with the situation for example listed sex-for-marks as one of the means girls use to obtain undue advantage over their colleagues in higher institution of learning
“The malpractice they [students] get involved in includes luring lecturers with sex and other material items to get undue advantage in the university,” he wrote in a research paper.
With the harsh economic situation in Nigeria, coupled with a dip in morality and the advent of social media, prostitution, a vice that was frowned at with disgust, is becoming a rave among girls. Their patrons, mostly middle-income earners cut across all strata of the society who can afford a fee for the sometimes one-off service.
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