Two staff at the Nigerian Embassy in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, have been accused of barring several Nigerian ladies stranded in that country from returning home.
The ladies said in a video that the embassy staff asked them to pay $600 each for their return ticket to Nigeria.
According to them, the Lebanese Government already catered for the travel fees for at least 40 of the girls.
The girls went on to tell SaharaReporters in a chat that their employers seized their passports. 
“We are supposed to return to Nigeria on Saturday,” one of the girls said. “Before, they were saying if we do not have our passports they will not let us go.
“Later, they said we are not traveling if we don’t have our ticket money,” she added.
The girls said they were not fully paid for their services yet their employers, who are chiefly women, seized their passports.
“We are hungry, we are tired, we want to come back home,” the girls chorused in the video clip.
SaharaReporters contacted he numbers on the website of the Nigerian Embassy in Beirut but received no feedback.
Some of the girls, who returned last Saturday, told SaharaReporters that agents in Nigeria recruit unsuspecting girls determined to earn a living, upload pictures of them on a Lebanese database for wanted domestic help and in some cases extort as much as N400,000 from them for visa processing and purchase of travel tickets.
Unknown to these girls, Lebanese families go to this database to purchase them and pay for their visas.
The girls say $2,000 is the rate to buy a housemaid from Nigeria.
