Husband Connives With Wife, Sells Only Child For N500,000 (Pictured)
Category: Bizarre & Odd News
The Nigerian Child Rights Law 2003 specifically prohibits the sale or
procurement of a child but in the world 31-year-old Gideon Ani lives in,
no such law exists.
Ani, an unemployed indigene of Abia State,
who is currently being quizzed by investigators at the Department of
Criminal Investigation, Yaba, Lagos had just had his first child, a boy,
from his second wife, 23-year-old Joy.
His first wife, Victoria had no child yet.
If
one expected that Ani’s newborn son would be a bundle of joy for him
and his family, one would be right. Unfortunately, the joy that came to
Ani’s heart was for a totally different reason.
“I am jobless, I
had no money and was suffering along with my family. Then a strange
thought entered my mind,” he told police investigators.
Ani’s
strange thought was not about urgently looking for a job to take care of
his family and the new addition; neither was it about obtaining a loan
that could help him resuscitate his business.
He had found a way out of his dire financial troubles – looking for a buyer for his son.
“I
thought about it for a while, and I realised that since the baby was
mine, I could do whatever I wanted with him,” he told the police
But
Ani realised he could not broker the deal alone and thought about the
closest person he could share such a strange thought with – his first
wife.
Victoria, an Ebonyi State indigene, who had been married to
her husband without a child for more than three years, instantly jumped
at the idea.
She was saddled with the responsibility of finding a buyer.
A
police source who was privy to the case, told our correspondent that
Victoria found a buyer who agreed to pay N500,000 for the baby.
“The
husband brought Joy from Abia State and lodged her at a motel in Orile
area of Lagos. He took the baby from her under the guise of taking the
baby to the clinic for treatment,” the source said.
Our correspondent learnt that if not for the employees of the motel, Joy would have died in the room in which she was lodged.
It
was learnt that in order to ensure Joy did not venture out of the
motel, her husband locked her in when he left with the baby.
She
was only rescued four days later, when a motel employee who was
concerned that the room had not been opened for a while, asked a floor
manager to unlock the door.
“By the time they found the woman,
she could not even speak properly anymore, she was too weak. She had no
phone with her. She had not eaten for a long time,” the police said.
It
was after Joy was stabilised that she managed to narrate what had
happened and gave information on how her husband could be found by the
police from the Orile division.
Our police source said, “We
eventually found him and he also led us to where we arrested his first
wife. The woman told us that she only agreed with the husband after he
pressured her to go along with the plan.
“The first thing the man
said was that he only gave the child out since it was his to give and
that he did not actually collect money. But we later learnt that he gave
him out N500,000 was agreed.”
The police have arrested the buyer of the baby, whose identity is still being kept secret.
Saturday
PUNCH learnt that Ani and his first wife still maintain that no money
had exchanged hands but the investigators at the DCI told Saturday PUNCH
that whether they had been paid for the baby or not, they would get to
the root of the matter.
When our correspondent visited the DCI,
it was learnt that investigators had prevented journalists from
photographing the suspects.
A relations of the first wife, whom
our correspondent saw at the department explained that he could not
comment as efforts were being made by their families to settle the
issue.
The spokesperson for the Lagos State Police Command, Mr.
Kenneth Nwosu, told Saturday PUNCH that the baby had been recovered
unharmed and reunited with his mother.
Sale of children by parents now a trend
It
is true that Ani’s case is indeed a strange abomination but it is not
unheard of. In recent times, The PUNCH has reported a couple of cases in
which children have either been sold like a mere commodity or given out
as collateral for loan.
Just last week Friday, February 27,
2014, PUNCH reported how a middle-aged farmer, George Maduabuchi, in
Owerrinta, Abia State allegedly sold his 14-month-old son for N300,000.
The
man, who already had three children connived with another suspect to
sell the child to a herbalist when the baby fell ill. When the herbalist
told him he could not heal the child, he simply sold him to the man.
In
another report, a Bakassi refugee father, 40-year-old Edet Okon, gave
up her 12-year-old daughter, Mary, as a collateral for a loan of
N600,000. One of the many reasons cited by the father at the time was
that his first daughter was battling blood cancer and the loan was for
her treatment.
Also, much earlier than this, in May 2013, there
was a report on a pregnant woman and her husband that sold their unborn
baby for N200,000 even though the pregnancy was still seven months old
at the time.
There seems to be a shift in the worrisome trend of baby factories which came to public knowledge in 2013 in Nigeria.
Between 2013 and 2014, not less than 10 baby factories were uncovered in the south-east of Nigeria.
The
girls and young women who were recovered in baby factories in the past
cited both poverty and unwanted pregnancies as reasons for falling
victims of ‘baby merchants’ in the
country.
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