10th January, 2014
Imo State Commissioner of Police, Muhammad Musa Katsina, in this interview with NKRUMAH BANKONG-OBI reveals how the baby facories operate and how he daily busts such trafficking rings
There have been reported cases of “baby factories” in Imo State. What is the situation on the ground now?
The situation on ground is now comfortable because we have been able, not only to identify those behind this heinous crime against humanity, but we have gone ahead to dislodge, disarm and prosecute them. Most of these cases are in court.
And I’m also very happy to tell you that the judiciary in Imo State is cooperating with us. Most of the suspects are now remanded at our prison here. We did this because of the determination of our men. As a result of the training and retraining that I have been giving them, we have discovered the evil doers. They had been perpetrating their evil for a long time.
Is that an admission of breakdown in service delivery? You said the vice was there in the past?
I will not want to say that, I will only want to look at my own operational strategy here, without bothering ourselves to look at what happened in the past. I am saying that it is ongoing because of the records. The literature that I stumbled upon in the course of my engagement with these people has really made me to believe that this particular thing was going on in the past. If you are talking of child trafficking, it is not only in Imo State, you are also aware that I was able to bust some in Rivers, Abia. We even went as far as Ilorin in Kwara State to rescue children.
What have you achieved so far, in terms of prosecution of these traffickers?
I said that my relationship is very cordial with the judiciary here. No policeman will delve into any conduct unless it is established by law. So I wouldn’t have gone to court if I didn’t have a section of the law that backs us up. Those so far arrested, as I told you earlier on, are in court. Due to the nature of offences, possession of firearms, we are preparing charges to take them to the Federal High Court.
Unconfirmed estimate puts the number of children so far rescued by security people at 1,000…
No, I will not confirm that. I don’t think we have reached up to 1,000, we are just within that region. But for security reason, I don’t want to raise any alarm. I will want to keep this thing in utmost confidentiality. The most important thing is for us to know that most of these defenceless human beings have been rescued and those behind the act have been identified, arrested and now await prosecution.
A community leader told me that one baby factory they were able to bust could have been breeding kids for rituals. What charges do you press in such circumstances?
There are basic ingredients to establish a case. That is what we call the prima facie case. What you hear from outside is the outer layer. There are what we call the inner circle of an issue. That means the police, that is directly response for the arrest and prosecution. Those outer circle are called the by-standers. By-standers in the sense that they see and act based on rumours or other things. But that does not mean that I will erase the fact that most of these children are also victims of ritual practice.
What confessions do you get from the victims and the culprits?
There are many things that are related, let me just tell you. It’s a case of interwoven phenomenon. Let me talk about these baby factories. Why are they baby factories? They are so called because all the entire production process is there. The issue of getting people to go out and scout for misinformed pregnant teenagers. These are the people we call the hunters. They are very influential, sugar-coated and highly motivational in spreading their message. And they depend heavily on the vulnerability of these teenagers. They convince them of better days ahead. And whenever the girls get inside these dens, some of them are never allowed to smell or receive the aroma of fresh air from the society!
They are kept in captivity, they are rendered totally incommunicado because any form of communication is condemned. They are kept there in perpetual servitude, where they are engaged in doing all sorts of menial jobs while pregnant.
And I will also give you a particular example of the baby factory that I was able to bust in Imo a few weeks of my arrival in Imo State. That was the Ahamafule Babies Home at Umuaka in Njaba Local Government Area. The owner of this factory is popularly known as Madam One Thousand. Though she is on the run, I’m still looking for her. You are aware that in science, we have what you call optical illusion. Yes, you see a beautiful scenario from the outside that depicts a very harmonious atmosphere, you then think of beauty and an enticing environment. You could see a painted wall outside and you see sprawling business activities like pure water business.
This was just a decoy. Behind that was a terrible, horrendous spectacle. You needed to have an eagle eye of a security person to be able to uncover that. This particular woman had been there for over 10 years, nobody considered it fit to look into that. I don’t want to talk of compromise but what I think is that it is just one of the reasons to explain the efficacy of intelligence.
The teenagers were kept in very indecent apartments and they were never allowed to go out. Even after their delivery, they were never allowed to go out. They were kept there just to recycle and recycle and recycle. There, what we saw was something that could definitely shatter your heart because they were not only kept in that solitary confinement, they were kept behind very high perimeter fence, with broken bottles and nails to prevent any attempt to escape. That was the condition we had these innocent young girls. For what reason? They were kept there as raw materials to produce babies.
Now, If you look at the period of 10 years, and we stumbled on this place where we rescued about 27 teenagers and all of them pregnant, some with babies ready for sale, multiply this by ten years, you will be able to know how many innocent babies go out into the trafficking market. If we had not bust that place, it would have been on by now. In the course of rescuing them, we even saw an imbecile. That imbecile was deaf and dumb. She never knew what was happening.
And yet somebody put her into the family way. And it was just like liberation. If you had monitored one of the interviews anchored by Aljazeera, one of the teenagers said something very the philosophical. She said when the treatment became unbearable; when all hope was lost, they decided to turn to their God. So they started to pray and fast for three days, according one of the girls. On the fourth day, police came to their rescue. This goes to tell you that if we are going to use the statement by this teenagers and use it as a basis for generalisation, you will see the sort of inhuman and degrading treatment these innocent Nigerians are being made to face. Now, that is one.
The state government came to our rescue. The first lady came, she quickly changed the girls’ wardrobe, changed their dressing, hosted them to a first lady dinner. After that, they are now being rehabilitated. Some of them have been re-united with their families. It was nothing but an outpouring of emotion. Some of them had earlier concluded that it was all over for them. So the excuse that the girls came there voluntarily is just a quick defence by unrepentant miscreants.
So, from that you can tell that I have my own special intelligence squad so largely spread, that I want to confidently tell you that I have Imo State in my palm. When I’m talking of a special squad, I’m talking of a squad that is a combination of many variables – the police, the public. Having burst the first one, I redirected my operation. I went all round to expose, because as the philosopher Kelvin Inston said: “The world would not be destroyed by evil doers, but by those who watch and fail to take action…”
And it wouldn’t be me, because today, it is by God’s grace that I am here as the commissioner of police. One day, I will leave. The big question that posterity will ask me one day is, “How did you utilise the advantage given to you?”
So ours is a commitment for the betterment of tomorrow; so that our children will be protected, because they are the future of the country. That is the biggest challenge.
Today, I must tell you that we don’t have a single baby factory in Imo State. The last one was recently exposed, that is Dr. Ezuma’s. Now we have reached what we call a desperation level by these miscreants. Now that we are chasing them out of their homes, they have now designed another means of carrying out their activities. I told my men not to worry, this is a sign that the whole edifice is crumbling. The whole syndicate is in disarray. The entire process of the illegality is now being weakened under our resilience and continuous war against them. Now, they have what we call the “hawk”. They are the ones who when they see you with a baby, they come after you like the hawk bird.
Today, I’m telling you we have been able to also deal with that, even those in transit. I will give you a recent case of when one of them struck, in far away Edo State. They took a four-year-old and their destination was Port Harcourt, River State. But they made the mistake of coming to Imo.
Immediately they arrived, the Ambush squad which I constituted was on ground. They were given the greatest chase of their lives, some of them were arrested, they were able to escape with the baby to Rivers State. That very night we were able to trace their hide-out in Rivers, where a medical doctor who received the baby was arrested. But to tell you the importance of this structure, that very night they were able to get to Port Harcourt, where the woman, who we called the landlord, wanted to take the baby away to Imo State, maybe preparatory to taking the baby outside, before my ambush squad came knocking. The baby was rescued, the woman too was arrested. This syndicate goes by a three-level line of operation – the hunters, who we normally refer to as the hawk, they go about snatching babies from their helpless parents. After snatching they hand over to the courier. The couriers are so well-learned in the act of taking the babies away that you need to be a security agent, endowed with an inquisitive mind to nab them.
They speak very convincing language, they can dramatise, they can camouflage to look like anything. They have the capacity to induce their victim to sleep until they reach their destination. So, it’s not like picking anyone. What I do here is that once I pick a suspect, I make sure that all the structures are identified and dismantled. So if I pick a suspect, I give him opportunity to speak. I’m thinking that we have made a remarkable in-road in this and we are still not tired. For every challenge, I derive my inspiration; for every challenge, I derive my strength. And since I am the commander on the field, I lead; my men look at me and also derive their inspiration. We will keep on moving until we clear this area and any other area of the activities of these undesirable elements.
What do these people you have apprehended tell you led them into this trade? I have my hypothesis in relation to infertility and availability of the market. But what are their confessions as you interrogate them?
Some have reasons to give, somehow very adequate but not legal. Not legal in the sense that if you are barren, the law requires you if you really want a child, to adopt. But there are basic established protocols. Legal protocols. Anybody that has gone through the legal means of getting a baby has no problem with me, he or she hasn’t committed any offence.
But the very platform of breeding these children is tainted with illegality. So we cannot use an illegal conduct to push for justification. Like this Dr. Ezuma clinic, it has a very beautiful signboard, but has anybody gone beyond that to see what is happening there, the condition in which these women were kept? One of the teenagers was only 14 years old. She went there, not because she wanted to abort the baby, not because she wanted to sell the baby. She went there because she was introduced by these hunters, who go about hiring innocent girls. They told her: “There’s no problem, this man is a medical doctor, when you get there he will take care of you after delivery, you will go to school and come back and take your baby.” She was lured into this. The consent of this teenager was obtained by fraud.
But immediately she entered that very place, she found herself in the middle of nowhere. Her handset was taken, everything was taken away from her. She was never given any chance to go out and communicate with her parents. When her mother came here, the woman said she had concluded that her daughter was dead.
This baby was forced out of the womb of this innocent girl and immediately given away to their nocturnal buyer because they buy in the night. That baby with blood and placenta and everything was taken away. Is that adoption? If it was adoption, why the hurry? The big question I asked Dr. Ezuma before I charged him to court was, “Where is the baby?” No answer up till now. So I come to the conclusion, if the baby was well-adopted, from a social home, is there record? Up till today, I am telling you with a heavy heart, that the last point of this baby as we investigated was a shrine. That was among the charges we are pressing and Ezuma will go and tell the court about the baby.
Like this hawk that kidnapped this four year old boy, was that adoption? A four-year-old boy in this present world knows everything. So how do you expect him to grow and be happy in the midst of strange parents? That love will not be there. Common sense should have applied. For babies, you can cite tabula rasa – they are not conscious of anything. But a boy of four knows his parents for goodness sake! How do you expect him to grow up and not become something else? There is nothing legitimate about these baby factories, nothing like adoption because they know the procedure to follow.
Are there cultural practices here that could permit the flourishing of such crimes?
The Ibo nation has a very rich culture. I studied the culture of the Ibos. I know very much about their culture. There is no one section that I come across that says you must have a baby factory, or that you must go quietly and snatch babies from innocent children. The culture of the Ibo is above that.
It is just done by criminal gangs. Adoption, in the Ibo culture, is so clearly stated. It is clearly given universally, not just to the Ibo alone. Here, there are those who say, Okay, I cannot deliver, let me marry another woman. It is so clearly stated, not this kind of thing where people move under the cover of the night to start trafficking in children of mostly one, two, three days old.
Everything centres on one issue – outrageous inclination to pecuniary interests. That is it. If not that, what makes a father carry his daughter to another place and keep her in captivity for nine months until she delivers? I have the case here in Imo. Upon her delivery, the medical doctors called him and said, ‘Your daughter had given you a grandchild.’ He now rushed to see this baby girl. His daughter now heard how the man went to negotiate how to sell the baby.
They called the woman who came in a red car and bought that one-day old baby for N200,000. The mother was crying but the father cursed her into submission. He gave the doctor N50,000 and took N150,000. He dragged the girl back home. He told her to stop crying and bought a handset for her. The girl said no, and voluntarily went to the local police and reported. They all came before me, I was moved to tears. The girl said, “What I’m witnessing is killing me slowly. Please, daddy, help me get my baby for me.” We have gone all over the place but we can’t find it. The big question is, where is the baby? If you gave the baby for adoption, then let’s go and take it.
Those who came from Kwara State and bought a one-day-old baby, it was while they were going that my ambush squad caught them. We went to Ilorin; we rescued many of these children. By the time we got there, the woman had even travelled to Saudi Arabia for this [last] year’s pilgrimage. It is the proceeds from this trafficking that she used to travel. My men are there. She can go all over and fly like a kite, vulture or eagle, she will drop and we will pick her to come and face justice.
Let’s come to the cases of Madam One Thousand and Dr. Ezuma, the stars of the business. The woman is on the run now and Ezuma was only caught after he was declared wanted in Abia. This looks like a trans-border trade. Is there any cooperation between you and your colleagues in other states to track Madam One Thousand as well as the trafficking syndicate?
When we talk of cooperation, it is a standard that the police anywhere is the same, not only in Nigeria but all over the world. We have the capacity to track down a fleeing miscreant to any part of the world and we have the capacity to bring him down to face justice, through the operation of the Interpol. When an offence is committed and somebody is on the run, it is wrong for somebody to conclude that we lack the cooperation. That very person is on the run in the midst of 130 million Nigerians. I always say, whereever you go, the world is a circle, you will come back to your dot. What we consider is whether we have abandoned the hunt. No, we will not. We are working together; definitely, we will get her.
But we have made a lot of progress in this. If you look at the whole scenario of baby factories, child trafficking, I think only Madam One Thousand has remained invisible, for now. All the principal actors have been picked. But any other experience is a platform we use in order to obtain information for our strategy. Like Dr. Ezuma, we monitored him and we made sure that by the time we struck, he just had no way of escaping. But about the Madam One Thousand issue, I can assure you that we are cooperating, she has been put on the watch list, other commands are looking for her.
I can sense from your explanation that this illegal business is really big. Can you estimate for me, the worth of the business in naira and kobo, based on the evidence you extracted from those caught?
I think it’s a very lucrative business in the sense that if you buy a child for N900,000 or N1 million and then you are able to sell many of them in a year, you know what that means. I must tell you one area that my own research has led me. They have wholesale and retail. Just like a poultry farm, where you go to buy a day old chick. You groom and sell. In some cases, you see the children, they get them for N1 million naira, groom them for some time, then they sell for N5 million and above. Everything as regards this trade is pecuniary driven, money-driven, just like any other business.
When you see a factory, the objective is to manage the resources so that you can make profit. So, mind you, we have never seen any non-profit-making baby factory. The fact that they make this effort means that somebody is reaping big from it. Dr. Ezumah, have you see his vehicles? When you see them, you will know the value of these vehicles. For goodness sake, in a disciplined country like Nigeria, how can somebody have 10 exotic cars without any single documentation? With impunity, they were all parked there, without a single documentation. If you see the vehicles, then you see a medical doctor. You don’t need to be a medical doctor to know what and what qualifies a place to be a hospital. Here is a man who is 65 years old, calls himself a medical doctor and said: Dr. Ezuma Private Hospital. What is the definition of a hospital? When you go inside, it was the same doctor that was the chief medical director, the matron, the consultant gynaecologist. His wife who had never seen the four walls of any health institution is a consultant gynaecologist.
So, he trained her in his hospital, he trained her in his university, he is the provost of the college of medicine, he is everything. And yet, after graduating his wife, she came out without a certificate. Yet she was the one delivering babies. In the same hospital, ask them, where are the beddings, where is the labour room? Find out if you can get any injectable material. Even ordinary iodine or panadol is not there. It was a crude way of delivery. You can see the sort of impunity following this type of dirty trade. You can see the desperation, the debasement of anything that you call integrity.
What you see is an animal in human form. That kind of animal is too dangerous to mankind. They put on the clothes of deception to ravage our future, desecrating our national pride, our children. The beautiy of any nation lies in its future and the future is our children.
So we have to distinguish between legal adoptions and this child trafficking. Whether we like it or not, if we don’t fight this thing one day, God the Omnipotent, the Omnipresent, God the Most Merciful and Compassionate will say enough is enough.
The National Agency For Prohibition of Trafficking In Persons, NAPTIP, was established in 2003, specifically to fight this kind of crime. What is your level of cooperation with that agency as you wage this war?
You know any other establishment functions differently. There is a section in the Police Act and the constitution that gives us our powers. The police is the lead actor in crime prevention and we have the capacity to arrest, to investigate and prosecute. In Imo State, other agencies – NAPTIP, NDLEA, NAFDAC, the Army, SSS – we are all working together. We are working together in harmony. But as far as I am concerned, I don’t think I have so far suffered any inhibition in my determination to unravel any type of crime. We work together in all that we do. But the difference is that my structures are fully in place everywhere in the state.
I ask this question because I understand the police nabbed one trafficker once, handed him to NAPTIP, which let him off the look. Reports say he later came back and sued that police command. What do you do if the judiciary decides that you are not the right agency to prosecute the person if you take offenders to court?
It will be an aberration. Do I look like somebody who appears incapacitated to handle crime cases? I mean, from your own assessment of me. Do I look like that? I am not aware of any arrest that was handed over. What I am telling you is that Dr. Ezuma had been carefully and meticulously monitored for some months and was arrested some weeks ago in Imo State. And we found him in the midst of series of conducts that we can comfortably describe as offences that required investigation. We found him wanting and we therefore charged him on 18-count charges to court. So everything here is working for me. I have a group of intelligent lawyers, we sit down with them, they advise me on whatever we do. I am not aware whether he was previously arrested, what I am aware of is that a name that resembles that of Dr. Ezuma was identified in Abia State and they destroyed his hospital. I am yet to establish the relationship. My lawyers are working on that so that we can add the evidence of that to the case file. As a policeman, I don’t rush into conclusion. The names can be identical. But my own Dr. Ezuma is here with us, in prison, on remand, so I think the position of the police is established in such a way that it doesn’t suffer any inhibitions.
If our law must be efficacious, those charged with the responsibility of enforcing them must be knowledgeable, intelligent, bold, and must be courageous to carry the war against crime and criminality to the doorstep of anybody because nobody is above the law.
Only yesterday, we caught another person, he came all the way from Aba and feigned madness and went and snatched a baby from a woman like a hawk. The colleague was waiting for him on a bike. As he was rushing, the woman raised alarm and my ambush squad arrested him and rescued the baby. And you know, the whole thing is that the greatest weapon against deviant behaviour is the fear of sanction. I am a professional crime scene investigator. I have been to Cairo Police Academy, Egypt; I was in India Crime Record Bureau, in New Delhi, I was in Italy with the The Carabinieri [Police]; I was in public safety office in Vancouver, Canada, all on crime scene investigations. So, I train my men, I go with them.