But between 2am and 4am on Monday, May 26, 2014, night marauders came calling in their home when Akuvi’s husband was away at work in Apapa area of Lagos.
Their target was one single thing; the couple’s three-year-old daughter, Blessing.
“I wish I did not come to Nigeria for a better life. My life is finished now, my child is gone,” Akuvi said.
“My life is over, I can’t stand this agony. I never knew a child could be stolen while asleep in her own house in the middle of the night. I knew thieves break in to steal money and other valuables, but I never heard of thieves breaking in to steal a child.
“This is unfair. I don’t even feel safe again. The police are not helping at all. Had I known, I would have stayed back in Togo. I am finished,” she told our correspondent.
Akuvi, a trader in her 20s, wobbled out of a corner in which she had sat looking like someone in a trance. When our correspondent first spoke with her, there was no impression that she understood anything she heard as she stared at the floor.
She looked up when one of her relations shook her shoulder. Her eyes shone like someone who was under a spell.
But Akuvi was not under any supernatural force. Her spirit had simply been rendered dormant since her daughter was abducted right under her nose, through the window of their bedroom, while she was sleeping.
On Sunday (May 25) Sojine left for work in Apapa. By nightfall, his young wife and three children went to sleep, in the same room.
But by morning, the girl among the children was missing.
Akuvi, a fair complexioned young woman, was dressed in a T-shirt and wrapper that did not seem to have been changed for days when she spoke with Saturday PUNCH.
She strung along her words slowly but once in a while, her face creased into a sob that threatened her coherence.
The woman said, “I woke up around 2am to plug our rechargeable lamp when electricity came on. Two of my children slept on the bed beside me while Blessing slept on the floor on a mat.
“I went back to sleep and I remember Blessing was exactly where she was on the floor when we all went to bed in the night. By 4.30am, I woke up because it was my turn to sweep our compound.
“The first thing I noticed was that the drawer where I keep my children’s clothes was pulled out and placed on the floor. I put on the light and realised my daughter was gone.”
Akuvi struggled to remember every detail. Tears streamed down her face and her distress was unmistakable as she vigorously shook her head in self-pity.
With many neighbours still in the final lap of a blissful sleep, Akuvi’s desperate shriek rent the air.
“Jesus! Somebody has taken my baby!” a neighbour, who was jolted awake at the time told our correspondent that she heard the young mother scream.
Akuvi said her panic rose when she went to the door and realised it was firmly bolted as she had locked it the previous night.
“I went to the window after I checked the door and what I saw made me scream,” she said.
The net on the window had been cut with a sharp object. Our correspondent noticed that the window did not have burglar-proof bars.
Being the last room towards the back of the house, the Ananis’ window faces the backyard, a small enclosure closed off to prying eyes by a five-feet fence.
However, Akuvi reportedly went berserk, screaming and knocking on doors of sleeping neighbours. Many of them would later join in the search for the child.
Not much has come out of notifying the police. Blessing has simply vanished.
Blessing is still missing and her father is languishing in police custody. All these have compounded Akuvi’s agony. Her relations told our correspondent that they feared for her mental health because she had remained inconsolable since the incident and had started acting sometimes like she is not in her right senses.
Depressed is a mild way to describe the image Akuvi cut when our correspondent spoke with her.
Tears ran down the young woman’s face in torrents. She said, “I am all alone. My husband, who is supposed to be here is suffering in jail. Police are not even telling me anything. Where would I search for my child? I cannot sleep or shut my eyes, all I see is the face of my girl and I cannot stop thinking about what is happening to her.
“My children are suffering because their father has been locked up by the police. He is the breadwinner. Why are the police doing this to us? Why are they making us suffer more?”
Our correspondent visited the traditional ruler of Shasha but he was said to be unavailable. One of his chiefs, the Otun Baale of Shasha, Chief Shuaibu Yahaya, who attended to our correspondent, said such a crime had never happened in the area before.
Asked what was being done in the community about the matter, the chief said, “There is nothing we can do on our part than to advise the people to remain calm and allow the police to do their job. We are as shocked as everybody because stealing a child is very strange here. I cannot even say much on the matter because it is now a police issue.”
When our correspondent visited the Akuvi’s home, the residents of the area gathered around to sympathise, each interjecting words of prayers for the safe return of the child.
“How can a child get lost like a pin?”one of them asked in anger.
“I don’t trust that man (Sunny). Only someone who knows this house well will understand that there is no burglar-proof bars on the window. Only someone who is familiar with this house would know that children sleep in that room. I am no seer but police need to investigate Sunny well,” one of the Ananis’ neighbours said. She did not give her name. Apparently, the neighbours were afraid of further harassment and arrest by the police.
There has been a series of child thefts in recent months, supporting the fears of child rights activists that a frightening trade in children is growing in the country.
According to Dr. Josephine Effah-Chukwuma, the growing trade in children in the country does not seem to be ringing alarm bells in the quarters of appropriate Nigerian authorities. Effah Chukwuma is a women and children rights advocate and founder of Project Alert on Violence Against Women, who has written a book about child trafficking in Nigeria.
Between the 16th and 19th century, the transatlantic trade in human beings, which brought about large-scale abduction of children put a permanent blemish on the history of the world.
But more than 150 years after that kind of trade was formally abolished, some Nigerians now seem to have modified it into a sinister business that preys on children, a trend that has now reached an alarming proportion.
Police compound family’s suffering
For more than a week since Blessing went missing, her father has been languishing in police custody.
“I am confused, I don’t know what is happening to me. I can’t find my daughter and police has detained my husband in cell,” she told our correspondent.
The police claimed she used an unothordox method to find the person that stole her baby. She was said to have taken the suspect to a seer’s house, an offence responsible for her husband’s detention.
Akuvi was hysterical while searching for her child. But she soon sat down and ruminated on who could be responsible for stealing her child, she told our correspondent.
At the backyard of the house in which the Ananis live is a detached single room apartment, inhabited by an indigene of Calabar, Cross River State, a man called Sunny.
Sunny’s room is adjacent the Ananis’ window. But that was not the reason Akuvi suddenly stood up that day and went to drag their neighbour out of his room, accusing him of stealing her child.
She said, “Sunny always joked with my daughter in my presence that he would take her away. Few days before she went missing, a man visited him. Both the stranger and Sunny sat at the backyard.
“But when the man saw my daughter, he asked me if she was mine and I said, yes. He simply said she was a good girl. But when the man left, I had to ask Sunny’s wife who the man was. She said she was her husband’s relation. It was strange the way he tried to get information about my daughter. But I did not think it was anything.
“I had to hold on to Sunny when my child went missing simply because he always talked about my daughter.”
Our correspondent learnt that at a point, the other neighbours questioned Sunny and he denied having a hand in the girl’s abduction.
But things got to a head when he was questioned about his strange friend or relation who had visited him days before.
One of Akuvi’s relations told Saturday PUNCH, “We wanted to try everything before it was too late to get the child back. The police visited but did not seem to be doing much about finding the child. So, we took Sunny to a seer’s house.
“When we got there, the seer said the person who stole the child was an insider. We left the place and asked Sunny to take us to the house of his friend who visited days before. When we got to a house he took us to, he changed his mind and said it was not the place. He took us to another place and said he was not sure that was where he lived. When he took us to a third place and he seemed to be deceiving us, people who followed us started to beat him. But the police arrived and took him away.”
But a group of the Ananis’ relations and neighbours showed up at the Shasha Police Division, calling on the police to do something fast about the missing child.
Nine of them were rounded up including the victim’s father and a nursing mother with her baby. The Divisional Police Officer, Nwachukwu Eburuaja, ordered them detained.
He later transferred them to the Department of Criminal Investigation, Yaba.
When our correspondent contacted him about the rationale behind the victim’s father and other neighbours’ continued detention, Eburuaja told our correspondent that he had nothing to say.
“Direct your questions to the police public relations officer. I have nothing to say,” he said.
Police demand bribe to release stolen child’s father – Family
On Monday, our correspondent learnt that the policemen investigating the matter at the State Criminal Investigation Department, Yaba, Lagos said Sojine and neighbours detained with him would not be released until he had paid N220,000.
Our correspondent was told Sojine and his family could hardly afford decent three square meals in a day.
When our correspondent relayed the accusation of extortion against the police to the Police Public Relations Officer in the state, Ngozi Briade, she swung into action and contacted the authorities of the SCID.
Braide explained that the father of the victim along with the other detainees were accused of “trial by ordeal.”
She said, “When the family reported the abduction, the police went in and questioned the parents of the abducted child. But later, we learnt they took a neighbour they suspected of being responsible for the abduction to a native doctor, who said the man was the culprit. That is illegal; we call that trial by ordeal in law.
“Later, police were alerted to an attempt to lynch the suspected man. A team intervened, rescued the man and arrested those responsible for the attempted lynching and trial by ordeal.”
Our correspondent provided her with the names of the policemen accused of demanding bribe for the release of the victim’s father and the other individuals.
But after making her findings, she said the accusation was denied by the concerned policemen. She said the deputy commissioner of police in charge of the SCID had been notified about the case and had promised that they would be released on Tuesday.
More frightening cases of child theft
The Ananis’ case is one of many in recent months. If this family is still in agony, wondering what could have happened to their missing child in the hands of her abductors, Mr. and Mrs. Egbe Donatus of Church Village, Ipaja, Lagos, have certainly been there.
Our correspondent reported on May 24, 2014 how their five-year-old son, Joseph, was allegedly kidnapped one afternoon in March 2014 by a neighbour living just 50 metres away from their house and sold him for N350,000 in Enugu.
A miracle happened. The family recovered the boy two months after he went missing. The Donatus family got a break because the daughter of the alleged abductor, who transported Joseph to Enugu, was arrested after a fight with the woman she sold the child to.
Joseph, whose name had been changed to Success in the house of his buyer in Enugu, told our correspondent that her abductor used a handkerchief to cover his mouth and carried him away while he was playing in front of his parents’ apartment.
Our correspondent visited the Department of Criminal Investigation, Eleweran, Abeokuta, Ogun State, where two suspects were held on suspicion of attempting to kidnap two siblings in Sango area of the state.
The two men, who are both Imo State indigenes allegedly attempted to kidnap Damilola and Olaitan Folorunsho (six and five years old respectively) from their grandfather’s house in Dalemo Agbado area of Ifo Local Governent Area.
The mother of the children was the lover of one of the suspects.
The suspects were caught when the children alerted their grandfather about the strange men who came into their compound and wanted to take them out.
The woman’s lover, 29-year-old John Chuibueze, told our correspondent he only went there to ask the children about their welfare.
Asked why he could not simply introduce himself to their grandfather or why he chose not to notify their mother, he parried the question and simply said, “I did not want to kidnap them. I like the children.”
Spokesperson for the police command, Mr. Muyiwa Adejobi, said the men were suspected of attempting to kidnap the children because they could not provide any explanation for their presence in the compound where the children were playing.
Going by recent reports, Nigerian streets may no longer be safe for children. But while a kidnapper may be lurking in the shadow in neighbourhoods, the seemingly safest of places may prove to be vulnerable as well.
In August 2013, five-year-old Oluwaseun Ogunbemile went missing at the Redeemed Christian Church of God camp along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway where her parents had taken her to attend a programme.
Sometimes, parents of victims get lucky and are asked for ransom like in the case of four-year-old Emmanuel Alonge, who was kidnapped on his way to school in Iju-Ishaga area of Lagos in 2013. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of N150m, which they later reduced to N20m. The boy was released after an undisclosed amount of money was paid.
Spokesperson for the Nigeria Police, Mr. Frank Mba, was of the opinion that child theft was becoming worrisome in the country.
He said in a 2013 statement, “A mother in Nassarawa State handed over her one-month old baby boy to another woman while she attended to her other child briefly during a church service. The strange woman vanished without a trace.”
A suspect named Chinenye Godwin in Abia State was apprehended by a mob while trying to escape with a two-month-old baby she said she stole from the parents’ house when the child’s mother was busy in the kitchen.
A recent spike in cases of mob justice seems to be a direct result of the increasing incidence of child theft in the country.
Our correspondent gathered that in the last three months, there have been at least 15 cases of lynching on suspicion of child theft.
Source: Punch