The men of the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) have arrested a woman, identified as Blessing Okonkwo, age 24, who confessed to selling her three-year-old sibling, Friday Okonkwo, at the cost of N410,000.
Okonkwo, who blamed her action on the biting hardship in the country, was said to have tricked her mother and taken the kid on false pretence of enrolling him in a school in the city of Mubi, where she lived, some 40 kilometers away. Okonkwo is a resident of Mubi in Adamawa State, while her sibling lived with their mother, Hauwa Lawan, in Rimirgo in the Askira Uba Local Government Area of Borno State.
She however sold him at a price of N410,000 to a buyer, one Efunaya Nabufe, age 35, who trafficked him to Enugu city in the southeastern state of Enugu. “I used the proceed of the crime to buy a grinding machine so I can start a business and also gave my boyfriend N200,000 to buy items required for our tradition wedding,” Blessing said.
After several weeks, their mother became worried as all her attempts to speak with her son over the phone were cunningly thwarted by Okonkwo. Lawan resorted to flagging the situation to the police, which led to the arrest of the suspect. Lawan expressed dismay, wondering how her daughter could sell her sibling to a total stranger.
“She visited sometime last year and lied to me that she would be taking her kid brother to enrol him in a school in the city, seeing there’s no good school in our village.
“Ever since she took away the boy I never heard from him because any time I called to hear his voice she kept telling me one lie or the other for one year now. I got tired of asking and since I least suspected my own daughter could do this to me, I didn’t raise any alarm.
“As God will have it, she took a proposed husband home to her father in the southeast, the father demanded to know the whereabouts of his child first before attending to her marriage proposal.
