Despite the pleas from the Nigerian government, eminent Africans, and The Economic Community of West African States, the United Kingdom court today sentenced former Deputy Senate President of Nigeria, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, to nine years and eight months in prison for an organ trafficking plot.
The court also sentenced his wife, Beatrice, to four years six months while the medical doctor who acted as a ‘middleman’ in the plot, Dr. Obinna Obeta, was sentenced to 10 years and his medical licence was also suspended.
It will be recalled that the UK Court found the trio to have criminally conspired to bring a 21-year-old Lagos street trader to London to exploit him for his kidney.
The young man was said to have been falsely presented as Sonia’s cousin in a failed bid to persuade doctors to carry out an £80,000 private procedure at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
The young man was said to have been offered an illegal reward to become a donor for Sonia after kidney disease forced her to drop out of a master’s degree in film at Newcastle University.
The prosecutor, Hugh Davies KC, had told the court that Ekweremadus and Obeta had treated the man and other potential donors as “disposable assets – spare parts for reward”.
He said they entered an “emotionally cold commercial transaction” with the man, adding that the behaviour of Ekweremadu showed “entitlement, dishonesty and hypocrisy”, Davies told the jury.
According to him, “He agreed to reward someone for a kidney for his daughter – somebody in circumstances of poverty and from whom he distanced himself and made no inquiries, and with whom, for his political protection, he wanted no direct contact What he agreed to do was not simply expedient in the clinical interests of his daughter, Sonia, it was exploitation, it was criminal. It is no defence to say he acted out of love for his daughter. Her clinical needs cannot come at the expense of the exploitation of somebody in poverty.”
