An activist journalist and human rights defender, Chidiebube Okeoma, has taken home a set of twin boys, delivered on May 4, who were held in a clinic due to their mother’s inability to pay the delivery bill.
Okeoma, in a statement in Owerri, the Imo State capital, on Saturday, said that the state Commissioner of Police, Aboki Danjuma, should be commended for his professional and fatherly intervention.
He stated that the police chief ensured that the twin boys, who were born over five months ago, went home despite the doctor’s insistence on holding them against their fundamental human rights.
Okeoma said that he was not the first person to go to the maternity ward to request the discharge of the babies and their 19-year-old mother, but the doctor made it very difficult.
He said, “The CP’s intervention after the doctor acknowledged before him in his office on Thursday that he jokingly requested that the babies be exchanged in lieu of the delivery bill, was commendable.
“Apart from taking the babies home for the first time since they were born almost six months ago, my team and I bought food items and diapers and gave a cash sum of N100,000 to the mother of the babies.”
Okeoma stated that this gesture was made possible through the support he received from compassionate Nigerians who heard about the plight of the children and their mother through him on social media.
He urged the commissioner to charge the doctor with hostage-taking, abuse of medical ethics, and attempts to compromise the identities of the twins.
Okeoma said that his team wasn’t the first to seek the discharge of the twins, but the doctor kept raising the delivery bill.
He urged the police chief to direct his officers to investigate the assault the doctor and his nurses inflicted on the 19-year-old nursing mother and the children’s grandmother, as well as the loss of their phone.