BBC:
Chioma is adamant that Hope, the baby boy she is holding in her arms, is her son. After eight years of failed attempts to conceive, she sees him as her miracle baby.
“I’m the owner of my baby,” she says defiantly.
She’s sitting next to her husband, Ike, in the office of a Nigerian state official who spends the best part of an hour interrogating the couple.
As the commissioner for women affairs and social welfare in Anambra state, Ify Obinabo has plenty of experience in resolving family disputes – but this is no ordinary disagreement.
Five members of Ike’s family, who are also present in the room, do not believe Hope is the couple’s biological child, as Chioma and Ike claim.
Chioma claims to have “carried” the child for about 15 months. The commissioner and Ike’s family are in disbelief at the absurdity of the claim.
Chioma says she faced pressure from Ike’s family to conceive. They even asked him to marry another woman.
In her desperation, she visited a “clinic” offering an unconventional “treatment” – an outlandish and disturbing scam preying on women desperate to become mothers that involves the trafficking of babies.
The BBC was allowed by authorities to sit in on the commissioner’s discussion with Chioma as part of our investigation into the cryptic pregnancy scam.
We have changed the names of Chioma, Ike and others in this article to protect them from reprisal in their communities.
