When an Hausa man met and married an Ekiti woman some years ago, little did he know that his union with the woman would cause so much heartache, as a battle is currently raging over the paternity of the two-year-old boy whom the woman made the man to believe he sired, but whom his stepdaughter is claiming as her son after the death of his wife. OLUWATOYIN MALIK reports.

Magaji Garuba is currently a wounded man. His wound is not physical  but his heart has been rent into pieces by recent discoveries that have shattered him beyond his imaginatination. Though he has a stoic outlook, the way he mumbled to himself intermittently and shook his head as if trying to wave off a troubling fly, depicted his mood. For two years, he took care of a little boy he thought was his son whom his wife, Aminat (whose real name was Dupe Ajiboye), gave birth to. Aminat died in March 2011 and Garuba continued to take care of the little boy, whom he named Mohammed, who was in care of his stepdaughters – Tairat and Aishat.

However, he was given a rude shock on Friday, December 23, 2011 when Tairat, whose real name is Bunmi Ajiboye, told him that the boy was not his son and that her sister, Aishat, whose real name is Temitope Ajiboye, is the real mother. Thinking that Aishat was cracking an expensive joke, Garuba went to inform his boss and uncle, one Alhaji Al-Hassan, and the 21-year-old girl repeated the same statement in the presence of the man.

Unable to resolve the matter, they all went to the house of Serikin Sasa in Ibadan, Alhaji Haruna Miyasin. There, Aishat repeated her statement once again. When he saw that the issue was beyond what he could dabble into, Serikin Sasa reportedly asked the parties to go to the police to settle the matter. From Ojoo Police Division, the matter was transferred to the State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID), Iyaganku where the Assistant Commisioner of Police in charge of State CID, Mrs Mary Egbeyemi, had been trying to investigate the paternity dispute.

Sunday Tribune investigations revealed that Garuba, a 47-year-old man, is from Kano State and is a miner working at Abujaleather in Itesiwaju Local Government area of Oyo State. Having divorced his first wife who gave him two children, Garuba decided to face his mining work squarely and forget about women. However his contact with an Ekiti woman in Abujaleather brought drastic change to his life, the effect of which he is still grappling with.

According to Garuba, “Aminat used to bring goods to Abujaleather to sell, though she usually stayed at Target, another settlement for miners. I met her about seven years ago. She would bring chicken to Abujaleather to sell and would tell me she wanted to stay with me. Initially, I refused because I was afraid of sickness and also because mining work needs a lot of energy and you can’t indulge in sex and make a success of it.

“After a while, she begged me to marry her, as her husband, a Nigerien, was dead, leaving her with three children. She gave their names as Tairat, Abdulkadir and Aishat. I gave in to her in 2006 and had an Islamic wedding with her in the palace of Serikin Sasa. She brought one woman, ‘Iya Pure Water’as her family representative. After the marriage, she stayed in Ibadan in a house I rented. After a while, she got pregnant and later  gave birth to a baby girl who died at eight months old while she was away in her hometown.

“After the baby’s death, she got pregnant again and at two months old, she told me that she wanted to go Ibadan to register for ante-natal services. She returned to Abujaleather three weeks later and after staying for two months, she went to Ibadan again. It was from there she called me that she wanted to go to her hometown, Oye Ekiti, because she was having problems with  the pregnancy. She was six months pregnant by then.

“A month later, she called me and said the pregnancy was being threatened again and the doctor suggested that she should be induced to have the baby prematurely rather than lose  it. She called again and told me that she was delivered of a baby boy and gave a bill of N48,000. It was her daughter that went to collect N50,000 from my boss, Alhaji Al-Hassan to give her mother. On the seventh day, I bought ram and celebrated my son’s birth, though the ram was not killed. After two months, she came with the baby and the ram was killed while we celebrated at Abujaleather. I named the boy Mohammed Sanusi.

“She did not breastfeed the baby and she said she was acting on doctor’s instruction so that she would not transfer the typhoid she had in her system to the baby. I bought ten Peak Milk tins for the baby and kept them before she came with him. She was with me for a long time and later went to Ibadan. I travelled to Kano and left N20,000 for her. When I returned, I went to her in Ibadan and bought a bag of rice and other things for her. I also gave her N10,000 to use when coming to Abujaleather.

“’Three weeks after, she came to meet me and later asked her daughter, Aishat, to join us there. Aishat started selling sachet water there. We came to Ibadan in 2010 for Ramadan and I left them and went back to my work. I left N5,000 for them. Two weeks after, she joined me and after Eid-el-Kabir, she fell sick. I took her to hospital and paid N45,000. She became well and was discharged. After Christmas that year, I also fell sick and broke out in rashes. She said she wanted to go home and I gave her N20,000. I was in Ibadan for three months before leaving for Abujaleather and she came to join me three weeks later.

“In March 2011, our son, Mohammed, fell sick and as I was taking the boy to hospital in Otu town with my wife on my bike, she suddenly asked me to stop. She started stooling and vomitting at the same time. Both mother and son were admitted for seven days and I spent N45,000. They were discharged and we went back to Abujaleather. The woman’s illness became aggravated and she started breathing labouriously.

“I brought her to Ibadan and she was admitted at Asalam Hospital, Ojoo. She was referred to University College Hospital (UCH) where she eventually  died the following day. I buried her according to Islamic rites and her daughters were present. I continued to take care of all children. I gave the woman N100,000 to pay for the accommodation we were all staying in Ibadan. On December 23, I came to collect drugs in Ibadan and I just branched home to see my son and my stepdaughters.

“To my surprise, I saw their loads packed. I asked them where they were going and they replied that they were going to Ekiti for Christmas. I asked them why this should be so since they were muslims but Tairat answered me and said they were Christians. I was baffled at her reply but I said again that though I could not stop her and her sister, they should leave my son behind for me. That was when she threw the bombshell and said that the boy was not mine; that it was Aishat that gave birth to him.”

However, Bunmi, who had been bearing Tairat, said that the boy belongs to her sister, Tope who is also known as Aishat. “My sister discovered that she was pregnant in December 2008 and we got to know in January. Then, I was staying in Ibadan with my mother while she was in Oye Ekiti with our father. The mother of the boy who impregnated her first rejected her, saying her son was too young to impregnate a girl. This caused a quarrel between both families and my father told the boy’s mother that if they should come back later to claim the child, he would send them away.

“Tope stayed with our father till she delivered. When she was in labour on August 18, 2009, I was called, and my mother went home that very day. Tope delivered on August 19 and mummy stayed with her for over two months, after which she took the baby from Tope and brought him to Ibadan, saying that she would want her to return to school.

“However, I noticed that our neighbours were greeting my mother and congratulating her on the birth of a new baby. When I called her attention to this, she said there was nothing wrong in it, since her daughter’s child is also hers. After many months, I told my sister to come and take her child back home. When she came to Ibadan, my mummy pleaded with her to give her time to inform Magaji Garuba that he is not the owner of the child. She left Ibadan for Abujaleather and stayed there for a long time that we even became afraid. This was because we could not communicate with her because there was no network there.

“After some time, she got across to us through a neighbour and she told us she would soon come to Ibadan. On March 25, Magaji Garuba came to the house and said our mother was in the hospital. I went there and saw that she was very lean. She was also vomitting blood. The doctor said he conducted three tests and my mother had typhoid and was also infected.  She was referred to UCH that day and died the following day. She was buried on Sunday March 27 by Magaji Garuba.

“Since then, I have been taking care of my sister and her son alone. It was when we wanted to travel and he tried to stop us that I informed him that the boy was not his. Actually, it was my mummy that caused all these problems. She pleaded with us to answer those names, saying that we should not cause her any embarrassment. She also said we should call the boy Mohammed instead of the name given him at birth, which was Olaiya. Even the child that Magaji Garuba mentioned that my mother first gave birth to was not his. That baby girl belonged to my father, though she delivered her in Abujaleather during one of her business trips there”.

The 20-year-old boy who reportedly impregnated Tope,  while speaking with Sunday Tribune, gave the date and time of the child’s birth, as well as the name of the clinic used by Tope. According to Oladele Bamidele, “Tope gave birth at 6.30 a.m. on August 19, 2009. The name of the hospital is Oke Royal Hospital, Oye Ekiti. When Tope’s mother suggested taking the boy to Ibadan, we did not object because we felt it would help us to concentrate on our studies. When I called the woman that I wanted to come to Ibadan to see my boy, she told me she was not around with the boy. I didn’t know anything until I learnt that an Hausa man was laying claim to my boy”.

Sunday Tribune further gathered that the deceased’s husband, Mr Ajiboye, was unaware of his wife’s antics as the woman never betrayed any emotion that could make him suspect that she was keeping another husband outside their marriage. Not only that, the man never knew his wife was dead until the current issue that exposed all the secrets his wife and children had been hiding from him. Also the father of the deceased did not know of his daughter’s  marriage to a strange man or her demise.

In order to resolve the issue, Sunday Tribune gathered from the Police Public Relations Officer in Oyo State, ASP Femi Okanlawon, when he was contacted, that the State CID had taken the parties involved – the child and the two fathers laying claim to him—to UCH for DNA test to determine the boy’s real father. Magaji Garuba said he was in agreement with the step taken, adding that if the test proves that he is father of the boy, he should be given back to him, and if he is not, his wife’s family should be compelled to pay back everything he spent on that child since he was an infant. “How can they tell me that I will lose all over a child I have nurtured from infant”, he queried.