Former Director-General of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Julie Okah-Donli, has alleged that some women in Nigeria fake pregnancies by using steroids and later obtain babies to convince their husbands they had given birth.
Okah-Donli made the claims in a resurfaced interview on the Kaa Truths Podcast, where she spoke about alleged fake pregnancy syndicates and baby trafficking networks operating in the country.
According to the former NAPTIP boss, women involved in the practice are allegedly administered steroids that cause physical changes resembling pregnancy.
“They are injected with steroids. So when they inject them with these steroids, it gives them the semblance of a pregnant woman. Their faces are bloated up, and their tummies are actually very big. They look pregnant, but they are not pregnant,” she said.
She further alleged that the women also mimic common pregnancy symptoms, including morning sickness, vomiting and excessive spitting, particularly when their husbands are present.
“When their husbands are around, they pretend to be suffering from morning sickness. They spit, they pretend to throw up and all sorts of funny things,” she said.
Okah-Donli claimed that when the supposed delivery date arrives, the women often arrange for their husbands to be away before returning home with a baby.
“When it’s time to have the baby, they usually have the baby when the man has travelled. Then he comes back to see a baby in the house. But sometimes if it’s the kind of man that doesn’t travel, they ask him to go and buy something… By the time the man comes back, it’s ‘Congratulations, you have a baby,'” she alleged.
She also alleged that some women undergo fake surgical procedures to make it appear they delivered through caesarean section.
“They actually do open them up to make it look like they had a CS. That’s how desperate these guys are. They stitch them back up,” she claimed.
The former NAPTIP Director-General linked the alleged practice to cases where paternity tests show that children are not biologically related to their presumed fathers, arguing that maternity tests should also be conducted in such instances.
“We started finding out that during a paternity test, a lot of children were not the children of the man. But one thing they failed to do was maternity test, which would have confirmed that the women did not have the children,” she said.
According to her, maternity testing could help determine whether a woman actually gave birth to a child and assist investigators in uncovering possible cases of baby trafficking.
“The man is thinking this woman cheated on me, whereas the woman bought the baby. So it’s not even the mother. You can have the maternity test to be sure that this woman is not the mother of the baby, and then you begin to investigate where the baby came from,” she said.
Okah-Donli further alleged that some women claim to have multiple births because it makes the deception more believable.
“Most of them say they have twins. They have triplets. They have quadruplets. Now everybody seems to be having twins and triplets and quadruplets because it’s easier for them to just buy them once and for all and deceive themselves and the world,” she alleged.
Okah-Donli was appointed Director-General of NAPTIP by former President Muhammadu Buhari in 2017 and led the agency’s anti-human trafficking operations during her tenure.
However, the claims she made during the podcast were not accompanied by specific evidence or documented cases. The allegations remain her personal assertions and have not been independently verified.
