Horror: dealing with the agony of a stolen baby

Saudah Nabakiibi says she will never seek treatment from Mulago hospital, again. She adds that on the occasion that the hospital is the only option there is, she will stay home and pray to be healed. Nabakiibi’s statement is a startling one. This is so, only if you do not know where she is coming from. When you do, you realise that the comment sums up the pain she has endured, the misery of being deprived of what rightfully belonged to her and the strain of searching for it, in vain.

On July 12, 2006, a heavily pregnant Nabakiibi walked into Mulago with her husband, Farouk Bukenya, by her side. She was armed with all the necessities – gloves, razor blades, threads, which she had been asked to carry. She states that having withstood the nine months sowing period, she was eager to reap. “And, I did not anticipate any eventualities. Well, not as overwhelming as what befell me,” says Nabakiibi.

After braving labour pains for about 10 hours, a doctor told her that she was going to be operated on. Nabakiibi was given consent forms which she signed with her husband. After signing the forms, Bukenya requested to go home and check on their daughter whom they had left unattended to. He promised his wife that he would be back soon. Nabakiibi was taken to the theatre while her husband dashed to their home.

Detection of something wrong
At about 2pm, she woke up to the sight of her husband by her side. She says that the first words she uttered were: “Where is my baby? I want to breastfeed it.” Bukenya replied that the nurses had said that they would bring it when Nabakiibi regained consciousness. Still under anaethesia, she slept off. An hour later, she woke up and demanded for her baby.

“I was worried that maybe my child had passed away and that the nurses and my husband feared to break the news. I was so anxious. When I raised my concern to my husband, he comforted me. He reassured me that he had seen the nurses take the baby from the theatre to the nursery. He said that this was before I had left the theatre to the ward,” she says.

Hours later a nurse randomly passed by her bed and congratulated her upon giving birth to a healthy baby boy. The nurse further said that her baby would be brought to her shortly. Nabakiibi says that this gave her some relief from the fears she had developed. In the evening, she was visited by an in-law. The in-law was alarmed that Nabakiibi had not seen her baby six hours after delivering.

When the in-law went to demand for the baby, she received a reply similar to the one that Nabakiibi and Bukenya had received. This reawakened the distress, which had subsided. “What was annoying was that no explanation was given for our long waiting. Actually, at some point the nurses started replying rudely whenever we asked for the baby,” she says.

At 1am a nurse went to Nabakiibi’s ward and informed her that her baby was in a bad condition and had been put on oxygen. Despite this, the new parents were still denied a chance to see their baby. Nabakiibi says that her anguish was brimming, but the pain that came with having been operated on made it hard to show her emotions.

Later at 6am, Bukenya alerted her that he had been told by one of the nurses that their baby had died.
“I burst into tears. It was unconceivable that after the entire pain I had gone through, I was reaping a dead body. What compounded my agony was the fact that I had not been permitted to see the baby during the few hours it had been alive,” she says. My husband and other relatives went to bury the body while I stayed back. I did not attend the burial because I had not fully recovered.

Discovery of change in sex
Later in the day, during the ward round, Nabakiibi read from a “pink theatre form” in her file, that her baby was male. When her brother visited that evening, he consoled her about having lost a beautiful baby girl. She found her brothers assertion dismaying.

“It is then that I realised that my baby had been swapped. I showed my brother the theatre file. He was equally surprised to read that my baby was a boy. I also told him that the nurse who had visited had told us that I had delivered a baby boy. He suggested that we do not confront anyone until we left the hospital. He reasoned that the person who had stolen the baby could put my life in danger, if I attempted to cry foul play while still in the hospital’s premises.

We took heed of his advice,” says Nabakiibi adding, “We were discharged after two days. Those two days were horrible ones. Crying was the order of the day. And, I would cry more whenever I saw a nurse come to attend to me. I had ceased viewing them as life-savers but rather murderers and child traffickers. Unfortunately, I could not say this to them.”

When Nabakiibi returned to her home, she tried to get her head around the whole thing. However, the environment made this challenging. Whenever she looked at the clothes, bedsheets, the diapers and the different items that she had bought for the baby, tears flowed down her cheeks. Two of her family friends had given birth but, she could not visit them. Nabakiibi says that she felt that she would ruin her friends’ joy by crying throughout the visits.

“My family did a great job in comforting me. My husband narrated to me the story of Joseph [in the Bible] who disappeared from his parents at a tender age but was found many years later. It is soothing words like these that have built my will to search for my baby until I find him,” she says.

A very long search
Nabakiibi has been searching for her baby for the last seven years. She is sure that he was swapped. This was confirmed by DNA reports procured by the police this year which indicated that the female baby that was buried was not hers.

“I have braved a number of frustrations in the search for my baby. For example, being given a file which had been clearly forged records. The word male had been tinkered with by adding letters “f” and “e” to make it female. And, the person who did this was never apprehended. A notable remark that was made which hurts me the most was one by a nurse whom I had trusted to help me in establishing the truth.

She cautioned me to stop wasting time on searching for a baby that I would never find. She urged me to instead concentrate on having another. Yes, I had another baby two and a half years after the incident. But, I asked the nurse, ‘If you have 10 children and lose one of them, would you stay unbothered because you have remained with the nine?’” says Nabakiibi.
Nabakiibi’s biggest dissatisfaction is that some people who clearly aided the disappearance of her child have not been brought to book.

“Can you imagine the nurse who forced Kapuru to change the records has never been arrested? Not even the gentleman who blatantly altered my baby’s records by adding an f and e to the word male so that it reads female. I am also disappointed that people with power to help such as the police are always hesitant despite presenting them with crystal clear evidence.”
She says that whenever she feels like giving up, she is overwhelmed by the imagination that someone who did not suffer even a bit, of what she did for nine months is out there enjoying her son. Nabakiibi has undeterred faith that her baby is out there. She calls upon anyone with an idea on its whereabouts to contact her.

What causes these thefts?

There is an adage that says, “health is wealth”, which is popular in our society. From this saying, one can infer that society has high regard for people who work to preserve health. These include doctors, nurses and laboratory technologists, among others. Against this background, three questions beg to be asked. Why would medical personnel participate in stealing a baby? Where do people get the courage to walk to the medical personnel and involve them in such dubious deals? Why are most of the fingers pointed at the nurse, of all the medical personnel?

Lack of money
Asma Mugabirwe, a theatre nurse at Paragon Hospital, says that there is just one thing that lures medical personnel into the vice. Money.

“Those nurses who do it are driven by greed for money. Since this largely happens in government-owned hospitals, I assume it is because they are not paid well and the meagre salary takes long to reach their accounts,” says Mugabirwe. The nurse adds that it is this knowledge of the state of the nurse’s finances that makes members of the public confident that they can convince the latter to steal babies for them. She adds that nurses are more likely to participate in the offence because they deal with the new mothers the most, compared to doctors. “They are the ones who measure the babies’ height and weight, and take them from the delivery room to the ward,” Mugabirwe says.

Moral degeneration
However, Prof. Pius Okong, the chairman of the Health Service Commission differs from Mugabirwe. Okong says that the problem is with moral degeneration of society. Not poor pay. “Go to the United States of America and United Kingdom. You’ll realise that nurses there are paid well. But, hospitals there still report cases of child theft. So, I cannot believe that reason. That is just an excuse. Look around our society, the kind of crimes that young people engage in. Acts like molestation and defilement are all over the place,” says Okong.

Fatigued doctors
Enock Kusasira, the public relations officer at Mulago, says that he does not deny that there might be rogue elements within the hospital. But, he is quick to note that there are incidents when some fatigued doctors err. “This is a hospital where over 100 babies are delivered daily, at the hands of two or three medical personnel. We are talking of medical personnel working under dire conditions. So, there are occasions where out of exhaustion, they forget to record. But what is notable is that this is not deliberate,” says Kusasira.

An intern, in the department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Mulago hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity, verifies Kusasira’s statement. He spoke about an incident when he forgot to record a baby’s name.

“For a mother who delivers naturally, it is our practice that after the baby is out, you show it to her so that she can see its genitals and then tell the sex herself. However, the night was a very cold one. After the mother had successfully pushed out the baby, I realised that she did not have clothes to wrap her in. So my concern and hers at the time was not establishing the bay’s sex but rather saving the baby’s life. Later, we had a brief misunderstanding in identifying the child to the satisfaction of its parents. But we resolved it. Maybe if it had not been resolved I’d also be in the news like Doctor Kapuru.

Honestly, sometimes it happens accidentally because of the numbers of expectant mothers we attend to. But, I cannot rule out that there are medical personnel who engage in stealing children though, personally, I have not seen any, so far,” says the intern.

How it is done
The medical personnel who are involved, use the money that they are given to bribe the people that may stand in the way of their act. This is done beforehand.
They prefer mothers who have delivered by caesarean section because the period between these mothers giving birth and recovering from anaesthesia gives them legroom to carry out the theft and cover any trace. This is what happened to Saudah Nabakiibi.

The medical personnel behave in a detached manner towards the patients. This makes it hard for the scared victims to approach the personnel for answers to any doubts.
Kusasira says that the situation is under control and will even get better when Mulago is fully treated as a referral hospital. “The word referral means that one can only come here when it is impossible to attend to them elsewhere. But here, you have people coming to complain about nausea and symptoms of malaria.

Such cases congest the hospital. The thieves ride on this congestion to cover their tracks. We are undertaking an exercise to decongest the hospital along with other sophisticated measures which will ensure that this vice becomes history,” he says.

Who is stealing babies?

Marlon Agaba, the spokesperson for the Uganda Chapter of African Network for the Protection and Prevention against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN), says the cases that they have scrutinised suggest that it is individual gangs that are involved in baby swapping and not institutions like Mulago hospital. “More males than females are being stolen.

When you reflect on this, in consideration of the attitude that our cultures have in regard to the preference of a son over a daughter, you’ll definitely conclude that Ugandan women who are in need of sons, to please their husbands, are behind this evil,” says Agaba.

Patrick Onyango, the deputy police spokesperson says that there has not been any indication of such children being victims of child trafficking. However, he agrees with Agaba and adds that women involved in long distance relationships are also proponents of the vice. “Most of such women lie to their husbands that they are pregnant. This is a key to their receiving of money to care for the unborn baby and the so-called expectant mother. When the time comes to account for the funding, such a woman will not hesitate to steal a baby,” says Onyango.

Asma Mugabirwe says that these babies could also be stolen for use in witchcraft rituals. She says that some witchdoctors ask for human body parts for sacrifice. “I assume that sometimes people who participate in such rituals find it easier to steal newborn babies than taking adults for sacrifice,” says Mugabirwe.

Herbert Byamugisha, a cobbler, says that he has heard a rumour that some of these babies are a source of some body organs to individuals who lack them. “I heard that kidneys from these children are donated to people who do not have them,” says Byamugisha.

Measures to stop the vice
Enock Kusasira, the spokesperson of Mulago hospital says that the hospital has embarked on a thorough recording system. “We now have a systematic following of a mother from the time they enter the theatre till they go back to the ward.

Their details are carefully recorded by each person that attends to them,” says Kusasira. He adds that the hospital has changed the system of recording from tagging of children as females and males to boys and girls. “Previously it was easy to tamper with the words male and female.

For example one would simply add the letters “fe” to male or rub the “fe” on female. The words boy and girl cannot be changed without one noticing. Actually, the results are already showing. Because, for the last one year we have not had any case of child theft,” he says.

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