Kidney donation: UK prosecutor accuses Ekweremadus of exploitation

Sopuruchi Onwuka

Review of reports emerging from the UK court where former Senate President Ike Ekweremadu, daughter and wife stand trial on charges related to organ harvesting shows that the key subjects of the case now emphasizes exploitation of the desperately poor.

A British prosecutor, Hugh Davies, driving the charges against Senator Ekweremadu who allegedly flew in a young man to donate his kidney to alleviate his ailing daughter said that the arrangement was contrived in deceit and exploitation of a desperately poor victim.

 “A wealthy Nigerian politician and his family plotted to bring a street trader from Nigeria to Britain and pay him a few thousand pounds to donate his kidney for a transplant for his ill daughter,” the prosecutor declared at the Old Bailey central criminal court on Monday.

The prosecutor said persuading a donor with cash made the entire arrangement illegal, pointing out that the process took advantage of the victim’s poverty situation.

The King’s Counsel stated that family members could have donated kidney for transplant to alleviate or cure Sonia since, according to him, the family was “close, open and loving”, with a “direct interest in Sonia’s medical treatment.”

He told the jury that rewarding someone for a kidney donation was illegal.

He said there was an “obvious risk that those providing organs for transplantation for reward are likely to come from the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society.”

Jurors were told the alleged donor did not understand until his first appointment with a consultant at the Royal Free Hospital that he was there for a kidney transplant.

“In the real world, altruistic donors are an exceptionally rare commodity.” They were, Mr Davies said, “often young, intrinsically economically disadvantaged young men.”

Davies also noted the doctor’s concern that the young man’s maturity, age and ethnicity put him at risk of long term complications should he donate a kidney.

“He was not picked because of his extraordinarily selfless altruism, he was picked because he was a physical and biological match.”

Mr Davies said whether the donor agreed to travel to the UK for that purpose didn’t matter because victims of trafficking couldn’t legally agree to their own exploitation.

The defendants have been charged under modern slavery legislation which makes it an offence to “arrange or facilitate the travel” of a person to the UK for exploitation. This offence carries a higher potential sentence of life, compared to a maximum of three years for illegally making an organ donation.

Senator Ike Ekweremadu, 60, his wife Beatrice, 55, daughter Sonia, 25, and Nigerian doctor Obinna Obeta, 50, who is accused of acting as a middle man, all deny a charge of conspiracy to arrange travel of another person with a view to exploitation between August 2021 and May 2022, local media reported.

In gloating at the distressed family, Davies argued that donating a kidney is not unlawful in Britain but a criminal offence to offer a reward, regardless of whether the donor is complicit. He said the proposed donor was recruited in Lagos where he hawked telephone parts with an offer of up to N3.5 million and a promise of work in Britain.

“To him, a street trader for Lagos, these sums and rewards were significant,” Davies said, alleging that elaborate steps were taken to create the impression the victim was Sonia’s cousin.

“None of this would have been necessary if this was a straightforward, genuine, lawful, altruistic kidney donation,” Davies said. “It was not. The alleged conspirators knew it was not, what they agreed to was not. It was criminal.”

Davies said that the would-be donor did not grasp that he had been taken to London a year ago for a kidney transplant until his first screening appointment at the Royal Free Hospital. He pointed at the consultant who carried out the tests as saying that the donor had a limited understanding of why he was there and was visibly relieved when told the transplant would not proceed.

The Oracle Today reports that the prosecutor’s argument is only one side of the story which will inevitably unravel in the court. The Ekweremadu family will definitely have the opportunity to narrate its side of the story.