How 7 kids survived being abandoned in Nigeria

How 7 kids survived being abandoned in Nigeria

Sept. 12, 2004, 1:09AM

Passed among unreliable adults and failed by the system, seven Houston children survived a tortuous journey only to be abandoned in Nigeria

By EVAN MOORE
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

IBADAN, NIGERIA - It's a tangled web that stretches from the blue, two-story house here on Salimonu Street where seven American children were found abandoned July 29.

Its strands are formed of deceit and confusion, linked with lies and half-truths. Wrapped within is a tale of greed and neglect and, ultimately, human kindness — the story of seven children, stranded in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

It began Oct. 16, 2003, when Mercury Denise Liggins arrived at the Lagos airport with her exhausted, bewildered brood: four girls and three boys, a group ranging in age from 7 to 16.

Liggins, 42, had adopted all of them. She had a penchant for adopting children and previously had adopted two others in Fort Worth, who went with their father when the couple divorced in 1990.

She had accumulated the current band as a single parent, four in 1996 and three in 2001. They were categorized as "hard to place," two separate groups of siblings, several past the normal adoption age. As such, the state paid Liggins $3,600 monthly for their care. Child Protective Services had received complaints about that care, but subsequent investigations by CPS had revealed nothing seriously wrong in the Liggins home.

Then in 2003, Liggins met Victor Nwankwo, a Nigerian living in the United States. Soon afterward, she had plans to marry him and move her family to Nigeria.

By that time, relations between Liggins and the children were strained. In letters she wrote, she referred to the three oldest girls as "earmarked for hell" and said she had considered returning them to CPS. The rest she described as manipulative and stressed that the decision to move them to Nigeria was not made "because they are wonderful little people."

None of the children knew of those plans, however. Instead, Liggins had told them they were headed for Germany. In Lagos, they stepped from the plane dazed and confused.

Colonized by the British in the 1830s then left to its own devices, Nigeria was the scene of bloody tribal wars for decades. Unlike many of its impoverished neighbors, Nigeria has oil, which has made the country both rich and corrupt.

The result is a chaotic culture in which economically driven crime is rampant. The well-to-do and middle class huddle behind cinderblock walls topped with concertina wire and shards of glass. Police are ineffective at best and corrupt at worst. In major cities, thugs rule the nighttime streets, where robbery, kidnapping, rape and burglary are widespread.

It's a country in which children have become commodities for criminals. The abduction of the young for slave labor and prostitution is common. Even more grotesque, the ritualistic murder of children and marketing of their body parts for voodoo ceremonies has reached such heights that the National Agency for Prevention of Trafficking in Persons has been formed to quell both practices.

"It's a terrible problem here," said Veronica Omaru, national coordinator for Nigeria's Women Trafficking and Child Labor Eradication Foundation, a private group. "No child should be on the street alone."

Man they called 'Daddy'

The seven Liggins children knew nothing of that when they stepped from the KLM jetliner in October. They knew only that they were in a strange place and a tall, smiling man was beckoning to them outside customs.

The man was Obiora "Ben" Nwankwo, Victor's brother and Liggins' soon-to-be brother-in-law. Nwankwo would become the man the children loved and called "Daddy." A former pharmaceutical salesman whose business had failed, he would also be the man Nigerian authorities suspect exploited and eventually abandoned them.

On that day, Nwankwo was in a hurry. Even though it was late in the day, the group began the 70-mile journey north from Lagos to the ancient city of Ibadan.

Arriving in Ibadan

Once considered a model highway in Nigeria, the route is now decaying and treacherous. Sunset brings gangs of robbers who strew nails on the pavement to cause flat tires, then lie in wait for cars. If drivers manage to avoid robbery, they are still faced with gaping potholes and dangerously high shoulders, as well as scores of Nigerian trucks operating with no headlights.

The little group made the trip successfully, however, and once in Ibadan, moved into the second story of Nwankwo's decrepit home.

The house was in a better part of the city, which once was the capital of Nigeria. Today, Ibadan is a massive industrial and agricultural distribution center. No one knows exactly how many people reside there — estimates range between 2 million and 8 million — but its streets are teeming and often dangerous.

"The children were not happy to have come to Nigeria," said Nwankwo, who agreed to meet a Houston Chronicle reporter in Enugu, a city in eastern Nigeria.

"Frankly, I was not happy when she (Liggins) arrived with all seven of them. I had understood she was only bringing three or four. I wasn't prepared for them, but I tried to make them happy."

Enrolling in school

During the next month, said Nwankwo, he secured a tutor for the children and he and Liggins enrolled them in the God's Work Montessori boarding school to begin the first of the school's four three-month semesters in January. Liggins left shortly afterward for employment in Iraq, said Nwankwo, and unknown to him, took the children's passports.

In January, the Liggins children settled into the boarding school and Nigerian life, a culture in which tribal custom has been incorporated with Western manners. Their school principal, Chief Johnson Akintayo, speaks textbook English with a clipped, British accent, while his cheeks bear the four regional scarification marks of the Yoruba tribe.

"We have never had any other American children here," Akintayo said. "We thought it was strange when these children were enrolled. America has better schools. But the Nigerian children accepted them and loved them."

Money runs out

Things went well enough for the first semester, said Akintayo, though the children never had sufficient clothes or spending money. Then, Nwankwo fell short on his payments for the second term and, during the third term, began removing the children, first the girls, then the boys.

Nwankwo said he stopped paying the school in part because Liggins was not sending him enough money, even though both he and Liggins agree she sent $14,000 during the 10 months the children were in Nigeria.

"But they had very few clothes when they got here, and she brought no money," said Nwankwo. "What she sent came in drips and drabs, just a little at a time. I had to buy them clothes. I had to pay for teachers (tutors at $120 per month before the children entered the boarding school), food, clothing, cooks (at $50 per month) and rent for the house."

Nwankwo said he rarely heard from Liggins after she left in November. He also said he was never aware that she received the $3,600 subsidy or that she lost a large part of it in March, when Houston CPS workers found she had lied to them about the children being in Houston.

Instead, said Nwankwo, he kept expecting money. He charged Liggins $1,500 monthly in rent for October through December, although Thomas Aimakhu, real estate agent and property manager, said rent for the entire house was less than $1,000 per year and Nwankwo was in arrears on that payment.

The boarding school charged less than $1,000 per month for all seven children for six months, from January through June, a bill of less than $6,000 that the $14,000 Liggins provided would easily have covered.

Children left alone

Nwankwo does not deny the accounting disparity, nor can he explain it.

"If I had known all this was going to occur, I would have kept better records," he said. "Besides, money was not the reason for removing the children from the school.

"The children were not happy," Nwankwo said. "The teachers were asking them, 'What crime did you commit in America to be sent here? What have you done?' One of the teachers threatened to beat one of the boys, and they were harsh with the others, so I took them out."

Akintayo said that, between June and July 22, Nwankwo removed all the children with approximately $1,000 owed to the school. That bill remains unpaid.

Nwankwo also left Ibadan frequently for long periods, and with his absence, the children were left largely on their own, said neighbors.

"I saw the girls wandering on the street in the evening," said Emanuel Joseph, who lived nearby. "I warned them to stay in the house, that it was not safe."

In fact, during that period, police in Anambra state, just east of Lagos, discovered a Vudun shrine with 50 corpses and 20 boiled and cleaned human skulls. In the Ibadan market, less than a mile from Nwankwo's home, police arrested a man with a sack containing body parts of an elderly man and the torso of a decapitated and emasculated infant — presumably for sale.

Assigned to orphanage

On July 29, concerned neighbors noticed that the two older girls had fevers, thought to be typhoid. They also noticed that all seven were losing weight, and so they began calling various agencies to report that the children were abandoned.

That same day, immigration officers came to the house and found the children, some ill. Believing they might have found another child-trafficking case, they took custody of all seven.

The event was no secret. The National Television Authority in Ibadan covered the story and aired it that evening. The story included interviews with several of the children in which their Texas accents rang clearly.

With no proof of citizenship, however, the children were handed over to the Ministry of Women's Affairs and Social Development, a state agency that, lacking any better facility than the state orphanage, called the American Consulate in Lagos.

The consulate did not immediately respond, however, and the ministry assigned them to the orphanage.

Scene of misery

Lying near the center of a lushly overgrown field about a quarter-mile from the edge of busy Awolowo Road, the state orphanage in Ibadan is barely visible to drivers.

They wouldn't want to see it more closely. Consisting of several concrete buildings with fading blue paint, arranged haphazardly on a hillside, the orphanage is a scene of misery.

There is no electricity in its buildings, no running water. The facility is severely understaffed and neglected. It houses juvenile delinquents, older orphans and — in one dormitory off by itself — toddlers and infants whose parents have died or abandoned them.

Within the walls of those buildings is fetid squalor. Rusting cots bearing stained, decaying mattresses line the walls of the children's dormitory. They are unwashed because there is little water. There is little water because the orphanage has only a well.

A stench hovers in the air. With no water, there is no toilet — not even a dug latrine — and waste matter is routinely collected in a bowl and thrown into the bushes nearby. Among the toddlers, many of whom appear mentally retarded and unable to speak, feces can be found lying on the concrete floor.

An orphan himself

It's home to Funso, a man with only one name.

Funso does not know his exact birth date. He only knows that he was found as an infant in a burlap sack near an Ibadan hospital 22 years ago. He has lived at the orphanage since.

From that pathetic beginning, however, Funso has achieved. He began at age 7 by choosing his own name, the Yoruba term for "cherished one." He went on to earn a technical degree in computer processing.

In the jumbled economy of Nigeria, however, Funso can find no job and his home remains the orphanage. There he cooks, makes a few repairs and buries the dead infants.

"Many of the babies arrive sick," Funso said. "They never recover. They die. Usually, someone carries them to the hospital. There is no car, so they take them on the bus in a biscuit box so the other passengers won't know it's a dead baby. The doctor signs a death certificate, and they bring it back for me to bury.

"There is no cemetery, no markers. I bury them in the bush around the orphanage. I've buried about 20 this year. I've been doing it so long that, by accident, I've started digging into corpses I already buried."

Being discovered

On July 29, amid the horror that is his home, Funso spied a group of kindred spirits.

"The American children were all sitting on the floor, very close together," he said. "They looked afraid, tired, unhappy, and I understood.

"I think they were afraid of me at first, but I told them my story, and they listened and we became friends. I told them we were all orphans together.

"I gave them my fan (battery-operated). I set up cots with mosquito nets outside for them because it was too hot for them in the building at night. They wanted me to cook for them, but I can't cook American food."

Instead, the ministry brought the Americans roasted chicken and purified water daily, along with drugs to treat the two older girls.

"I didn't blame the Americans for getting the chicken," Funso said. "I only thought, 'Why don't you bring us chicken, too? We're all orphans here.' "

Then, Aug. 5, a group of workers from Abundance Ministries arrived. The ministry, founded by Pastor Diran Adedeji, primarily directs its efforts toward widows and orphans, and its workers frequently visit the orphanage.

The group included Warren Beemer of San Antonio, who was caught by the accent of a little group of orphans clustered together. He called his pastor, who contacted Republican Sen. John Cornyn and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who called the State Department.

Back in America

On Aug. 8, nine days after the Liggins children were placed in the orphanage, U.S. Consulate officials in Lagos arrived to take charge of them.

The consulate has come under criticism for not responding to the children's plight earlier and for leaving them in the orphanage for more than a week. Officially it has offered no explanation. However, a person close to that agency said officials had been informed by the ministry that the children were safe and cared for, and the consulate was attempting to contact Liggins when Beemer happened upon the seven.

The seven were returned to Texas on Aug. 13 and placed in foster homes, still referring to Nwankwo with fondness and stating that they did not want to return to Liggins.

They have been the center of intense media interest and a civil court case ever since. Last week, Terry Elizondo, the children's court-appointed attorney, obtained court permission for the seven to appear on Oprah Winfrey's TV show.

"Why don't we just turn them into a sideshow?" said Michael Delaney, attorney for Liggins, who opposed the appearance. "They were being exploited in Nigeria, and now they're being exploited here."

Hope for their future

In Ibadan, it is unlikely that Funso will see his friends on television. There isn't one at the orphanage, and, even as a native Nigerian, Funso rarely braves the streets at night.

"I still think of them," he said. "I wonder how they are, and I hope their future is a good one in America. We had an experience together for a short while, and I still think of them as my friends.

"After all, we're all orphans in this world."