I am sure you read about the nurse in Zambia who recently confessed to swapping close to 5,000 babies in a 12-year period while working in the maternity ward of University Teaching Hospital, UTH in Lusaka, Zambia.
The nurse, Elizabeth Bwalya Mwewa is now asking for God’s forgiveness for her sins.
According to Mwewa, “I used to swap babies at UTH for fun”. For fun, she confessed!
She claims she has terminal cancer and knows she be will be dying soon so wishes to confess her sins before God and before all the affected people, especially those she ‘helped’ to give deliver their babies at UTH, claiming she is now born again. No doubt, that phrase ‘born again’ has suffered.
Here comes her bomb and clincher: “If you were born in UTH between the years 1983 and 1995, chances are your parents may not be your biological parents. I had developed a habit of swapping newly born babies just for fun. So take a good look at your siblings; if for example everyone is light and you are dark…, you are that child and I am really sorry for that”, she has boldly declared.
Mwewa continues: “I have caused some faithful couples to divorce after going for DNA Tests. It is now that I have realised I was just being used by a demon to do that. I have caused many mothers to breastfeed children who are not theirs biologically. I don’t want to go to hell for that”.
Many adjectives have been used to describe thus Zambian nurse or midwife if she’s in the maternity ward. But hers is definitely not a fable, even though the number she gave – 5000 – could be stretching it by a mile, except of course the place is an expanded baby factory that churns them out like doughnuts.
There are other tales from the maternity wards that have filtered it and continue to show how evil those charged with saving lives sometimes turn the other way round. A common one is the stealing of babies.
The child selling business is quite real and children have been known to have vanished after successful deliveries; or a dead child could be presented to the mother of a new born and told her child died at birth whereas that is not the case. Her real child would have been swapped with another one that had died in the hospital, leaving the mother of the living baby inconsolable while the midwife presents her child to a waiting couple desperate for a baby, no matter the cost.
Seems like a movie, right?
What of the case of fantastic bills coming out of the maternity or hospital claiming that some form of surgery or procedures were done to bring out the baby when in fact the reverse was the case? This mostly happens when a third party like patient’s employer, friend, NGO or HMO are the ones paying the bill. If there is no reference to the patient to confirm whether the delivery was normal or not – it could be embarrassing sometimes to ask the patient – then the hospital can go smiling to the bank through fraudulent billing.
I was privy years ago to a normal delivery during which the baby’s father was present in the labour room but the hospital later sent a huge bill to the lady’s company, suggesting that there was some surgical procedure that took place before the baby came out. Her company would have paid that bill if the lady’s friend was not working in the accounts department and saw the huge bill that contained the false information on the baby’s birth.
But on the swapping of babies, there is no telling how many marriages would have been destroyed when children with different DNA from their fathers are discovered later in life. In Africa, it can be difficult for a man to accept that the son who had been calling him daddy for 20 years is not his gene but he should just accept it since he brought up the child and they had developed a bond. It is tough.
But is there no end to the wickedness of the human race that will make a woman like Nurse Mwewa blame the devil for what she derived a kick from, for 12 years?
Even the devil has suffered, as everyone who has committed evil seems to say he is the cause of what they did.
Poor devil! Some of his followers seem to be worse than him.
Image credit: atlantablackstar.com
Ogie Eboigbe, veteran journalist, broadcaster and public affairs specialist writes and analyses current and historical issues with a ‘wise pen’.
