Ekweremadu: Why Obasanjo’s plea for mercy matters

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo wrote to the chief clerk of the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, in London, last month, pleading with the court to temper justice with mercy in respect of Senator Ike Ekweremadu and his wife, Beatrice. 

They were tried and convicted by the court on charges of organ trafficking and are awaiting sentencing by the court. Obasanjo’s letter was an unprecedented step with, I believe, a genuine feeling and purpose.

Ekweremadu’s case is sad, unfortunate, and pathetic. He and his wife were arrested in May last year by the Metropolitan Police and eventually “charged with conspiracy to arrange/facilitate travel of another person with a view to exploitation, namely, organ harvesting.”

No parent who has followed their dramatic change of fortune from important people to prisoners would fail to be touched by their trauma, their ordeal, and their plight. There is no contesting the fact that Ekweremadu and his wife broke a British law on modern slavery, but neither he nor his wife is a criminal in the business of organ harvesting or trafficking.

As parents, they were faced with the health challenges of their daughter who needs a kidney transplant. They were duty bound by their moral and sacred parental responsibilities to take whatever steps they deemed necessary, within the law, of course, to save the life of their daughter. All responsible parents would do the same to save their ailing child. That they took what they believed was the right step, but which turned out to be a wrong step, does not make them criminals. Still, they have to pay the price for their error of the heart before the law.

The senator and his wife did not go into this with a criminal intent. Ekweremadu, a lawyer, failed to see that while organ donation is not illegal in Britain, it is illegal to pay or seek to pay for it. He and his wife believed that the young man they took to London was a willing donor not a seller of his precious organ. They were mistaken on two counts. One, they took a young man who is smarter and had his own agenda before he left Nigeria for Britain. Two, they acted like the privileged Nigerians