Lagos Businessman dumps Wife and Baby Over HIV positive status

Lagos Businessman dumps  Wife and  Baby Over HIV positive status

A Lagos-based businessman, John Eze, has abandoned his wife and their new baby in a hospital and insisted that he was no longer interested in the marriage after the woman tested positive to HIV/AIDS.

Eze married his wife, Uloma, last year and they were living happily until she became pregnant and went for an HIV test. Unfortunately, she tested positive and both of them started trading blames over who first contracted the disease.

The 29-year old woman, who was abandoned at St Michael’s Catholic Hospital, Mile 12, Lagos, claimed that her husband knew that he was HIV positive and has refused to go for a test. She said she later discovered that three women he married in the past died in similar circumstance before he married her last year.

She said she got to know that she had contracted HIV when she went for ante-natal care at Ikorodu General Hospital and the test was positive. She went home and told her husband and advised him to go to the hospital to do a test to know his status but he refused. 

“What he did was to ask me to pack my things and go to my family in the village since I was suffering from the disease. When I refused to go because of the pregnancy, he started maltreating me and beating me,” she narrated. 

She said he later drove her out and threatened that he will kill her if she comes near his house again. Uloma said rescue came her way when an NGO, Community Health Support and Empowerment Initiative took her to a hospital where she delivered her baby.

Since then she has been in the hospital because John refused to pay her bill.

But John insisted he was not HIV positive because whenever he had sex with his wife he usually drink Alabukun and antibiotics for protection. He admitted he was responsible for her pregnancy, but said he cannot stay with her because he feels irritated since she broke the news to him. 

He said the marriage was over. On why he refused to go for a test, he said he would not go for any test for now because he trusted the Alabukun he has been taken. “My chances of testing positive are slim,” he claimed.

The matter is now before the Lagos State Ministry of Women Affairs where efforts are on to get justice for the woman and her baby.