ANAMBRA NIGERIA: Seven hundred dollars. That is the price Anulika Onyeanusia put on her eight-year-old daughter’s dignity, and she counted it in front of a camera, in a police facility, without flinching.
The 36-year-old mother, arrested by operatives of the Anambra State Police Command in Onitsha last Friday, has admitted that the highest sum she ever earned from posting pornographic video clips of her daughter was $700. The admission came during interrogation, where she sat before Valentine Obinwanne, the popular Anambra-based comedian known as Onye Obodo, who was at the facility specifically to confront her over the crime.
The story she told was cold in its simplicity. She first sent the videos to a man she described as a “whiteman” through WhatsApp. He paid her in dollars. “Sometimes, he gave me $300. Sometimes he gave me $400,” she said.
Onye Obodo did not let that pass. “So because of $300, and $400, that’s why you have to mess up your child to please that man?” he asked her, according to the interrogation footage. She had no answer that mattered.
Police confirmed that four children, aged two, three, six and nine, were rescued from the couple’s home during the operation, and that investigators recovered sex toys and other items now assisting the probe. Her husband, Ikechukwu Onyeanusia, told police he had no idea what his wife was doing to their children, a claim detectives will test in the coming weeks.
What should rattle every parent in Nigeria is what she said next. Cornered by the condemnation around her, Mrs Onyeanusia insisted she was not an outlier. “There’s one lady who also posted two of her children’s pornographic videos on our platform. I am not the only one doing this,” she said, before telling investigators she did not know the other women’s identities well enough to name them. Police have already told her she will help identify them.
That single sentence deserves its own headline. If she is telling the truth, and detectives believe she might be, then a network of Nigerian mothers is feeding children to foreign predators through WhatsApp groups and social media platforms, one dollar transfer at a time. This was not desperation. This was a business model.
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The Anambra State Police Command is treating the case as child pornography, and the legal weight ahead of Mrs Onyeanusia is severe. But the deeper question belongs to the platforms and the payment rails that moved that money. Someone sent dollars across borders, repeatedly, for material involving a child, and nobody flagged it.
Four children are now in protective custody, and investigators say the names of the other women she mentioned will surface. The dollar transfers left a trail. So did the uploads.
