Salamatu is restless. Her bloodshot eyes show she is tired of crying but cannot afford to stop shedding tears yet.
Her source of joy and laughter– five months old Emmanuel, who still suckles at her breast has allegedly been stolen by someone she considers a friend, Ayele.
Salamatu’s only memory of her now lost toddler son, is a photo of him on her friend’s daughter’s phone. She doesn’t have one herself. She stares at the image of her lost son and tears meander down her cheeks.
It was 5:30 am on Saturday and Salamatu was up folding the mosquito net under which she sleeps with her toddler in a shed at Kantamanto.
Her bed is a fluffy carpet on the concrete floor of the shed. And the baby’s cot where baby Emmanuel slept is a piece of a worn-out student’s mattress.
While folding the mattress, Salamatu’s friend, Ayele, who is trending at Ghana’s biggest second-hand clothing hub Kantamanto for alleged baby theft, joins her to ask of the whereabouts of Emmanuel’s eldest sister.
Upon learning that she was away attending to other chores, Ayele offered to help carry Emmanuel. And that was the beginning of Salamatu’s grief.
Initially, she wasn’t perturbed until her three-year-old daughter asked her to go and bring her brother, “your peers are carrying their babies at their back, where is my brother? Go and bring my brother.”
Salamatu’s anxiety got out of the roof when at 8:40 am, almost four hours later, another friend of hers came around to say she saw Ayele with Emmanuel. She reveals that she questioned Ayele who looked scruffy but got snubbed.
A search party has combed parts of Accra but there is no sign of Ayele or Emmanuel who is the last of Salamatu’s five. Almost 24 hours after the incident, she was yet to inform her husband who she fears would “beat her” for losing their son.
After getting hold of a police extract, Salamatu trekked to the premises of Citi FM and Citi TV with the guidance of her elder brother in a wheelchair crying for help in finding her bubbly baby boy allegedly stolen by Ayele, a dark-skinned plus size lady she once considered a friend.