Former Minister of Special Duties and Inter-Governmental Affairs Kabiru Turaki has denied having sexual relations with Hadiza Baffa, whom he claimed to be his former protégé, let alone collect the foetuses of the eight abortions, Ms Baffa said he forced her to have.

In August 2024, Ms Baffa made serious allegations against the former minister, asserting he forced her to abort eight pregnancies between 2014 and 2022.

Ms Baffa claimed that the foetuses of those pregnancies were handed to his driver Shehu per his instructions.

She further asserted that she refused to terminate the ninth pregnancy and delivered the baby, a decision she claimed angered Mr Turaki who contested the child’s paternity in court but kicked against submitting his DNA for testing arguing that the Sharia Law forbids it.

Mr Turaki, through his lawyer, Nasir Saidu, denied those allegations claiming Ms Baffa only turned against him because he declined to assist her financially as he had always done.

Speaking on Issues and Society Podcast, Mr Saidu said that the former minister investigated Ms Baffa’s university results after she claimed to have graduated with a “First Class Upper.”

Findings, according to the lawyer, revealed that Baze University had terminated Ms Baffa’s admission after her first year in the institution.

The lawyer also asserted that Mr Turaki paid over N30 million to settle multiple persons that Ms Baffa had scammed.

He alleged Ms Baffa’s illicit activities such as “defrauding so many people leading to her detention at many police stations including making him incur a lot of financial loss to guarantee her freedom” discouraged Mr Turaki from further supporting her. 

He said that it was Ms Baffa’s mother, Hajia Uwani Arabi, who asked Mr Turaki to take her daughter under his wings as a ward.

The lawyer explained that Hajia feared the insurgency in Borno State where her daughter was a student at the University of Maiduguri. 

She wanted Ms Baffa to study in an institution where insurgency was less prevalent and sought Mr Turaki’s assistance.

But Ms Baffa told the police that it was Mr Turaki who approached her mum in 2014 to send her to a private university and cater to her other needs. She said he promised to marry her and later rented a three-bedroom flat in the highbrow Guzape neighbourhood. She filed a complaint of physical abuse, inducement of abortion, child abandonment and threat to life allegations at the Force Headquarters in August 2024.

When the podcast host asked Mr Seidu if his client ever had sexual relations with Ms Baffa, he said he was “not aware.”

“I am not privy to that, I am not aware,” Mr Turaki’s lawyer said to Vanessa Abubakar, host of Issues and Society Podcast.

He also punched holes in Ms Baffa’s claims that she wasn’t consistent with her argument, claiming she once mixed up the name of the so-called driver receiving the foetuses as Abdullahi in her police report and later, Shehu, in a subsequent video posted on social media

Still, the lawyer admitted that a Mr Shehu has been working as a driver for the ex-minister for more than two decades.

On the contested paternity, the lawyer claimed Sharia Law is against the use of DNA to determine the father of a child. 

“The applicability of the issue of DNA in order to determine the paternity of the child is not applicable under the Sharia Law,” Mr Saidu said on the Issues and Society podcast.

On other allegations where Ms Baffa said the ex-minister was bi-sexual and that he often has sexual intercourse with his male personal assistant, Mr Saidu said that she failed to submit any evidence to substantiate her claims.

The lawyer further argued Mr Turaki’s innocence that Ms Baffa was only waging a “campaign of calumny”  as she did not provide evidence of abortion or even the doctor who performed the procedures.