Saturday 2 July 2011

Nigerian mum Bimbo Ayelabola battling to stay in UK after having quins




A NIGERIAN mum who headed for Britain when she learned she was pregnant is battling to stay after having QUINS, The Sun can reveal. 

Bimbo Ayelabola, 33, had been taking twice the prescribed dose of a potent fertility drug while at home in Lagos. 

Within days of discovering she was expecting she obtained a visitor's visa for Britain. 

And she ended up getting the best treatment possible on the NHS following an emergency Health Service scan which showed she was expecting four babies. 

After months of taxpayer-funded care - costing an estimated £200,000 - Bimbo had a complex Caesarean op 32 weeks into her pregnancy on April 28. 

Doctors at Homerton Hospital, in Hackney, East London, then discovered there was a fifth baby. 

Now, two months later, Bimbo is applying to the Home Office to extend her stay in the UK because boys Tayseel and Samir and girls Aqeelah, Binish and Zara - although healthy - are too fragile to fly home. 

Bimbo is also arguing that there is no "support network" of family and friends left in Nigeria to help her bring up her kids because they are all in the UK already. 

Bimbo's husband Ohi, 37, is not. He came to Britain to visit her in hospital but fled back to Nigeria after discovering it was a multiple pregnancy and he faced being responsible for the brood. 

The Home Office will now decide whether to grant Bimbo a six-month extension of her visa which expired on June 27. 

Officials are also considering sending her a bill for the huge cost of her six months of care which included treatment by consultants, paediatricians, nurses, midwives, social workers and back-up staff. But Bimbo would be unable to pay anyway. 

She insists she had no idea she was expecting more than one child when she sought a UK visa after getting pregnant in November.

Bimbo had bought supplies of the fertility drug Clomid over the counter in Lagos and began taking two a day - double the recommended dose. The drug is also supposed to be taken for five to seven days. But Bimbo popped the pills for two months before discovering she was pregnant - and deciding to head for London. 

She said: "I had already had miscarriages and couldn't bear the stress another pregnancy would cause. So I decided to visit my family in London. I thought I would stand a much better chance of avoiding another miscarriage in a calmer place with friends and family. Now if I go back I'll be on my own without even a roof over my head. My entire family support network, three sisters, four aunts and virtually all my school friends, live here."

Bimbo is helped by her sister Stella, 26, and a Nigerian school pal. They take turns to feed the babies in Stella's two-bedroom flat in Poplar, East London. But they are struggling to make ends meet as each baby costs £70-a-week in milk formula and nappies alone. Bimbo is being backed by immigration lawyer Mark Dada. He has applied to the Home Office for her to stay. 

But a Home Office spokesman said: "The NHS is a national health service, not an international one. We expect those with no right to be in the UK to leave. otherwise we will remove them." 

Tory MP Chris Skidmore said: "It's not acceptable for health tourism to continue in the way it has done."