Fake doctor runs Abuja hospital for 10 years undetected

Investigations by the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) led to police arresting a man who ran a private hospital for 10 years in Gwarimpa area of Abuja, where he offered surgeries and antenatal care, using forged certificates.

Victor Moffat Akpan was the owner of Luna Maternity & Surgery, an outfit he opened in 2006 as a “surgeon” using a forged practice licence—four years after MDCN refused to grant him licence to practice as a homeopath.

He's understood to have delivered by caesarean section a set of conjoined twins who later died at National Hospital in 2013.

Dr Henry Okwuokenye, head of inspectorate unit at MDCN, who had been investigating Akpan, said the council did not grant him a homeopathic practice licence because the school he claimed to have graduated from in Enugu was unapproved to train students in alternative medicine.

Akpan told police during questioning on Friday that in 2002 he paid N15,000 to one Mike Nwagbara, then an administrative official with the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu state, to get a forged MDCN practice certificate.

The certificate, exclusively seen by Daily Trust, used a folio number—unique to every doctor—registered to a Dr Tuoyo Awani, a 1995 medicine and surgery graduate of University of Benin.

Some documents also thought forged show Akpan to have interned at a Calvary International Hospital in Enugu in 1996, done his National Youth Service Corps with Prisons in 1997, attended an update course by the West African College of Surgeons in 2001 and a postgraduate course on the “scientific basis of obstetrics and gynaecology in 2002.”

But his 1990 Senior School Certificate from Eastern Nsit Secondary School, Odot, showed he did not make an acceptable credit in any of his six subjects: all were P7 and P8, apart from an A3 in Geography.

Investigations show Akpan presented the forged documents to unsuspecting officials of Private Health Establishment and Monitoring Committee (PHEMC), which regulates private health outfits in Abuja, to get Luna registered.

His big patient load goes back to 2007, and his clinic expanded to hire five staff, working in a converted apartment where he performed caesarean sections, removed fibroids and delivered babies from women.