At the Lagos High Court in the Igbosere section of the Island, Mrs. Onuwabhagbe, a single mother of two, told trial judge Justice Ibironke Harrison how her only daughter got involved with the defendant and what happened in the hours before her death.
Dr. Babajide Martins, the Lagos State Director of Public Prosecution, led the witness in testimony. The witness said, “My name is Cordelia Onuwabhagbe, and I’m a 56-year-old civil servant with two children, Hezekiah (26) and Augusta (who would have been 24 this year) but she was murdered.”
“I know the defendant very well.” My daughter Augusta sent me a message on December 1, 2021, saying she was seeing a boy named Benjamin Best Nnayereugo. I requested her to bring him home because I was a single mother and wanted to be secure. She did on December 8, 2021.
I took him in like a son when they came since my daughter stated she loved him. He would often come over to dine, and we would talk even when Augusta was at school. She was a first-year, final-year student at Lead City University in Ibadan studying Medical Lab Science.
The witness said that the relationship later displayed indicators of aggression when the couple went on vacation together.
She said, “There was a time, on November 22, 2022, when they went out of the country together.” I asked Benjamin how he paid for the trip, and he said he won the money from Sporty Bet Platform. When I asked why he wasn’t putting it into his business, he said he sent some of it to his uncle, Okeke Charles, to invest. The money for traveling wasn’t much because they were flying economy class and it was all low-key.
“Seven days into the vacation, he assaulted and mistreated my daughter without mercy, broke her phone, and ripped her hair out. He didn’t record it when he hit her, but he did record it when my daughter threw pillows at him and called him a bad guy. He sent it to me.
“When they got back, he came to me, begged me, and then went to my son and urged him to kneel.
He told her, “Ma, I’m not a violent person, and I won’t do this again.” He told her that if he hit her again, she should leave the relationship. He went after that, and Augusta urged us to give him another chance. They stayed together, and there was no more violence.
Mrs. Onuwabhagbe also told the court that things got scary in July 2023 when her daughter felt threatened by the defendant.
She stated, “Benjamin called me around 9 or 10 p.m. on Tuesday, July 11, 2023, and told me that Augusta has never cheated on me since we started dating, but she is going to cheat on me.”
I then inquired, “What happened?” He stated he pretended to be someone else and asked her out on the phone by asking her to Lagos to see whether she would be faithful. She decided to go to Lagos to spend time with someone else without knowing it was him.
“I informed Benjamin that I didn’t raise my daughter that way, but I also told him that she was supposed to be in school and would be home in two weeks, when we would talk about it again.
As soon as he hung up, my daughter called and stated that Benjamin had taken over her Instagram account and shut her out.
“She was an influencer, therefore she begged me to tell him to give her account back. After that, their relationship may stop right away. I called him, and he gave her the account back that same day.
The witness also said that her daughter gave her a distressing voice note that night about threats made by the defendant.
My son phoned me on Saturday, July 15, and inquired when I last talked to his sister. I told him I had been talking to her, but when I called that Saturday morning, the phone rung and she didn’t answer.
“He told me to go look for his sister because he had a horrible feeling. He saw her shadow and wasn’t happy. He told me to go to Benjamin’s house, and then I told him that she had a fight with Benjamin. When I called her about 11 p.m., she had sent a voice mail saying that Benjamin was threatening her and had promised on his mother’s grave that he would “show” her.
“I didn’t know where Benjamin lived, so my son asked Oyindamola, Augusta’s best friend in school, to accompany us there. Oyindamola claimed we couldn’t go into his estate until he gave us a code. I called Augusta’s godmother, Mrs. Bankole, whose husband is in the military. I made plans for a military man to travel with us, and five of us went to Oral Estate.
The witness then talked about how the group came to the defendant’s house and what happened on July 15, 2023, when she was said to have been killed.
“When we got to Oral Estate, the military man at the gate told them that my daughter wasn’t answering her phone calls but was answering her chats. They let us into the estate. When we got to his house, his gate was locked, but my daughter’s car was parked in the yard.
I believed they took his car and went out. Since it’s against the law for us to break into the compound, we went to the police station in Ajah to report it. They sent one officer with us, who then told the estate police to break the padlock.
“All the windows were open, and all the air conditioners in the home were running. The keys were on the hood of her car, which was fine. The cops told me to rent a ladder so they could go up because the doors were locked.
My brother took a ladder and climbed it to see if he could open the balcony. The police officers weren’t very helpful, and it was getting late.
“Whatever he saw at that point, he didn’t tell me. He drove us home and said that the next day, Sunday, we would go back and look for Augusta.”
The witness cried as she told how she found out the truth about what happened to her daughter later.
“After church on Sunday, I started pushing my brother to go look for her. He asked to eat, and Mrs. Bankole came in a little while later. After thereafter, my brother told me that Augusta had died.
She added that in her confusion, she called the defendant Benjamin and asked him what her daughter did to have him kill her.
“He didn’t answer all day Sunday. Benjamin went online on Monday and told everyone that he had a fight with his girlfriend, @austa_xxo, and accidentally stabbed her to death. He told me that no one should feel sorry for me and that he would give himself in to the police. He said, “I have N300m, and if that’s the only thing I can do for the family, I’ll turn myself in.”
“The next day, he started talking to me and claiming it was a mistake and telling me what happened that lead to my daughter’s death. I informed him that there was nothing that was worth killing her for.
He mentioned “I’m sorry” to me a few times throughout our talk. Sometimes he would send the emoji “be strong” and promise to take care of him.
“I told him that stabbing someone is a mistake, and that he should take her to the hospital right away. If she lives or dies, I will take it as fate. But to stab her and then run away, that was not a mistake; it was planned.”
“My son took charge and told him to come out of hiding, but he never did. At one point, he added, “Augusta has a sex tape.” I responded, “If I let it go, it won’t make you look good because you have a church.” I also said, “Is that how much you love her that you want to blackmail her even in death?”
“By August, I had gotten in touch with his uncle, Okeke Charles. By this time, all the family members I knew had cloned their numbers so that you could only send a message and not contact them. I wrote a message. “Your nephew killed someone, and so far, no one from the family has come to my house.” He told me that they are also dealing with the agony, but no one has called or come by yet.
I buried Augusta on September 9, 2023. On September 14, I went on Instagram and said, “It’s been two months since you were killed, Augusta, and no one came to see me. Where is karma?”
Benjamin then wrote back on his site, saying, “Karma doesn’t exist; I don’t believe in Karma; pay wickedness for wickedness.”
He then put the video of Augusta online that he had taken when they were on vacation. In it, she threw pillows at him and called him a bad man. He also added that he had been in a bad relationship and that “my baby would have been alive if not for her mother who was selling her to rich men.”
He locked his Instagram account after that and never came back online. We never heard from him or saw any messages from him there again.
“After that, he was wanted and captured in Sierra Leone, and my son was there when he was detained. Benjamin’s dad came to Sierra Leone on November 20 and talked to me for the first time.
When he was arrested, Benjamin had a Sierra Leone passport that he bought for $25,000. The name on it was Samuel Kanu Princeton.
“On November 26, he escaped from prison in Sierra Leone. Two weeks after the prison break, the police were able to get all the inmates back to prison, but Benjamin was still missing. I still have the video of him leaving prison on my phone.
“People on the internet were telling me about all the nations he was going to till he moved to Qatar. My lawyer, Femi Falana, who is known as the “lawyer to the poor,” helped me get him detained in Qatar on January 15, 2025. He was then sent back to Nigeria in April 2025 with several passports. “I hadn’t seen him in a long time until I saw him in court yesterday,” she said.
The DPP told the court that some of the technological evidence, like videos and chat messages, had only been given to the Defense counsel the day before.
Justice Harrison put off the cross-examination of the witness to April 22 and 23 because the Defense counsel, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Marcel Oru, asked for more time to look over the evidence.
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