THE story this week is so surreal that I shudder to even retell it. Accused of serial rape and impregnation of his pubescent step-daughter, a certain Pastor Femi who is resident in Osogbo, Osun State, recently declared that it was “god” who instructed him to perpetrate the crime. (Since the deity he serves doesn’t look anything like the true God, I refer to it with a small “g”). The victim’s testimony: “Femi started having sexual intercourse with me since I was 12. When I was 13 years old, I got pregnant and he took me to a hospital for an abortion. He asked me to lie to the doctor that my classmate impregnated me and ran away. The first time he had intercourse with me was on my mother’s bed and he has been doing it continuously. I decided not to take the matter to court because my mother had four children for him, although two are dead. I don’t want a situation whereby when the children grow up, it would be as if I am the one who sent their father to prison. I decided not to take legal action because of his children who are my younger siblings.” The victim had first summoned the courage to report the matter to her teacher after four years of gross abuse.
Femi, an okada rider pastoring a denomination he established, didn’t dodge responsibility for the crime. Hear him: “It is true I slept with her although I don’t remember the number of times I did it with her. I’m a pastor and it was god who told me to sleep with her. God also told me to abort the pregnancy.” If you are shuddering at Femi’s Luciferic audacity, then wait for the next act in this terrible drama. Here’s the affidavit sworn to by the victim’s mother at the Osun State Ministry of Justice after the victim, supposedly seeking alternative dispute resolution, reported the matter to an NGO, the World Institute for Peace (WIP): “That my daughter went to the human rights organisation, World Institute for Peace, and reported a case of defilement and abortion against her stepfather, Femi, early in August 2024. That she (victim) agreed to resolve the dispute through alternative dispute resolution and has engaged in negotiation. That the family is not ready to pursue any case whatsoever with Mr Femi any longer. That the purpose of withdrawing was as a result of a settlement between the families.”
As a so-called pastor, Femi had both mother and daughter to slake his depraved lust and even went ahead to procure abortion for the child, putting her life in jeopardy. And he continued to rape the victim long after this terrible incident, yet here we are with a disgusting story of dispute resolution when the proper course of action is simply prosecution of the case in a law court. Minus the victim in this story, it’s difficult to discern a sane adult: the mother tolerating vile abuse of her own daughter in order to save a mendacious marriage is just as guilty as the horrendously shameless, irredeemably corrupt cleric robbing a child of her childhood and legitimizing his crime with theocratic garbage. The young girl could have died during the abortion undertaken by a doctor who, by the way, should by now be having a conference with mosquitoes in jail and eating his watery beans with candour, but what matters to the mother is the preservation of her family’s secret that is now public commodity. Just like the case of genocidal herders slaughtering farmers on their ancestral farmlands, this case of rape and abortion procurement for a child is being treated as a “dispute” (or a clash, to use the language of government-sanctioned terrorism in Nigeria) as if the child and her abuser are having an argument. This is one of the ways in which the Nigerian society legitimizes rape, including the rape of vast communities by state and non-state actors.
Of course, the powerful and connected members of this society get away with anything. A certain king of music reportedly cornered his drummer’s stranded fiancée in France and forced the innocent man to endure cold, bitter nights while he used the lady like rainwater; he remains extremely popular, and regularly rolls out tracks wherein he exults in certain “divine blessings.” The General Overseer of a powerful denomination in this Lugardian affliction who reportedly abuses married women while supposedly delivering their privates from demonic bondage has a fanatic base, and routinely clamps naysayers in jail using his connections to the security high tower. A king who openly rolls up a joint and whose first encounter with his discarded queen was allegedly a rape incident struts through the land, never mind his record as a jailbird. Pastor Femi shouldn’t join the immunity list.
It is strange, isn’t it, that Pastor Femi’s deity–and I can’t fathom why this felon’s surname has to be elusive –told him to commit serial rape and abortion but did not intimate him with the consequences of his horrific crimes. I will. Nigeria’s Child Rights Act (CRA) classifies sex with a child as rape, and the penalty upon conviction is life behind bars. Section 31 of the CRA provides that “sex with a child is rape, and anyone who has sexual intercourse with a child has committed the offence of rape whether or not the sexual intercourse was with the consent of the child”. By admitting that he cannot remember how many times he raped the minor, Pastor Femi inadvertently exposes the terrible ordeal that the innocent child endured. Luckily, there will be no need to count his years in jail, since the penalty is a life term. The Bible that Pastor Femi preaches from but which he is chronically blind to prescribes the death sentence for rape (Romans 1), but it is quite clear that his deity has other ideas. The police should arraign Pastor Femi without delay.
RE: There’s no future for Nigeria with IMF policies
After reading your article on the above, I wish to ask: Is it a must that Nigeria should borrow money from IMF? Where were these people in 1967-70 during the civil war when Chief Obafemi Awolowo managed the economy without borrowing a kobo from anywhere to prosecute the war? What is happening recently shows that those who are ruling us lack managerial acumen. It is so sad.
Francis Anthony (0814 420 7433)
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