Busola Dakolo said she had
been expecting to hear from the police. Three weeks earlier the photographer
had filed a case against the flamboyant Nigerian celebrity Pastor Biodun
Fatoyinbo, accusing him of raping her years before.
Busola Dakolo (L) and Pastor
Biodun Fatoyinbo
However, she recalled that
the silver Toyota that tailed her as she was driving into her Lagos housing
estate, and the white minibus with tinted windows already parked outside her
house, had no police markings. By the time she got to her gate, the minibus had
blocked her path. According to Dakolo, a man appeared and told her to get out
of the car, get into the bus and speak to his oga – Nigerian pidgin English for
boss.
Dakolo said when she
refused, three men got out of the minibus and walked towards her. “One was
holding a gun, and I noticed a second one holding a letter. They told me they
were from IG’s [the inspector general of police] office in Abuja and that I
needed to sign this letter and acknowledge it,” Dakolo said in an interview
with the Guardian. The letter contained allegations of criminal conspiracy,
falsehood, mischief, and a threat to life. These were not levelled against
Fatoyinbo, however, but against Dakolo and her husband, a well-known musician.
Dakolo’s description of the
two occasions on which Fatoyinbo allegedly raped her, first at her family home
and then on the bonnet of his car, shocked Nigerians. It also triggered a
backlash both from the pastor himself – he denies the allegations “in every
measure” – and from some of the 16,000 members of his church, the Commonwealth
of Zion Assembly (Coza). Dakolo had been hailed as a brave survivor whose
speaking out, women’s rights activists hoped, could set off a #MeToo movement
in the West African country where patriarchal traditions continue to stigmatise
survivors. Now she found herself hounded in a seemingly orchestrated social
media campaign.
Rape Allegation: Inside
story of Police invasion of Timi Dakolo’s home “Busola Dakolo was never raped
nor had any form of intercourse with Biodun Fatoyinbo. She fabricated the
entire story to garner sympathy for a bigger assignment of defamation,” wrote
the controversial blogger Kemi Omololu-Olunloyo, who describes herself as “the
Great Journalist of Nigeria”. Later, she posted: “Busola Dakolo should exit
this web of lies now. There was NO RAPE!” “If God be for him, even all the
celebrities, everyone that has made comments, even the over two million
followers on Instablog can’t bring him down,” Ernest Esekhile, a Christian DJ,
said on Instagram.
COZA pastor: The PFN
Curious Position The charges against the Dakolos were brought by a special
police branch in a counter-case filed by Coza, despite investigations stalling
on the initial case. “Our culture doesn’t allow speaking of these sorts of
things against anointed men of God,” Dakolo said. “They’d rather hide it, and
the party that is being victimised tends to live with that self-blame. The
damage on the survivor is extremely terrible.
The society, the church,
keeps sweeping things under the carpet.” Fatoyinbo returned to the pulpit on
Sunday after a month’s absence. “As a Christian, you must face opposition. If
God, who is holy and faithful, has enemies, you are sure going to have,” he
told the congregation. Pastors are often revered in Nigerian society, some
leading church franchises with branches worldwide and congregations in the tens
of thousands, building hangar-size places of worship and flying around in
private jets. Fatoyinbo himself drives a Porsche.
They often also wield
significant political power: TB Joshua, the leader of the Synagogue, Church of
All Nations, has received presidents from across the continent, and sometimes
makes prophecies about who will win elections – including one that Hillary
Clinton would win in 2016. Chris Okotie, a 1980s pop star turned pastor, has
run for president himself four times. The country’s vice-president is a pastor
at the Redeemed Christian Church of God, the country’s most economically and
politically important religious institution, according to the sociologist
Ebenezer Obadare.
In response to condemnation of the delivery of the Dakolos’
letters, the Nigerian police force put out a statement saying: “A police
invitation letter is not synonymous with a warrant of arrest, and must not be
construed to be one. Rather, it is a polite investigative tool used in
eliciting information voluntarily from parties to aid police investigations.”
However, Dakolo said it was “extremely intimidating” to have a gunman emerge
from a darkened minibus, and that while she had eventually acquiesced, she had
been in shock. “Is this what everybody goes through, everyone that comes out to
say their truth, everybody that says something about someone that is
influential?” she asked. “I felt: who’s going to be there for the common man?
Who is going to be there for someone who nobody knows?”
The lawyer and women’s rights
advocate Ayisha Osori said Nigeria had “a very strong rape culture” and that
men and the state felt a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies. “That’s why
the state doesn’t typically play a supportive role, but instead plays a role to
maintain power structures,” she said. Osori said that if it was not quite
Nigeria’s #MeToo moment yet, it was a “huge deal” to have an educated,
public-facing woman speak out, with a supportive spouse alongside her, and
would be looked back on as a milestone. “It’s not done for women who have
everything to lose to come out and say: ‘This has happened to me.’
That a middle-class family,
a well-known family responds as they do – it’s extremely positive.” The way
Dakolo saw the reaction to her allegations, she said, was: “He [Fatoyinbo] is
in denial and he’s just trying to cover up and protect everything about
himself.” She said she was praying for justice and she hoped it would encourage
others to come forward. “This issue is beyond me. This is what’s happening, and
the church is a place where they don’t talk about this. “I decided to come out
for me,” she added. “It’s for me and others, so they can begin their process of
healing, so they can begin to live freely.” Vanguard Culled from UK Guardian
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