Two men, 24-year-old Olamide Ebenezar and 31-year-old Kolade Oladipo have been remanded in a custodial centre in Ekiti state for allegedly scaling a fence to rape a 16-year-old girl in her mother’s house.
An Ekiti State Chief Magistrate’s Court gave the order on Wednesday, October 6, after a prosecutor, E.S. Atane, of the Department of State Services, brought an ex-parte motion before the court for the remand of the defendants in custody pending the completion of the security agency’s investigation.
Atane said the detention would also allow for the “onward transmission of the duplicate case file to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions for legal advice”.
The charge filed against the suspects reads in part:
”The two defendants were reasonably suspected to have committed the offence of rape on a 16-year-old student, punishable under Section 2(2) of the Ekiti State Gender-Based Violence (Prohibition) Amended Law, 2019.”
In her ordeal narrated to the police, the victim stated:
“The defendants on 27th of September, 2021, around 2pm, jumped into our compound at Ajilosun and had sex with me in my mother’s room when she (my mother) travelled to Lagos.”
The Chief Magistrate, Saka Afunso, ordered that the defendants be remanded in the Ado Ekiti Custodial Centre pending the conclusion of the investigation by the DSS and adjourned the case till November 9, 2021 for mention.
Despite the Nigerian authorities’ declaration of a “state of emergency” on sexual and gender-based violence, rape persists at crisis levels with most survivors denied justice, rapists avoiding prosecution, and hundreds of cases of rape going unreported due to pervasive corruption, stigma and victim blaming, Amnesty International said in a report published in November 2021.
The report reveals how harmful cultural stereotypes, failures of law enforcement to investigate rape cases, toxic misogyny and insufficient support for survivors, have created a culture of silence and impunity which continues to fail hundreds of women and girls every year.
“The fear of not being believed, or even being blamed for being raped, is creating a dangerous culture of silence that prevents survivors from seeking justice. It is unacceptable that survivors of rape and other forms of gender-based violence face such a torturous ordeal to get justice, which only adds to their pain. The ‘state of emergency’ has proven to be an empty declaration, which has so far done nothing to protect women and girls in Nigeria.”