An Ekiti State High Court has sentenced 45-year-old Alabi Oluwafemi to 15 years imprisonment for raping an eight-year-old minor in 1999.
According to the charge, Oluwafemi sometime in 1999 at Ikere Ekiti, did rape an eight-year-old girl.
The victim, in his testimony, said: “The defendant was my teacher and our neighbour. He touched my breast each time he came to teach me at home, I did not understand anything about what he was doing until he raped me in our sitting room when my mother travelled to Lagos and left me and my sister at home.
“He removed my cloth and used it to clean the blood and sperm and threw it away, I later ran to our neighbours weeping, they thought I was missing my mother but I did not tell them what happened.
“Thereafter, I dropped out of school because I could no longer concentrate on my studies. I was afraid anytime I saw him in the class. He came across me on Facebook sometime in the year 2012, he sent me a friend request and I declined.
“In the year 2023 again, he started disturbing me, I reported the matter to the law enforcement agents, and I was advised to ignore him. Thereafter, he started sending disturbing and annoying videos and messages to me, referring to the past ugly incident. When I could no longer bear it, I decided to take legal action against him.”
To prove his case, the prosecutor, Kunle-Shina Adeyemi, called two witnesses and tendered a confessional statement of the defendant, a flash drive of the defendant’s conversations with the nominal complainant, a petition and printout from screenshots of chats among others as exhibits.
In his judgment, Justice Lekan Ogunmoye said the sexual intercourse with the victim could not have been consensual. She, as an eight-year-old girl, was a minor and could not consent to sexual intercourse.
This issue is resolved in favour of the prosecution and the defendant is found guilty as charged, Ogunmoye said.
