Teacher jailed 15 years for rape committed in 1999

Alabi Oluwafemi has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for raping an eight-year-old girl in 1999 at Ikere Ekiti, Ekiti State.

The victim, during her testimony, recounted how Oluwafemi, the defendant, who was also her teacher and neighbour at the time, sexually assaulted her.

“The defendant was my teacher and our neighbour. He touched my breast each time he came to teach me at home,” the victim recounted.

She added that she did not understand anything about what Oluwafemi was doing until he raped her in her sitting room when her mother travelled to Lagos and left her and her 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,” she added

“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.”

The victim added that in the year 2023, Oluwafemi started disturbing her again, which she reported to the law enforcement agents and was later 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.”

The prosecutor, Kunle-Shina Adeyemi, to prove his case, 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 a printout from screenshots of chats, among others, were submitted as exhibits to the court.

Justice Lekan Ogunmoye, under the Ekiti State High Court, said the sexual intercourse with the victim could not have been consensual.

The court then ruled that the victim, as an eight-year-old girl, was a minor and could not consent to sexual intercourse.

The judge found Oluwafemi guilty as charged and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.