Defilement: Adeyemi Babatunde’s devious alibi

PICKED up recently by the the Ogun State Police Command for  allegedly defiling his five-year-old biological daughter (name withheld) in September 2022, a 28-year-old suspect, Adeyemi Babatunde,  stunned police interrogators when he averred that  he had been wondering what led him to such an act which he knew was unlawful and indecent. He said that though the act made his wife to leave the family residence with their two daughters for her grandmother’s place, he never knew that it would be made public nine months after. According to the Ogun State police spokesman, SP Abimbola Oyeyemi, the suspect was arrested following a  complaint lodged at Ijebu Imushin divisional headquarters by the mother of the victim, who reported that her first child told her that her father had laid her on the bed and inserted his manhood in her private part while she was away from home. The woman had noticed that the child was complaining of pain whenever she was to urinate or her private part was to be washed when taking her bath. He added: “On interrogation, the suspect confessed to the commission of the crime but claimed not to know what came over him as at that time.”

Babatunde, from Awa Ijebu, also confessed to committing the crime during an interview with the Nigerian Tribune. His words: “I’m an employee in a cocoa factory. I have two daughters aged five and two. The relationship between me and my wife was cordial and smooth until what I did pulled us apart and made my wife to pack out of the room we rented at Ijebu-Imushin. I had issues with the police over installmental payment of missing cash to a POS business I was working with. When the business account was being reconciled, N290,000 was discovered missing from it. I was called from the kiosk I was working in and taken to Vigilante Group of Nigeria (VGN). From there, I was transferred to the police station where I was asked how I would pay the money back to the POS business, along with other workers that were also picked up. On September 3, 2022, I sent my wife to the police station to help me tell them that I would not be able to pay because of salary delay. My five-year-old daughter was with me at home while my wife put the younger one on her back to the police station. My daughter sat on the bed with me and was watching cartoon. I didn’t know what came over me.” He then proceeded to give lurid details of the encounter.

To say the very least, this is a dastardly, terrible incident. It is inconceivable that a parent would have any kind of sexual contact with his child, let alone a minor. It is a horrendous crime that boggles the mind and defies logic. Indeed, unless it is proved that the suspect suffers from mental disability, there is no possible explanation that can account for such an event. Sadly, as demonstrated yet again, Nigerian children are in danger of sexual and emotional violations, especially by family members and close associates of their parents. Time and again, we have warned parents to watch over their young, impressionable children; to guard them jealously and protect them from sexual predators, because increasingly, the media is suffused with stories of deviant and criminally minded adults taking advantage of young children and violating and brutalizing them, setting them up for a future of agony. Now, the case becomes worse when the abuser or would-be abuser is the parent: it is hard to even think about, but it is a reality in some homes.

In this instance, as in most cases, a child has been betrayed in the most criminal fashion by her supposed protector, and we can only hope that she will overcome this dastardly episode with the right kind of care. To be sure, we categorically reject citizen Babatunde’s alibi; it is illogical and self-serving. By his own admission, he did not know that the matter would be blown open, but he apparently did not think of this when he perpetrated the violent, repulsive act of defiling his own flesh and blood. For whatever demonic pleasure he hoped to enjoy, he cast reason, sanity and decency aside and engaged in a patently illegal, blatantly unnatural, socially forbidden sexual encounter. Not even the natural love a father is supposed to have for his daughter deterred him; all he wanted was to satiate his depraved lust. If the little girl had died from the encounter, what would Babatunde’s alibi have been? How was he even able to look the child in the face after criminally violating her? And pray, just when will people start taking responsibility for their actions instead of blaming them on malevolent, terrestrial forces?

We denounce Babatunde’s action in no uncertain terms and hope that the law will take its due course with the maximum sentence allowed by law imposed to serve as a deterrent to other felons who would, for any reason, be inclined to toe a similar, perfidious path. The society must never allow such crimes to go unpunished.

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