Bisola Dakolo, photographer and
wife of popular artiste, Timi Dakolo, has revealed how she survived a rape
ordeal by Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo, the founder of The Commonwealth of Zion
Assembly (COZA).
Speaking during an exclusive Y!
TV interview with Chude Jideonwo, the founder of Joy Inc., Busola explained
that while a member of the church, she was raped by the pastor when she was
still under the age of 18. .
The interview comes months after Timi
Dakolo called out the Abuja-based pastor over his alleged sexual relationship
with female church members, even as he encouraged other victims who have gone
through the experience to speak up. (Read here and here)
Please continue to scroll down for videos of the interview
Read the interview as reported by YNaija below and watch the full interview below
Please continue to scroll down for videos of the interview
Read the interview as reported by YNaija below and watch the full interview below
ON MEETING BIODUN FATOYINBO FOR
THE FIRST TIME
Busola Dakolo was born and lived
most of her early life in Ilorin. The first time she left Ilorin was for
secondary school at Suleja and that time away allowed her really find her
Christianity. She joined and rose to become the vice-president of the Gifted
School Academy Suleja’s fellowship and embraced a conservative approach to
Christianity, growing to become distrustful of churches and fellowships that
tried to copy worldly trends as a way to reach people outside the church. She
returned home for the holidays to find that her sisters had started attending a
non-denominational ‘youth club’ that embraced all kinds of people and focused
on worship and fellowship over doctrine and legalism. It took a while but her sisters convinced her to go by telling
her she needed to meet different kinds of people, especially former prostitutes
and cultists that have given their lives to Christ.
Busola reluctantly joined her
sisters for the youth club, but she wasn’t comfortable there, partly because of
the way they worshipped and because I was the youngest person there. After the
service, there was a first timers call, and Busola stood up and introduced
herself, explaining her initial skepticism and how their worship had changed
her mind. After the service, the pastor of the club, a much younger Biodun
Fatoyinbo came looking for her after the service.
Pastor Biodun wasn’t yet married
( though he was engaged to his current wife) and the Commonwealth of Zion
Assembly (COZA) wasn’t yet a church, it was called Divine Delight Club.
He expressed his surprise at how
bold she was for someone so young and encouraged her to keep speaking up for
herself. He also managed to convince her to sing at their next meeting before
she left back for school. To sell this idea, he offered to personally rehearse
with her, mentioning that he played the keyboard. This was before mobile phones
and internet, so Busola’s sister had to take her to Fatoyinbo, who was living
with his parents at the time.
Though Busola remembers the song
they rehearsed, their rehearsal was uneventful, and at the next meeting she
performed, her performance moving enough that a former cultist who was
attending the club public renounced his past and embraced Christianity. After,
the members of the club affirmed her and Fatoyinbo convinced her through gifts
of books and cassette tapes to keep attending their club when she was back home
from school.
Returning to school and the more conservative
worship environment she was used to was harder than she had anticipated. For
the rest of her secondary school year, she struggled with guilt, shuffling
between her role in the conservative Fellowship of Christian Students (FCS) and
the more liberal world of Fatoyinbo’s COZA. She felt she was living a dual
life. Eventually she graduated and returned home to find that Divine Delight
Club had grown into a church headed by Fatoyinbo, and her sisters had convinced
her family to join the church. It felt like the only option she had to join as
well.
A YEARNING FOR UNDERSTANDING
LEADS TO RAPE
Busola had embraced conservatism
because she’d grown up in a polygamous family and she wanted some control over
her own life in service of something bigger than herself. Her father was
largely absent in her life and her mother had tried to shield them from the
financial difficulty that came with parenting her and her sisters alone but she
saw and it affected her deeply. Conservative Christianity gave her purpose and
the structure she desperately craved. She joined the choir at COZA as a way to
integrate into the church and rid herself of the discomfort she felt towards
the church. Being in the choir made her visible and eventually Fatoyinbo would
take an interest in her, inviting himself to her home under the guise of
getting to know her better.
The first time he visited, he
asked if she’d join him on an errand run. Her mother was concerned but didn’t
really push when Busola insisted that she wanted to go. They drove in his white
Mercedes Benz and finally spoke for the first time. Though she was normally guarded
around men, Fatoyinbo was charming, using his knowledge of her family and the
absence of her father to gain her trust. Before long, he was visiting the house
regularly, engaging her in ways her unavoidably distant sisters weren’t.
Fatoyinbo showed up at her house
unannounced. It was a Monday morning early enough that Busola Dakolo was still
in her nightgown. Her mother had traveled with her sisters and were absent at
service the previous sunday. He didn’t say a word, forcing her onto a chair,
speaking only to command her to do as he said. It took Busola a while to come
to terms with what was about to happen, and it was why she didn’t struggle or
make a fuss when he pulled down her underwear and raped her. She remembers he
didn’t say anything after, left to his car, returned with a bottle of
Krest and forced her to drink it,
probably as some crude contraceptive. She remembers him saying.
“You should be happy that a man
of God did this to you.”
At this time, his wife had just
given birth to their first child, Oluwashindara.
AFFLICTION STRIKES A SECOND TIME
Busola spoke up because her
husband, the singer Timi Dakolo put up a social media post on Instagram
accusing Nigerian clergy of condoning rape and sexual assault. People had
approached him anonymously about Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo targeting underage
girls for sexual relationships and he felt obligated to publicly speak up on
their behalf. His posts had created intense backlash and support and sparked
rumours about who the subject of his post was and who the victims were. This
wasn’t the first time Timi Dakolo had spoken up about sexual assault and he was
aware of what had happened to her from the beginning of their relationship.
What motivated her to speak up
about her rape was a social media post from an anonymous account that had
insinuated that she had been promiscuous as a teenager and had affairs with
pastors when she lived in Ilorin and questioned the paternity of her
children.
The reality was, rather than the
fabricated promiscuous teenager, Busola Dakolo was an isolated girl, terrified
of Fatoyinbo whose salvation story heavily featured his past as a cult member.
She was too terrified to tell her sisters or mother about his violence, stewing
in silence for a week. Her sisters were active in the church, and to avoid
suspicion she followed them to church the next Sunday. She remembers he spoke
about grace during the service and after, Modele Fatoyinbo asks that she come
to help her with her new baby, something she had never done before. It was
normal for church members to come serve at the pastor’s house so her sisters
allayed her protests.
Feeling she had no options, she
went to her pastor’s house, Fatoyinbo tried to isolate her later that night
from his wife and their daughter by insisting she slept in the family’s guest
room. She managed to thwart his plans, appealing to the pastor’s wife to let
her sleep in their master bedroom.
“No one ignores me.”
He would tell her this the next
morning, smacking her butt. It was an ominous enough statement that Busola
became apprehensive and tried to leave for her house once it was past twilight.
It was the first of many threats she would get from the flamboyant pastor.
Fatoyinbo would insist on dropping her off at home, even though she protested
several times. Instead of dropping her off at the junction as he had promised,
he detoured, driving her away from safety and towards a secluded spot. He
threatened her the entire drive, making proclamations about how he owned her
and how he was angry that he had thwarted her the night before. He opened the
car, pulled her out of the passenger seat and raped her a second time in the
space of a week. First behind the car, then moving her to the bonnet for ease
of access.
She didn’t fight, she had lost
all her will to. She’d protected her virginity for so long that having it
forcefully taken this way broke her. He guided back into the car when he was
done, and told her he loved her, speaking of how he’d told his pastors that men
of God raped women, that there was nothing special about what he did. He
dropped her off outside her home as though everything was normal. She bathed
immediately after and didn’t leave her room for three days, but while her
siblings were worried about her, no one made any connections between her sudden
mood and her married pastor. Busola’s family was a ‘church family’, a family so
involved in church activities that their home was routinely used as a hostel
for visiting ministers and guests of the church. Fatoyinbo had exploited that, and
did it again when he showed up the next Sunday, to ask why she hadn’t gone to
church that Sunday. She was afraid of drawing attention to herself, so she went
to church the next Sunday, and kept going, even though she left the choir and
began to voice her dissent towards Fatoyinbo.
THE BEGINNING OF RELIEF
A dream was the catalyst for
Busola opening up for the first time about Fatoyinbo raping her. Her elder
sister had relocated to Lagos, and she pleaded to visit, drained from avoiding
the pastor. In Lagos, her sister who she believes has the Sight, told her about
a dream she had had, where she’d seen Busola crying, blood on a chair and
Fatoyinbo smiling. She asked her pointedly, breaking months of silence and
starting a flood of admissions about the rape and everything that had happened.
Her sister convinced her to return to Ilorin and together they told her other
sisters and her brother, who was studying at the University of Ilorin. Her
brother flew into a rage, grabbing a pocket knife and taking her to Fatoyinbo’s
house. He was able to intercept them before they reached his house, and
together with Wole Soetan, who she suggests is now the pastor of the COZA
Portharcourt branch, convince them to return home and that Fatoyinbo would
follow.
The pastor and two of his church
members would eventually come to pacify her family, blaming the devil and
Soetan even promising to leave the church to show how little tolerance he had
for promiscuity. After Soetan would confide in Busola that he couldn’t leave
the church because he felt Fatoyinbo was ‘weak’ and needed spiritual guidance
and support. He convinced her siblings to keep the rape and assault from her
mother. Numb to all emotion, Busola
pretended to concede and after two weeks of constant visitation from the
pastors and the unspoken implication that Fatoyinbo was an alleged reformed
cultist with a lot to lose if news of her rape went public, she returned to the
church to protect her family and project normalcy. It was clear to her at this
point that she would never feel comfortable within organized religion.
Fatoyinbo continued to target
Busola in the intervening months, organizing prayer sessions and specialized
deliverance sessions with guest pastors to help ‘repair’ her ‘bondage’ and
suggesting to her that the violence he had meted towards her was a problem they
both had in common and needed communal deliverance, Busola would find out that
Fatoyinbo had been telling church members that she wasn’t ready for a
relationship when the pastor’s cousin befriended her. Their time would
eventually develop into a relationship and she would confide in him about what
had happened to her.
With his help, she would leave
the church and join another congregation.
According to Busola, she was a
virgin when the pastor allegedly raped her at 17. She stated that after he had
allegedly raped her inside her mother's living room, Pastor Biodun told her she
should be happy a man of God was the one who took her virginity.
Watch the concluding parts of the
interview below
According to her, the Pastor told her to feel at home and should not be "shy".
She alleged that he told her to order for "alcohol, feel free and order what you want."
Ese Walters said she felt guilty at first that she and the pastor were getting involved however, Mr. Fatoyinbo told her that he will “ teach you a level of grace that you don’t understand."
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I rememebr reading the Ese Wlter story on this website in 2013.
ReplyDeleteA leopard cannot change it's spot, watch how more people will come out in the following weeks.
If he is not arrested or charged to court then we have failed a as a country