A female soldier, who was dismissed from the Nigerian army
for getting pregnant, has appealed her dismissal.
An army board of inquiry (BOI) had investigated the soldier
after the incident and recommended her trial where she was found culpable of
the “offence of conduct prejudicial to service discipline”.
She was thereafter dismissed from service.
But Johnson Oyewole, her lawyer, described her dismissal as
“unlawful” and appealed to Tukur Buratai, chief of army staff, to upturn the
decision
“It is manifest that the purported trial of our client was
tainted with substantial irregularities; there is no offence under the law and
no element of the offence of misconduct prejudicial to service discipline that
talks of pregnancy while in service and warranted dismissal under section 103
(1),” Johnson said.
In the appeal, Oyewole explained his client enlisted in the
army in March 2012 as a member of 67 regular recruits intake, and was serving
with 56 signal command, Mile 2, Lagos, before the incident.
He said his client had lawfully applied for and obtained a
pass to travel to Oyo state, sometime in October 2014 when the vehicle she
boarded ran into bandits along Odo-Oba road and was allegedly raped by five
men.
The soldier was taken to Ladoke Akintola University of
Technology, Ogbomoso, where she was reportedly treated for six days.
The lawyer said following the assault, his client obtained
an extract from the police crime diary, a sworn affidavit, and a medical
report, which showed that she sustained “injury of right ankle joint with
laceration and bruises around the thigh region”.
He added that she later fell sick in December 2019 and when
she reported at the military hospital, she was confirmed to be 12 weeks
pregnant.
There are insinuations that one of the reasons for her
dismissal was the time difference between the period of her attack by the
bandits and when she was confirmed pregnant.
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