If I don’t allow daddy to do it, he sleeps with my younger sister –Girl, 13

One night in June 2011, in a quiet neigbourhood in Ajangbadi, Egbeda area of Lagos, a 35-year old man sold his soul to the devil. While the residents slept peacefully, Adeleke Adetayo, who lived in a small apartment with his two children, woke up his first daughter, 13-year-old Bola (not real name), and asked her to pull off her pants.

That night, Adeleke, a commercial bus driver, raped his daughter as the little girl cried in agony.

“Blood was coming out from my body. He used a white singlet to clean it. I was crying but he told me to stop so that the landlord would not hear. My sister was in the room at the time. My father started sleeping with my younger sister last year,” the girl told our correspondent as she looked down at her toes.

Bola’s younger sister, Tolu (not real name), is just 10 years old.

In any African culture, sleeping with one’s child is the most abominable form of incest. But once in a while, reports of such incidents come up.

Such traumatic experience most times leaves a very damaging effect on the abused child and it may take substantial effort by specialists to make such child live a normal life.

The case of Adeleke’s daughters will bring tears to many eyes.

Unlike their peers who have the love of their parents and live normal lives of going to school and coming back home to the warm embrace of their parents, Bola and Tolu close from school every day with the trepidation of what awaits them at home.

They rarely have good food to eat as their father barely provide for their feeding when he comes back from his commercial driving job.

Their mother moved out in 2012, leaving them at the mercy of a predatory father who rarely had time for the children’s welfare.

Anytime I don’t allow him to do it, he sleeps with my sister instead but he would not give me money for food.”

The older girl said she was crying after her father refused to give her money for feeding after turning him down one particular day. A neighbour saw her and asked what the problem was, she told the neighbour the truth.

The neighbour placed an anonymous call to a woman she knew in a not-for-profit organisation, who in turn informed Mrs. Esther Ogwu, founder of the Esther Child Rights Foundation.

On Friday, June 5, 2013, the police were informed and Adeleke was apprehended by men of the Ikotun Police Division.

Adeleke did not utter a single word of denial.

“It is true I was sleeping with them. Sometimes, I just have the urge to do it. When I cannot control myself, I sleep with them,” he said in a tape recorded by the NGO officials who first confronted him.

These were the words Adeleke offered in defence when he was asked by Ogwu, the police and his landlord, why he slept with his two young daughters.

culled from Punch