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Busola Dakolo, wife of popular singer, Timi Dakolo, has accused controversial the pastor and founder of the CommonWealth of Zion Assembly COZA, Biodun Fatoyinbo, of raping her when she was 17.
The allegation is coming weeks after her husband, Timi, in a series of posts on Instagram called out the Abuja based pastor for serially molesting women in the church and leaving them broken emotionally.
In an explosive interview with Chude Jidenowo, co-founder of Red Media, Busola, a mother of three, recounted how the clergyman who have been trending in a number of sexual assault related cases, raped her in her mother’s house while she was still in secondary school.
Busola said, “There was no GSM then. I didn’t know and he came to my house. My house then, the gate was opened but the living room is where you just knock the door and someone will come downstairs and open the door. However, my mum had travelled with my younger sister. It was just I and my elder sister at home.
“The house was a duplex so big that if you are in a room upstairs you won’t know what’s going on downstairs. So I came down normally, it was 6:30 am to 7 am pretty early, and I heard a knock. Ah, who’s that, Pastor Biodun. I couldn’t say anything because what he doing here this early?.
“Immediately I opened the door, he just pushed me. He didn’t say anything, didn’t utter any word, he just pushed me to one of the chairs in my living room and I saw him, he was removing his belt.
“So I was like what? And he said, ‘keep quiet, do what I want and you will be fine’. At this point, a whole lot was going on in my head because he was someone I had put up here and I thought was really really concerned about me. I had already filled him in the place of a father that could speak to me, guide me and he was there about to do something I did not believe.
“When I was about to react, he covered my mouth and when he did he said, Busola, listen to me and you will be fine, just do what I want you to do.
“I didn’t struggle, I just left him and he brought out his penis. I was wearing a nightgown and pant, he pulled down my pant found difficulty to enter I was grunting, I would cry and he eventually penetrated, blood dropped on the floor.
“At that point, he finished what he wanted to do, had an orgasm and he zipped up. He left me there, I just sat on the floor and he went out.
“It looks just like an event but after that whole lot damaged within me. He entered his car, came back with Crest a soft drink with green content. It was already opened so he just poured it in my mouth and I had to swallow as he did that.
“He tapped me and said, you should be happy I’m the one that did this to you and he said I’ll see you and he left.
“He said, ‘be happy a man of God did this to you, disvirgined you’. At this point he was already a pastor in Ilorin, his wife had given birth to their first child Shindara and I was in the choir.”
Another report however said the pastor even raped Busola a second time.
According to YNaija, the second incident happened when Modele Fatoyinbo, Pastor Fatoyinbo’s wife asked Busola to come help her with her new baby.
The report said: “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 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.”