Wife of singer, Timi Dakolo, Busola, has accused
controversial clergyman and founder of the CommonWealth of Zion Assembly COZA, Biodun Fatoyinbo, of sexually
assaulting her when she was much younger.
Speaking during an explosive Y TV interview with Chude
Jideonwo, the founder of Joy Inc, Busola, a photographer and a mother of three,
recounted how the clergyman who has been embroiled in a number of sexual
assault related cases, Ese Walter being the most prominent, allegedly raped her
in her mother's house while she was still in secondary school. In her
interview, Busola recounted how the clergyman also allegedly tried having sex
with her inside his matrimonial home when she came in to help his wife, Modele,
when she had their first child.
Recall that Timi Dakolo recently launched an attack on the
clergyman, anonymously. He called out the pastor, accusing him of taking
advantage of women in his ministry and leaving them broken emotionally. Read
here and here.
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.
