“The law is in place for a reason. Till this issue is handled, till these allegations are investigated, till the law takes it’s full course, there should be no sermon on that pulpit from him. Someone else can preach for now. What is right is right.
#PASTORSTEPDOWN”
Yesterday, Etomi-wellington also revealed that she’s standing by Busola Dakolo;
“Survivor. Not a victim. You have spoken your truth even when you knew it could cost you everything. Clearly, we still need to have active conversations about rape because a lot of people CLEARLY still don’t get it. Busola, we are proud of you. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” You have done something. Ps I have turned my comments off because I am not looking for people to validate or invalidate my stance. Regardless of either, It is my stance. #istandwithyou #istandwithbusoladakolo”
5 shocking things Busola Dakolo said about COZA’s pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo
One of the most shocking and explosive stories you’d be reading today is that of Timi Dakolo’s wife, Busola Dakolo revealing how the senior pastor of Commonwealth Of Zion Assembly, Biodun Fatoyinbo raped her twice years ago.
In an exclusive interview with YNaija, Busola gave a detailed account of how she met the pastor while she was in secondary school and started worshipping at his then club turned church after a lot of persuasions from her sisters.
Busola Fatoyinbo revealed in graphic details how Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo was ruthless and unremorseful during the period he raped her. She went on to reveal how finally opened up to her family about the raped incident and how her brother was held back from attacking Pastor Fatoyinbo. Here are five explosive things Busola Dakolo said about Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo.
1. Their first encounter
“I have to say this is the first time I would be coming out like in public to discuss something with someone else, except my family and my husband. I was still in secondary school and I came home, I was still staying in Ilorin because I was born in Ilorin, went to primary and secondary in Ilorin. I returned home for a particular holiday and my sisters all told me that they are now going to a particular club…I went there and they said time for new first timers to stand up and I did, introduced myself as Busola and explained my journey there,” she said.
She went on to talk about how she wasn’t really interested in coming to the club because of the way they worshiped God but was impressed by the kind of messages and what people had to say.
“After the message, Pastor Bioudun Fatoyinbo preached, he came to meet me after the service, then it wasn’t COZA, it was called Divine Delight Club and he wasn’t married yet but he was engaged to his present wife. He came to meet me and said I was such a bold lady that he had never seen someone like this, that I needed to keep the fire then he said, can you do something in the next meeting before you go to school? He asked me when I’ll be going back to school…then I told him I can sing and he said that’s great. He then said he plays the keyboard that he would help me rehearse. So, I told my sisters,” she said.
For Busola, because she was skeptical about the club, she informed her sister about her unwillingness to actually go ahead with the plan to which they rebuffed her. She, however, agreed and decided to go ahead.
“My sister then took me to his house, he was living with his father and his wife was always there. She left me there because he was already seated by the keyboard. As at then, I didn’t have a phone, even my house, we didn’t have any landline. So he asked me what kind of song I wanted to sing, I did and we rehearsed and I went back home. So the next meeting I did the song and I was singing someone came out to give his life to Christ…after the service he gave me books to read, but it wasn’t at the spot,” she said.
2. How Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo raped her the first time
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.
“One particular day, Pastor Biodun came to meet me and he said, you don’t like to talk and he was like how are you and I was like I’m fine. He started coming to my house and my family was very involved in the COZA,” she wrote.
Then one morning, 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.
3. Raping her the second time
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 to 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.
4. Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo confessing
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.
5. How Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo continued to target her
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.
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