Nigerians themselves have known better. Ask any eligible voter his opinion of the average Nigerian politician and your guess is as good as ours. And yet, they can’t do without politicians or those in positions of authority, which makes the social contract

Sometime in December 2021 in a white garment church in Akure Ondo state, a worshipper, Bukola, approached her pastor for deliverance. Whatever for has never been quite clear. She was five months pregnant. Probably fearful of a miscarriage, the woman took her case to the man of God and overseer of the church where she worships.

It was a Wednesday, a day the church in question used to have special prayer and delivery sessions. The programme had ended that day by the time Bukola got there. The unnamed man of God assured her all would be well. Declaring that the list, prescription given to the woman in her hospital was too long, the pastor instructed her to make a photocopy. She did and returned to the church. “He then said I should take it to the altar. While I was sitting down, he started pressing my stomach and asked how many months my pregnancy was and I said five months.”

By some funny coincidence, Bukola and the preacher man were alone in the church on that day. “He said he was going to do some spiritual work on me before my delivery,” Bukola recalled the man of God saying. “He stood up and entered a room. He later called me to enter and I did.”

The “spiritual work,” it turned out, was a carefully worked out plan by the supposed man of God to seduce and bed the expecting woman.

Alone with Bukola in a room within the church premises, he commanded her to remove her clothes. Like most women would in the presence of an adult male not their husband, she timidly obeyed. Before she knew it, the pastor brought out anointing oil and proceeded to massage her private part with it.

Not done, he told the woman the baby in her womb was not in the right position which he opted to correct. How did he do it?

Hear the woman herself: “He asked me to open my legs and dipped his middle finger with oil in my private part,” Bukola said. “He said my baby was in a vertical position instead of horizontal. He said he would put oil in my private and would help me insert it with his private part so that oil would get into the baby.”

Continuing the man of God’s tale of deception, Bukola said the pastor “then rubbed oil on his private part and had sex with me. He said he was not supposed to do it but he helped me because my husband was not around.”

Whether the anointing oil got the baby in the rightful position is hard to say. But what did happen was the man of God got himself into trouble. “It was later after he had sex with me that I came to my right senses,” Bukola recalled to the police in Akure, as if she’d just woken up from a hypnotic state.

For Bukola Dakolo, wife of singer song writer, Timi Dakolo, it took her decades to wake up from her hypnotic state, for her to “come to her senses,” as she later said. In her own case, her pastor and close friend of her family raped her at her family home. She was just sixteen!

Now a full grown adult, Bukola narrated how, in her teens, celeb preacher, Biodun Fatoyinbo of Commonwealth of Zion Assembly used to come around her family. One early morning, Fatoyinbo duly visited. Nobody was home, even Bukola’s mother. A mentee of Fatoyinbo whom the young Bukola depended on for everything from counseling to inspirational books, her sibs were upstairs asleep when the man of God arrived. After forcing himself on her, Bukola recalled, Fatoyinbo went to his car and returned with a bottle of Krest Bitter lemon for her to drink, telling her at the same time that “you should be happy that a man of God did this to you.”

Probably worried about the teenager’s depressive state after the act, Fatoyinbo, Bukola said, told her not to worry: “You’ll be fine. This thing is not a new thing. Men of God do this.”

If that was a personal confession, Fatoyinbo couldn’t have been more correct. In 2015, a lady called Stephanie Otobo let it be