Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti state on Tuesday advocated life
sentence for anyone found guilty of rape and other sexual offences.
Governor Fayemi, who stated this while presenting cheques to some
communities for developmental projects, said it was time to make Ekiti
State unbearable for rapists and perpetrators of domestic violence so
as to put a stop to the shameful act.
The Governor said he has the responsibility of ensuring the safety and
protection of lives of citizens and his government would soon come up
with punitive measures that would serve as deterrent to all.
Fayemi said every right-thinking citizens of the state should be
bitter against such perpetrators in their communities and report any
such unwholesome act, adding that government would ensure that anyone
found guilty of the crime would be permanently shot out of the
community.
He said, “You would see that on issues of domestic violence, we have a
no nonsense approach to it and you would have noticed what I called
‘Name and Shame’ that our government is doing all across the state,
because we are having increasing cases of rape, of sexual violence in
Ekiti state and I don’t think any of us were ever brought up that way.
Those are not the values that our ancestors and our forefathers
promoted in this state and there is no reason why women should be
violated by anybody. So it is unacceptable to my government. I would
continue to shout at the roof top and those that we convict will be
gone for a long time. We are now working on increasing the number of
years in the statute for rape, possibly life sentence for those who
are caught for it in Ekiti state.
“You may be aware that my wife is going round Ekiti now by paying
particularly attention to this issue, female genital mutilation and
many of the issues that are affecting our women, to also appeal to our
traditional and community leaders to use the benefit of their
closeness to government to sensitize people in their community to
address this.”
The Governor condemned the rate at which young girls are dropping out
of school as a result of pregnancy and promised to ensure adequate
sensitization in his drive to bring the girls back to school.
He also promised to embark on special projects on the girl-child
education based on the fact that they are more prone to abuse than
boys.
According to governor Fayemi, “We would also be doing a special
project on girl-child education. Ekiti is known for education and high
schools’ enrolment. You would have seen me in Eporo last Saturday
where I went to campaign for our pupils to return to school because
there is no longer fee payment nor collection of levy in our schools
in Ekiti state and I hope by Monday when all of the schools are taking
off again, we would begin to witness another round of increasing
enrolment in our primary schools particularly as well as our secondary
schools. Even with this enrolment, we are having problem with
girl-child education, many of our young women are being taking off
schools because they are getting pregnant at very early age, this is
not something that we are proud of in Ekiti.