Though some Nigerians have applauded the immediate past Senate for passing the Sexual Offences Bill before its expiration, Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to withhold his assent to the bill because it creates opportunity for the likes of Senator Sanni Yerima, a former governor from Zamfara.
The private member bill was sponsored by Senator Chris Anyanwu.
The bill provides life imprisonment for anyone convicted of raping or having sexual intercourse with children under 11 years.
It provides 10 years imprisonment for incest, 10 years for child pornography or a fine of N2 million.
It further provides 14 years for sexual abuse.
Soyinka does not think this is good enough. The age limitation is one of his arguement as he thinks the bill still provides for sexual exploitation.
In a letter to the organising committee of the June 12 Movement of Nigeria, Soyinka said he thinks those above 11 years could still be described as fragile and innocent and therefore should not be endangered since they are not matured enough to know what is right from wrong in most situations involving sex and its experience.
Soyinka said: “I could not help but notice a reiteration – as if to ensure that there is no ambiguity – of the word ‘child’, near superfluously.
“President Buhari – and here I make my first imposition on his presidency – should never place his assent on such a nefarious distraction.
“Its implications doom the victim to afflictions that churn the stomach even to think of the human toll.
“Perhaps those legislators think that vaginal fistula is something thought up by arm-chair critics with nothing better to occupy their minds. No matter, let those who profess a genuine concern declare their stand on this.
“On my part, I find unacceptable any effort to build a nation on perversions that merely minister to man’s sexual appetites.
“This is a sordid appeasement of a minority who actually require psychiatric help.
“President Buhari should not give his assent to the Bill without amendments that address the earlier Yerima gift to the nation. It’s a trap.
“Well, we understand ‘child’ as defined in most dictionaries. There is however also child as defined by the Nigerian legislature.
“This definition is contained in a prior Bill, sponsored, no less, by a notorious serial paedophile and cross-border sex trafficker, yet lawmaker – one Ahmed Yerima.
“Does Yerima’s Bill, gleefully assented to by his peers, not simply vitiate this latter, supposedly humane concern for the protection of the child? Again, I confess to being only a ‘bloody layman’ in such matters.
“However, reading both bills, it strikes me that all the new bill does is empower the clique of paedophiles.
“All you need do is ‘marry’ even a six-year old under any local laws, and do whatever you want with her.
“Through marriage, she is already an ‘adult’. Her ‘defiler’ is now fully protected by this law. She is not.
“The current bill is the ancient story of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. End of story? Yerimah and his fellow perverts are having the last laugh.
“This latest addition of insult to social injury was tucked within a last-minute avalanche of bills that were passed at lightning speed during the tail-end of the last legislative assemblage – 47 bills in under 3 hours – surely one for the Guinness Book of Records. An accident? Or by design?
“This bill, subjected to wrong arguments, merely consolidates the reduction of female minors to sex objects.
“As long as you can afford a bag of rice or – as in the case of cross-border tastes such as Ahmed Yerima’s – ten thousand dollars, you are free to rape a child to death.
“This, surely cannot pretend to represent the will of a people who care. Once you re-define female adulthood as marital status, all subsequent protection bills for the girl-child are worthless, cynical.”
Advising Nigerians to learn from the heroes of the June 12 struggle, he noted that few people have done more for the cause of liberation than the major hero of June 12, M.K.O. Abiola, who was an open polygamist.
