By: Abdulhakeem Abdulhakeem
Just of recent, a 22 years old girl, by name, VERA UWAILA OMOZUA falls victim of rape that led to her untimely death in southern Nigeria ( Edo state to be precise) as she sought the tranquility of her empty church in the city of Benin, as a place to add value through studies. This crime has sparked off horror across the country. Different civil Society and Human right groups have taken different steps in their bid to ascertain justice for the victim. However, this piece intends to strongly support ‘Death’ as a capital punishment for anyone found guilty of rape. To do this, this layman would present his reader with some statistics of rape cases in Nigeria, though the readers are free to further evaluate the statistics, as he believes that this would further convince them to accept his view on why ‘death’ should be the penalty, and also present how ‘death’ as a penalty will reduce drastically the rate of rape cases in our dear country before drawing a conclusion.
For scarcity of sources, this piece will present it’s statistics result of rape cases in Nigeria from year 2012 down to 2016 as reported by the National Bureau Of Statistics (NBS) in the writings of a prolific writer and human right activist Kunle Adebanjo. In 2013, 5,797 Nigerians were admitted in prison for sex offences. In 2014, this figures was 4, 436. By the second half of 2015, the figure was 1,621. In 2016, the figure was 2,279. When you sum these figures up it gives you a total of 14,133, meaning that over 14,000 Nigerians were admitted in prison for sex offences. The total number shows that rapist have not in any way learnt any meaningful lessons from the punishment meted out on those found guilty and convicted by the court of law. Principally, because most of this convicts are jailed for few years, and released to continue life as a normal Nigerian, forgetting that they have done a lifetime damage to the life of a poor girl. But had it been ‘death’ is the penalty, specifically ‘death by hanging’ lots of lessons would have been learnt by those who derived joy from sexually assaulting an innocent girl, though not all girls are innocent.
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Fundamentally, death as a penalty for rapist will go along way to reduce cases of rape and Animals clothed with the skin of Man in Nigeria communities. Because death is the only thing that a criminal like rapist is afraid of. And that has been the reason why other laws don’t work. Rapist are not just criminals, they are terrorist as they create terror through their activities. If death as a capital punishment is meted out on Rapist the followings would be achieved:
A) There would be considerable reduction if not total disappearance in the number of rape cases in Nigeria as this will instilled fear of death in the minds of those boys and men who have such intentions.
B) This, would force parent to give their children, specifically male child a good upbringing as many young boys took to this act as a result of the non-challant attitudes of their parent towards their moralities.
C) Considerably to a large extent, girls and women would have freedom of movement without any form of assault and harassment.
D) Girls and women would have a sense of belonging in our society unlike the way they felt rejected by the Society presently, especially when it comes to cases like this.
E) This, would also give those innocent girls dying in silence the confidence to voice out their grievances, knowing fully well that there is a system in place that would bring the cultprit to justice. These, according to my layman perspective would be achieved if death is meted out on Rapist. I know some of my readers might be of the opinion that cutting off the head is not the solution to headache. But I want them to remember that death is the only punishment that can be best meted out on a terror, if we really want peace and harmony.
Abdulhakeem Abdulhakeem, is of the Department of History, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
