Sugabelly, Rape and Audu's Sons by Reuben Abati

You probably don't know Sugabelly. I don't know her either. But it is the twitter handle of a Nigerian lady: @sugabelly, who in the wake of the death of former Governor Abubakar Audu of Kogi State felt the urge to go public with her story. My foregrounding her/story as opposed to his/story is further affirmation of an earlier submission that Audu's death is "inconclusive" (The Guardian, Nov 27).

As the rest of Nigeria mourned the death of Abubakar Audu and pondered the implications of an inconclusive electoral process, Sugabelly showed up on social media and started celebrating his death. Her message was that the death of the man was good riddance to bad rubbish. "I feel so amazing", she wrote. "Like God actually answered my prayers… That's usually how it is.

Powerful people rarely remember the people whose lives they destroy." She alleged that Audu's sons once gang-raped her-seven of them, when she was an impressionable 17-year old and that Governor Audu used his position as a big man to rubbish her, slammed her with a $2 million libel suit, denied her from getting justice, with his lawyers insisting that "14 years" is the age of consent under the Penal Code in the FCT, and so there is no case.

9 Fulani herdsmen gang-rape 15-yr-old girl, 2 housewives

MAKURDI — No fewer than nine suspected Fulani herdsmen, yesterday, allegedly gang-raped a 15-year-old girl and two housewives (names withheld) at gunpoint, in Tse Ikyuer, Yandev, Mbagwen in Guma Local Government Area of Benue State.
Two of the victims, who narrated their ordeal to Vanguard in Makurdi, the state capital, said after beating and raping them, the herdsmen also made away with their N60,000 and two phones.
According to the women, who could barely walk, “one of us (the teenage girl) was raped repeatedly, after being thoroughly beaten by the herdsmen. At the moment, she is neither able to walk nor talk.”
Before they were taken to an undisclosed hospital in Makurdi for medical attention by the Police, the women, who spoke at intervals, said: “The men with their leader came to our home in the afternoon and pleaded that we give them water to drink.