The Edo State Government has revealed that between January and July 2026, over 70 cases of child defilement were recorded in the state, with more than 50 per cent of the perpetrators being the biological fathers of the victims.
State Commissioner for Women Affairs and Social Development, Eugenia Abdallah, disclosed this during the bi-monthly press conference organised by the state Ministry of Information and Strategy in Benin City.
Abdallah, who was flanked by the Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Kassim Afegbua, and the Managing Director of Edo State Geographic Information Service, Innocent Bello, said the victims ranged between two and ten years old.
“Mostly, 50 per cent are abused by their own fathers, with the victims ranging from two to 10 years. For instance, there is a little girl currently in our custody who was impregnated by her father. She is just 14 years old and is eight months pregnant as we speak. The case was reported to us by a neighbour,” Abdallah said.
“When we asked her about her father, she told us that she had lost her father and pleaded with us not to have him arrested. Meanwhile, she is the only person who can tell us where her father is,” she added.
The commissioner expressed the state government’s commitment to ensuring that vulnerable citizens are not merely identified but protected, adding that survivors are not merely heard but supported.
“The victims are not merely trained but provided opportunities for economic advancement; and social-protection programmes increasingly produce measurable outcomes,” she stated.
In a related development, the Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Kassim Afegbua, reiterated the government’s ban on the movement of motorcycles in the Benin metropolis, citing security concerns.
“We are not pretending about it. The reason why this was done was purely for security reasons. And the kind of reports we get daily have become a security concern to us. People use Okada (motorcycles) to kidnap people, to commit robbery. They carry their passengers, they take them to a lonely place and dispossess them of their belongings,” Afegbua said.
Speaking on the delay in the release of land documents to applicants, the Managing Director of EdoGIS, Innocent Bello, attributed the backlog to the detection of fake application documents.
“What is responsible for most of the delay in land document processing is the detection of fake application documents in many cases, and that includes survey plans, tax clearance, fake ID and so on,” Bello said.
