NFM Weekly News Digest: 50% of Girls’ Sexual Abusers Are Fathers and Other Shocking Stories We Covered

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For this week’s news edition, we cover religious enabling of convicted sex offenders, a government disclosure on child sexual abuse in the home, sexual coercion in academia, the hidden costs of marriage for Nigerian women, and how cultural attitudes to menstruation have shaped and distorted medical research. Below are some of the reports; you can click on the links to read the stories in full.

1. Religious Enabling: Genesis Global City Church Platforms Convicted Sex Offender Baba Ijesha

A video emerged of convicted child sexual abuser and Nollywood actor Baba Ijesha leading praise and worship at Genesis Global City church in Lagos, sparking widespread public debate. NFM reports on how the church handed a microphone and a public platform to a man convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, and what that communicates to survivors about institutional accountability.

2. Fathers Primary Perpetrators of Their Daughters’ Sexual Abuse — Edo State Government Reveals

The Edo State Commissioner for Women Affairs and Social Development, Eugenia Abdallah, disclosed that over 70 cases of child sexual abuse were recorded in Edo State between January and July 2026, with fathers accounting for more than 50 per cent of perpetrators. NFM reports on the data, including the harrowing disclosure that one girl currently in the ministry’s custody was impregnated by her own father.

3. YABATECH Lecturer Lawal Lateef Olaitan Under Investigation for Attempted Sexual Coercion

A lecturer at the Yaba College of Technology, Lawal Lateef Olaitan, is under investigation following allegations that he attempted to sexually coerce a student. NFM reports on the allegations and the institutional response, situating the case within the documented pattern of sexual exploitation of students by Nigerian lecturers who leverage their academic authority over grades and results.

4. ‘Mumu for Marriage:’ The Unspoken Price Nigerian Women Pay to Become Wives

This piece examines the invisible labour, financial sacrifice, and emotional cost that Nigerian women are expected to absorb in the pursuit and maintenance of marriage, costs that are rarely named, almost never shared equally, and consistently treated as the natural price of womanhood rather than the product of structural gender inequality.

5. Medical Misogyny: How Cultural Repulsion to Menstruation Influences Scientific Research

This analysis explores how cultural stigma and disgust around menstruation have historically shaped and distorted the direction of medical research, leading to chronic underfunding of menstrual health conditions, inadequate clinical trials that exclude women, and a medical system that treats the female body as a deviation from a male default.