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The Edo State Government on Thursday said that more than 70 cases of child sex abuse were recorded in the state between January and July 2026, with fathers of the minors allegedly responsible for over 50 per cent of the cases.
The 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.
The commissioner, flanked by Kassim Afegbua, Commissioner, Ministry of Information and Strategy, and the Managing Director, Edo State Geographic Information Service (EdoGIS), Dr Innocent Bello, disclosed that the minors sexually abused by their fathers were between the ages of 2 and 10.
She said: “Mostly, 50 per cent are abused by their own fathers, with the victims ranging 2 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.
“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.”
The Commissioner, however, 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; that women are not merely trained but provided opportunities for economic advancement; and that social-protection programmes increasingly produce measurable outcomes.”
Also speaking on steps taken by the state government to protect residents of the state, the Commissioner for Information and Strategy reiterated the government’s ban on the movement of motorcycles in the Benin metropolis, adding that it is for security reasons.
He added, “We are not pretending about it. The reason why this was done was purely for security reasons. And the kind of reports we get on a daily basis have become a security concern to us. People use Okada (motorcycle) to kidnap people, to do robbery. They carry their passengers, they take them to a lonely place and dispossess them of their belongings.”
Speaking on the issue of Davido writing to President Donald Trump over the forthcoming Osun election, Afegbua said it was a joke taken too far.
On his part, the Managing Director, EdoGIS, while giving reasons for the delay in the release of land documents to applicants, said “what is responsible for most delay in land documents processing is as a result of detection of fake application documents in many cases, and that includes survey plans, task clearance, fake ID, etc.”
