Niger Gov’s Wife Advocates Life Imprisonment for Rapists

Worried by the increasing cases of rape across the country, the wife of the Niger State governor, Dr Amina Sani Bello, has advocated life imprisonment for those convicted of the crime.

Dr Bello lamented that in Niger State “on weekly basis, I receive reports of one or two rape cases most of them minors. This is disturbing because the lives of the victims are being destroyed”.

The governor’s wife, who made the suggestion in Minna on Monday when he received top officials of the state Ministry of Justice on an advocacy visit to her office, decried the present punishment for offenders, saying: “It is not stringent enough to deter people from committing the crime.”

According to her, “If life sentence is the maximum punishment for rapists those involved will think twice before committing the offence.”

Dr Bello also took exception to the N10,000 fine and two-month jail term recently handed down to a homosexual who “raped a 12-year-old boy to death”, saying that “the punishment was not commensurate with the offence committed”.

Details later…