Empress Sugarbelly@sugarbelly, revealed on her Twitter account how late Prince Abubakar Audu's sons, Mustapha, Kabir, Bashir, their cousin, Jibrin, and his friends,
regularly raped her repeatedly.while their late father took his eyes away from
their act! This is how she started her series of tweets:
"The Prince Audu I knew was a monster, and I am glad he is dead, and I spit and I dance on his grave."
She followed up with this:
"The only thing better than Prince Abubakar Audu dying today would be if all his sons could hurry up and die too."
Then this:
"I'm so happy he's dead, God please hurry up and take Mustapha, Kabir, and Bashir too, and that their animal of a cousin called Jibrin."
Her tweet, has generated heating comment about
her revelations and many people tweeted
insults at her for what she has been putting up, she took her time to give an
extensive narration of what she went through in the hands of these men.
Read what she wrote:
"Every time I see a white
Nissan Altima, my palms go sweaty, and my knees get weak. It’s an involuntary
reaction born of so many nights being driven around Asokoro pinned to the floor
of Tunji’s white Nissan Altima, barely able to breathe, the stench of weed
stinging my eyes while I choked on the penis of whomever it pleased Mustapha to
force me to pleasure that day.
I can’t have music playing while
driving around in a car either. Or just sitting around at home. I can’t have
music playing period. Especially not Maroon5. If I get into your car, please
drive in fucking silence or you will make it hard for me to breathe.
Right now, there are thousands of
people running wild with their “opinions”, talking authoritatively about what
Mustapha, Abdul, Tunji, and their band of friends and brothers did to me, as if
they were there. As if they hovered around us unseen like evil spirits,
listening to everything that was said, seeing everything that happened, as if
they know.
 |
| Empress Sugarbelly and friend at work in Abuja |
In the beginning, Mustapha and I
would go out for lunch, and I’d put gas in his car, and we’d buy our own
shawarmas, and eat out of each others. I had a massive crush on him, and he
told me he loved me, and called me “his woman” which made me feel special. I
was getting paid 20K a month, which is nothing now, but it was my first real
salary back then, and it was nice to have more money of my own to spend, and
spent on him I did.
I actually wish this was true. At
least it would be compensation for all the money I've had to spend on
psychotherapy over the last few years.
I’m no stranger to money. I’ve had a
lot of it, and I’ve had very little, and I’ve never been the type of person to
be impressed by anyone’s wealth, so it wasn’t cars, hotels, or fancy shit I
cared about, I was cool.
I attended the best boarding school
in the country, and Mustapha didn’t impress me, and I never asked him for
anything or took anything from him besides the comic books and novels we traded
with each other.
What I needed was a friend, and when
I plunked down at my desk that first day of work at Alteq, and bonded
immediately over a shared love of books and superhero comics, I thought I’d
made one in the guy sitting next to me.
Every day, I came to work, and he
was right there. And at the end of each work day, it had become normal to
everyone for him to drop me off at home, so when 6pm came, and he grabbed hold
of my arm and said “Let’s go,” I had no idea how to justify refusing and making
a scene.
Even after he was fired in April of
2007, at the end of each work day, he would show up outside our office on
Amazon Street to whisk me away. I would step outside the gate, and he would be
there in his red Mercedes, waiting, demanding I get in.
I was terrified that my refusal
would mean the exposure of the pictures he had taken of me early in our
relationship, photos I told him not to take, but he did anyway, photos in which
I was naked and vulnerable.
 |
| Mustapha Audu and Abdul Ogohi in 2007 |
I wanted to quit my job, but what
reason could I possibly give my family for quitting a job I obviously loved,
especially when I needed the internship to get into the honours program at the
university I was to attend that year?
I had so much to be fearful of. The
thought of the videos Abdul recorded of Mustapha and Tunji raping me seeing the
light of day filled me with sheer terror. The alternative was keeping it all
secret, and so I did.
Masking your emotions is not hard to
do, just exhausting, and so for eleven hours a day, from 7am to 6pm, putting on
my clothes, going to work, and sitting at my desk next to Mustapha every day
was easier than you think.
At 17, I knew already that the
Nigerian police is most definitely NOT your friend, and that people who have
police and army escorts in their homes are generally the sort that can make you
disappear (in many little pieces preferably), and pay off the police to
look the other way, or failing all else, buy judges to make sure any court
cases brought against them never see the light of day.
 |
| Abdul Ogohi and Mustapha at Javabean |
I had disclosed already to my priest at confession, and to a doctor in Maitama General Hospital where I got tested for HIV and other STDS, the horrific things that were happening to me, and nothing had come of it.
At the time, I didn’t know whether a
rape crisis centre like the Mirabel Rape Centre even existed in Nigeria, or
that there were any resources to help someone in my situation, or even what to
do after I had been raped to help me get justice.
I was scared, and I felt very alone.
Their parents were very powerful people, and I didn’t have any faith in the
police, especially faced with attackers that seemed to have both the police and
the army in their pockets.
It was even more difficult to come
to terms with the enormous betrayal of the man who told me he loved me, whom I
loved as well, doing unspeakable things to me, and forcing me to do them with
others.
Even after I escaped from him by
moving to the United States for college, I remained torn, and the part of me
that loved him could not reconcile with the horror that he had put me through,
and we stayed in contact because the mental hold he had over me was still so
strong.
It took me an additional three years
to fully break free of him, and though I don’t live in daily terror of Mustapha
Audu as I once did, anything that bears even so much as the memory of him is
enough to break me down.
In December of 2008, I ran into
Bashir in a mall in Maryland, and suffered a complete panic attack. I broke
away from the people I had come shopping with, and ran and ran to the other end
of the mall.
In 2012 and 2013, while out with
Nyimbi, I ran into Ema and Tunji at Vanilla in Maitama. Tunji was sitting in
low seats opposite the bar in the company of my classmate, Kachi, whom I’d
attended Loyola with.
They didn’t recognize me, but it was
all I could do not to break a bottle of whiskey on Ema’s revoltingly globular
head, and the night ended with Nyimbi dragging me out of Vanilla in tears of
anger and frustration at my lost opportunity to kill them both.
Looking back, I can see how so much
fear and shame prevented me from exposing what these animals were doing to me,
and I question why I let them rob me of so many years of my life.
Still, the child I was at 17 was
very different from the adult I am today at 26, and my 26 year old self would
have damned the consequences, told, and raised hell.
As terrifying as it was to come to
work every day and have to sit next to Mustapha, I’m saddened by the
realisation that in the same place that held such terror and anxiety for me, I
had people who loved me, cared about me, and would have done their best to
protect me if I could have overcome my fear and shame and cried out for help.
My adult self sees what my child
self could not back then – that had I told my mentor, boss, and friend,
Nyimbi what was happening to me right under his nose, he would have
stopped at nothing to rescue me from my private hell.
What baffles me, is how so many
people who know absolutely nothing about what did happen, can speak with such
confidence, the most absurd speculations, about the facts of my life.
If this all were not so incredibly
sad, it would be quite amusing to me, that there are thousands of people who
think I am (by my count so far) – an agent of PDP, a gold digger, a woman
scorned, or politically motivated because they personally have never heard of
my rape before now.
Mustapha was a monster like you
cannot even begin to imagine.
His brother Bashir, was the same age
as me, and Mustapha decided, that one way or the other, it was his duty as big
brother to rid Bashir of his virginity. At what was supposed to be a casual get
together for suya and drinks at Tunji’s house, he dragged Bashir and me into
the bedroom, and pushed us inside, saying to Bashir “Fuck her!” before locking
the door, and leaving me alone in the darkness with his brother.
All my pleas to Mustapha were in
vain, and the only thing we heard from Mustapha from the other side of the door
was “Don’t let me come back and find out you’re still a virgin.”
On a different date, his cousin,
Jibril raped me in that same room. I screamed, and screamed, and fought, and
struggled, eventually sticking my fingers into his nose, and biting his hands.
In retaliation, he bit me hard on the nose, and later that night, I explained
away the swelling on my nose I came home with as an unfortunate meeting with
the edge of a swimming pool.
All the while I was screaming,
Tunji Abduland Mohammed were discussing business, and when my screams
interrupted their conversation, Tunji came by to look at me, naked and pinned
beneath Jibril, only to laugh and shut the door firmly behind him.
 |
| Tunji Abdul on his wedding day |
So, when I see ignorant comments
from members of the public in reaction to my trauma, I really feel the urge to
ask these shameless people, how the fuck do you know?
Were you there? Because I was
there, and you most certainly were not.
I SURVIVED it, not you, so it is I
who will tell you what happened to me, not the other way around."
This is becoming quite messy and be
sure this will not be the end of it.
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