AN online petition has been launched, calling on the Nigerian authorities to investigate a very public assault on a teenage girl by a self-styled “bishop”.

The ‘bishop’ was caught on camera delivering the slap (click on pic to view the entire incident)

During a “deliverance” service at Otta, in Ogun state, “Bishop” David Oyedepo, general overseer of Winners’ Chapel, slapped the girl with considerable force.

According to this report, Oyedepo suggested to his kneeling victim that she was involved in witchcraft. She denied this, saying instead she was “a witch for Jesus”. The cleric shouted that Jesus has no witches, but when she insisted, the furious Oyedepo called her “a foul devil”, slapped her violently across the face, and shouted:

You can go and burn in hell.

In calling on the Ogun state government, the Ogun State Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General to commence a formal investigation into the conduct of Oyedepo, the “Stop The Violence Against Women in Nigeria” petition says:

It appears as though the Bishop may have violated the Criminal Code Act (chapter 29 of Part V; sections 351 to 365) of the Nigerian constitution.

‘Bishop’ Oyedepo

Banji Oyebisi, one of the petitioners who is based in the United States, said:

Our objective is try and get at least 101, 000 signatures that we will submit to Governor Amosun. We want to say we are tired of this kind of conduct, violence against women.

Commenting on the Transparency for Nigeria blog, Adebowale Oriku said:

In spite of Oyedepo’s best efforts to label the poor girl a witch, the young thing insisted that she was not the kind of witch Oyedepo was insinuating and that she was a ‘witch for Jesus.’ Of course it may be argued that Jesus does not have a group of followers that are called witches, but this was a girl that had been browbeaten and spat upon by a man who calls himself a bishop, a man who was mentally torturing a wretched religious captive into abasing herself enough to accept being described as a witch. The girl must have been desperately inventive, after a fashion, to come up with the ‘Witch for Jesus’ fallacy of definition, which I do not think is better or worse that the description of nuns as ‘Brides of Christ.’

Hat tip: Debo