By Femi ODERE/
Thursday, February 20th, was billed as just another normal and sedentary day in the Senate plenary considering the legislative issues to be discussed according to the day’s Order Paper. Nobody—-not even Primate Ayodele of the Inri Evangelical Church who has luckily found his prophetic niche as Nigeria’s foremost speculator of politics and the art of politicking—-could have predicted that the day would be so dramatic to the extent of bringing the nation’s Upper Chamber to ridicule and opprobrium perhaps never imagined, let alone witnessed, since the beginning of the Fourth Republic.
After all, the Senate is already in the off-season of the confirmation/rejection game of appointees of the executive branch. It is usually on such occasions that drama would sit pretty and raise its hand in the Upper Chamber to be heard.
While the facts and the sanctity of rules that guide proceedings in the Senate in Senator Natasha’s saga are substantially in the public domain, as opposed to the often advertised primordial sentiments and mischiefs that are disingenuously packaged in the hope that something, anything, thrown at the Senate President would eventually achieve their main objective of pulling him down—-it bears restating that Godswill Akpabio acted within the confine of his powers and privileges as the Senate President.
Akpabio’s power to allocate seats to his colleagues (Order 6:1) and reassign seats already allocated (Order 6:2) to someone else as the internal political dynamics dictate in the upper chamber without prior notice is absolute, as had been done in the past without any fuss by those impacted.
The dynamics that unfolded on this day necessitated the re-assignment of seats because of the defection of some senators from another party to the ruling party, as well as the redeployment of Senate Committee Chairmen to assume the leadership of new committees, which is also the prerogative of the Senate President without any recourse to formal debates.
But Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, who was apparently impacted by these twin developments wouldn’t be detained by the Senate’s Rule Book as she flew off the handle. Senator Natasha went ballistic as she relentlessly tongue-lashed the Senate President and pointed at him during a live plenary that has trended around the world. It doesn’t get any more embarrassingly humiliating for the Senate as an institution and the nation’s Number 3 citizen than that.
Not done, Akpoti-Uduaghan condescendingly insisted that the Senate President must respect Order 10 of the Rule Book when she recklessly displayed beyond words that she has no respect for the Order that prohibits legislators from speaking from seats different from the ones assigned to them. An interplay of Sen. Natasha’s youthful exuberance and juvenile delinquency laced with senseless activism without wisdom, which is perhaps why members are called “distinguished,” displayed on the floor of the Senate couldn’t have come in a more vivid color than that on this day.
Perhaps having been drawn to the realization by some of her colleagues that she had inadvertently dug herself a hole in the way she ridiculed the Senate as an institution and every one of them by extension and therefore counseled her to apologize the next day, Natasha would have none of that as she would rather dig deeper.
The time-tested, age-old adage that says you should stop digging the moment you realize you’re in a hole makes no sense to her. For Senator Natasha, it is all or nothing. She must turn the table and gain the sympathy of the Nigerian public hence the sexual harassment allegation.
After all, she’s Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, an exotic ‘bird’ with the most beautiful plumage that ever perched in the Senate. So, the sexual harassment allegation against the Senate President was the next card to be pulled out of her equally dainty bag.
It makes no difference that she had used the sexual harassment card on several occasions and lost her deposits with ignominy. Perhaps because she’s exceedingly, if not excessively, fixated on her beauty, in Sen. Akpoti-Uduaghan’s mind, no man of means and influence wouldn’t want to make sexual passes at her. So, it’s better to strike that man born of a woman with whom Natasha is interested in crossing swords of sexual harassment.
The Senator from Kogi State probably thinks more about what to wear whenever she appears on the Senate floor than studying the Rule Book, which probably explains her refusal to relocate to her new seat because, according to her “she wouldn’t be seen by the camera” if she settles on her new seat.
The several leprous fingers that have now come out to assist Sen. Akpoti-Uduaghan in launching more sorties at the Senate President, aside from the ones she launched in the hallowed chamber on February 20th, and the big bomb she dropped a week later at a TV studio couldn’t have been mere happenstance or coincidence.
It must be stated that the coalition of Akpabio’s formidable political detractors such as the former Senate President Saraki in his glib and invidious attempt to draw a parallel between his patently criminal case that compelled him to preside on the affairs of the Senate from the dock when he ruled the roost and Akpabio’s mere allegation of sexual harassment, the Obe-dient mob who has, for all intents and purposes, declared a permanent war on the Tinubu administration and anyone seen to be in support of it, a motley crowd of feminists who would rather shoot from the hip than to look dispationately at Natasha’s egregious violation of the Senate rules and her juvenile tantrums that should have been embarrassingly worrisome to the womenfolk beggars belief.
The madness that has characterized this watery sexual harassment allegation is discomfiting. But it should also be stated that there’s a method and an end goal to the madness that Natasha has now taken to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It is such a great irony that the Senate President did not sexually harass Natasha in the few international fora they both had attended in the course of their legislative duties where they stayed in the same hotel but in Akpabio’s living room where her husband was within earshot of their conversation. A sexual harassment allegation doesn’t get any more bizarre than that.
It didn’t matter that the Kogi State senator drew the first blood in which members of the Senate from different political parties collectively and swiftly responded by sanctioning Natasha because of her unprecedented unruly behavior. What’s at play here, once again, and as exemplified by this vacuous and untenable sexual harassment allegation, is a proxy ‘war’ by those who stand by their decision like the Rock of Gibraltar to whittle down the president’s accomplishments of which the Senate under Akpabio’s leadership is the enabler. The only way to achieve this nefarious and anti-development objective is to take out Godswill Akpabio as the Senate President. They will not relent as long as Akpabio remains the Senate President. This is their near-term objective.
The long-term goal is to continuously disrupt and distract the Senate to the extent that the Nigerian public, if not the presidency, would be worked into a state of exasperation whereby the Upper Chamber would be seen as too rancorous and therefore unbefitting of Akpabio’s leadership as to make his return to the Senate as the Senate President too problematic and difficult in 2027. These elements have now demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the power struggle is not about development as we know it but raw power for its sake.
Femi ODERE is a public affairs analyst.
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