Akpabio/Natasha: Yet another perspective (1)

BY SIMON IMOBO-TSWAM

Nothing has shaken the Nigerian senate in recent times like the Akpabio/Natasha challenge. But this is hardly surprising. This is the first time a sexual harassment charge has been hung on the neck of a senate president.

And since all things sex/sexual captivate us, this developing story has taken a life of its own: breathing, pulsating and reverberating. The novelty of it has left the distinguished senate taking equally novel measures, leaving the public, aghast, even horror-struck.

Straight away, let me be clear: Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan will not win this battle. If she is lucky, she might win her case in court, and return to the chambers, but it would be a pyrrhic victory. With even her female colleagues turning against her and 108 senators endorsing the draconian measures against her wholesale, that environment will be very toxic for her.

And I guarantee that net, net, nothing will change markedly about her circumstances for the remaining period of the 10th Senate. She would be the odd one, but she can’t keep raising alarms about her maltreatment, maltreatment deriving from failed sexual predation, in an environment that considers such petty – perhaps, for obvious reasons.

This is the positive scenario. The negative is that her six-month suspension could now be graduated into an “indefinite one,” after a more thorough home-work! When you are dealing with uncommon people, with uncommon resolve, and the issue at stake is uncommon, you should expect uncommon outcomes.

Natasha may be sincere or insincere, but there is as yet no chance to prove that. There is a deliberate campaign, especially in the media, to tar her image, mutilate her reputation and assassinate her character.

Her private life is now being splashed on social media, with manufactured extras and salacious accessorising: we hear about her multiple marriages (this is her second); her six children with six different fathers (she has four children (three from a former marriage and one with the present); her history of false alarms (as if there’s a limit on alarms), etc. In this direction, she is being spared no name. The assassins are vicious, ruthless, spiteful and unsparing.

There appears to be a well-orchestrated, well-oiled and well-coordinated smear campaign to present her in the worst possible colours. This way, people will see her, at best, as a woman of abbreviated morality; and at worst, as a woman of easy virtue.

The flipside or disturbing side of this narrative is that many of those so out to shame her are not just immoral, but downright amoral; they are people of amputated morality, and among them number of wanton women, community men, sexual athletes, Baby-Mamas/mammals, serial divorcees and chartered adulterers!

But Akpoti-Uduaghan is smart: She knows the insults are calculated and intentional. The aim is to distract her, to make her lose balance, and begin replying to every baying voice. She will then lose control, and allow her emotions to run ahead of her.

Her emotional responses will then become fresh raw materials for her contracted enemies, to feed their frenzied demonisation of her person. But then, in a depressed and depressing economy, not many people, especially crowd entrepreneurs, can reject lucrative, short-term contracts!

But knowing better, she maintains her dignified silence in that area, focusing rather on the majors; and, thus, leaving the purveyors of falsehood and emergency contractors disoriented.

In his lifetime, one of Nigeria’s all-time greats, the inimitable Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu, wrote that a “lie is never dishonoured by a counter-claim – it is only highlighted. I will never give dignity to a lie.” If Natasha read Ojukwu, she understood him well. And if she didn’t, she needn’t bother: her thought process is already highly elevated.

But silence is also communication. And in her silence, she seems to be telling the world: “My life is my life. Even if I am a giver, I am not a universal donor…I am not the UN, the Red Cross or Mama Christmas – I give to whom I please. In other words, I give by choice; not by CHIP i.e. Coercion, Harassment, Intimidation and Pressure.”

In a way, beautiful and alluring Natasha reminds us so powerfully of another tantalising amazon in a different place and world, i.e., Demi Moore, the model and super-actress. She has been variously described as “stunning,” “ageless,” “beautiful and elegant,” and her beauty, “absolutely break-taking.”

We can use all these epithets for Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. But where rumours of plastic surgery swirl around Demi Moore, the senator’s beauty is all-natural: no surgical enhancements and no augmentations. Every endowment, every padding, every curvature…is factory-fitted or follow-come as we say.

So, if we are minded to add anything because our Natasha is genetically sculptured, we can only borrow the words of the English Poet of a bygone era, Lord Byron, to say, Natasha: “You walk in beauty/Like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies/And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meets in her aspect and eyes.”

Where Demi Moore is 63 and three children behind her, Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan is 44 and boasts four adorable kids. Still, both women surprisingly maintain figures that “defy gravity,” and their social or formal appearances are still riveting moments for men – be they straight or bent; happily married or married-and-ogling; single and searching or singling and mingling.

Crissy Iley, a journalist, has written of Moore somewhere thus: “Her screen persona always has something indestructible about it.  There is a toughness, a strength a determination.” She adds: “The inescapable thing she gives us is strength.”

These words describe our own Natasha perfectly: for she models a toughness, strength and determination that are, altogether, uncommon in these parts. And she gives strength to many weak women whose voices are muzzled in a patriarchal system that pretends to be progressive; one that still sees women as chattels – to be seen, but not heard or as spoils, to be just taken in the grip of animal-heat.

But we’ll return to Demi Moore later.

If you call Natasha “the Stormy Petrel,” it’s within your liberty. If you call her “the Table-Shaker,” no one will query you. She fits both terms and even more. She is a disruptive force, a destabiliser of routines. She may be a paragon of beauty, but she does not enter a place with a mirror or powder to dab her face – she carries in her delicate hands a hammer!

It is with this hammer that she shatters stereotypes, smashes pigeonholes, crashes orthodoxy and breaks monopoly, with her sights firmly set on the glass ceiling. Contrary to general perception,  Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan had a life before going to the senate; she was a public person before coming into public office.

All politics is local, and she made the Ajaukuta (Steal) Complex, located in her primary constituency, a primary concern. The place has been a resilient cash cow since the 1980s, a gigantic ATM that always dispenses, and those cashing out there were not enthused by her loud noises!

When she went for the governorship, it was a novelty. No woman had really aspired to govern Kogi state before – at least, not from her part of the state. And even if they did, they did so from the fringes, and with half-hearted moves; feeling more comfortable as campaign cheerleaders for the men! The men, not used to stiff competition from women, were incensed at Natasha’s disruption, her challenge of the status quo; and, accordingly, mobilised her constituents against her – some, her kin!

And then, in the approaches of the 2023 general election, she defected to the PDP and sought the senate ticket. It was an uphill task, given her newness in the party and the usual male entitlement mindset. However, she trumped them all at the very competitive primary to secure the PDP senatorial ticket.

(To be concluded)

Imobo-Tswam, a retired newspaper editor, writes from Abuja. He can be reached at: [email protected]