By Fisayo Soyombo
I believe Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. Not because of anything she has said or done, but because of Godswill Akpabio’s brutish reaction and her well-oiled bullying by the senate and its president’s lackeys.
No matter who you are, if a woman accuses you of sexual harassment, there’s only one way to go if you’re innocent: create the conditions for independent investigation of the allegation, knowing the only possible outcome is your exoneration. Again, only if you’re innocent.
Her coup-like excommunication from the senate and the latest attempt by her ‘constituents’ to recall her inadvertently expose a desperate, despicable plan to shush her rather than establish the veracity of her claims. Everyone knows there are no Nigerian constituents with the time, finance, single-mindedness or effrontery to organically institute a recall process against a lawmaker for “misconduct”. The tomfoolery should stop already! How many thieving lawmakers have faced a recall for pillaging our commonwealth at our collective expense?
Everyone knows, even if not many would admit it, that someone — personally or by proxy — is the instigator-in-chief of this recall attempt. And how can that not be Akpabio, the uncommonly corrupt former governor who stole N108bn from Akwa Ibom State (according to the EFCC), attempted to arm-twist the commission into submission via the courts but failed, only to then deviously defect to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), following which the case fizzled into oblivion while he himself subsequently transmogrified into Nigeria’s third most powerful official? The relentless politically-coordinated attacks on Natasha have all the trappings of ‘maradonic’ moves with which Akpabio pulled himself out of that EFCC rabbit hole and to the helm of Nigeria’s upper chamber.
There are no two ways about it: the more Akpabio fights Natasha, the more he implicitly convinces us of his culpability. The more he fights, the more he dirties his already-soiled apparel, the more we think ‘he did it’!
