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Tag: Rotimi Fasan

  • Natasha should save precious time and go to court, by Rotimi Fasan

    Natasha should save precious time and go to court, by Rotimi Fasan

    The fight between Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan and Senator Godswill Akpabio looks like a case of ‘see finish’, to state it in local parlance. Her familial relationship with the President of the Senate (only they and, perhaps, their respective families know the true nature of this relationship) appears to have undermined the respect she has for him as a public officer.

    One clear proof of this is that the very incident that led to her allegation of sexual harassment occurred in the country home of Senator Akpabio and in the presence of Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan’s husband. Both senators walked hand-in-hand, trailed by Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan’s husband, as Senator Akpabio showed them round his house. It was in this very improbable situation that Senator Akpabio propositioned Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan, asked her, in her words, to ‘make him happy’.

    This was in December 2023 just about a month after Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan was elected into the Senate. Nobody heard a word of this incident, not even her husband who was within earshot and who asked to know what the gentleman senator said was told anything. Nothing until her outburst following the change of her seating position.

    Her unruly behaviour thereafter, defying the intervention of her colleagues and shouting at Senator Akpabio where he calmly sat as the presiding officer of the Senate, was in the least unflattering. It made her look unhinged. She compounded her error and made a mess of her sexual harassment and punitive discrimination allegations by rushing first to media organisations, some of which cannot conceal their bias, to report. It was like two law-enforcement officers exchanging blows in public turning to bemused bystanders watching them to know who between them was in the wrong.

    Who should ordinary members of the public turn to when fighting if legislators cannot rely on the laws or regulations they make to resolve disagreements among themselves? What was the point of Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan rushing to the media to lodge complaints about the President of the Senate? Was she prevented at the Senate? Natasha is a senator of the Nigerian state not a defenceless school girl that could be shoved aside without anyone hearing of it.

    This is the point, perhaps, that the likes of Senator Florence Ita-Giwa and other past and present female senators who have spoken on the issue tried to make against the ire of preconditioned feminists for whom every male transgression is a sign of misogyny. Her position in the Senate offers her more than enough room to seek redress and in fact national attention, in case anyone tries to stifle her complaints. She has not shown that the floor of the Senate was inadequate to air her allegations except she was angling to scandalise the Senate through emotional blackmail, which she has been demonstrating with the tears she sheds at the slightest opportunity.

    Her apparently manufactured pain and dramatisation of her grievance has the potential of diminishing the anguish or occluding the pain of actual victims of sexual harassment. Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan may have been sexually harassed as she has alleged but she is yet to present an actual case of sexual harassment. Nothing beyond her words despite her promise of concrete evidence. It took her all of three days after her allegation gained national attention in the media before she would table it on the floor of the Senate. Her goal, it seemed, was to blackmail the Senate and its leadership.

    What is her appeal to the media rabble about? An invitation to a lynch mob? Even while being interviewed by the obviously sympathetic and often-opinionated Arise News crew and things appeared not to be going her way, Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan threatened to take her complaints to Facebook! What is it about her tireless fascination with the media and this hankering for attention? She seems to have misunderstood her role as chair of the Local Content Committee, extending its meaning to its everyday social media understanding. She has literally been creating content for Nigerians and the world.

    What prompted the PDA with her husband, where they had a kiss at the entrance of the National Assembly? When did that start- before or after her allegations? How much of her allegations are, indeed, real and how much are for the cameras? There are so many things wrong about the way Natasha has gone about her fight with Senator Akpabio and her colleagues at the Senate, including the female ones and others who preceded them to the Senate.

    They have to the last person refused to speak in her favour. There is so much the Senator needs to correct about her approach for her allegations to begin to sound plausible and thereby save herself the tag of a femme fatale. Her latest attempt at feminist activism and as latter-day Rosa Parks will not answer for these shortcomings. As a first-time senator who has headed a couple of important committees, she has clearly enjoyed the patronage of Senator Akpabio. This could not have been entirely earned. It is on record that her husband had lobbied him on her behalf.

    Senator Akpabio has a previous allegation of sexual misconduct trailing him and has not adequately acquitted himself of that. Neither has Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan who also has a similar history of making reckless allegations of sexual harassment, the most notorious being the one against Reno Omokri. It took Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan all of 14 months after the incident to lodge her complaints against Senator Akpabio. It took her six years, between 2014 and 2021, to accuse Reno Omokri of the same thing. What is the long wait for? In three weeks since her allegations, she has presented nothing close to the concrete evidence she promised. She must not expect, as she said before the Inter-Parliamentary Union, that the Senate President would stand down based on mere words and before a prima facie case of sexual harassment has been established.

    She has every right to lodge her allegation which should be treated with all the seriousness it deserves. But she must provide evidence. If she, however, has no evidence, she should admit it. It does not mean she lied but it does undermine her claim. Henceforth, she should learn to keep evidence, since she appears prone to making allegations of sexual harassment or being sexually harassed. Either way, we are perhaps at that point where the respective careers of these two senators either in being flippant and making inept remarks or self-aggrandising and engaging in manipulative conduct is about being terminated. The Senate has done its bit but only the courts are now best placed to deliver justice. Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan should cut to the chase and do what she must.

  • Nnamdi Kanu is his own judge and lawyer(2), by Rotimi Fasan

    Nnamdi Kanu is his own judge and lawyer(2), by Rotimi Fasan

    Nnamdi Kanu, as I previously stated, is a self-proclaimed self-determination agitator but his ways and utterances are those of a separatist. Not only does he want a separate Biafra nation, his Biafrans are to have nothing to do with Nigerians of other ethnicities. While they could have relations with or even annex other smaller groups that Kanu likes to include in his extended map of Biafra that goes far beyond the geographic core of the South-East states to the South-South states and communities in Rivers, Cross River, Bayelsa, Akwa Ibom, Delta and even Benue and Kogi states, they, by his estimation, certainly cannot have anything to do with people from the core Yoruba or Hausa- or Fulani-speaking states.  

    While he identifies as a Judaist, he is on record for scolding Igbo people that are members of so-called Yoruba Church, that is churches led by Nigerians of Yoruba extraction. For him the argument is not just that the Igbo should be allowed to determine the direction they want to go politically, it is rather that they are better than all others and should have control and the right of first choice over everything. They just should not and cannot cohabit with others of supposedly inferior make-up. That seems to be his position. For this reason, he and the organisation he leads thrive on propaganda in which he demeans and twists up the national history of other Nigerian groups to fit his account of Igbo exceptionalism.

    He gets unnecessarily aggressive and voluble in his self-created intellectual bubble where everything Igbo or about the Igbo is right and proper while the opposite is the case for other Nigerians. Can anyone imagine what things would look like if everyone has to think and act with and from the same mindset? Raining insults and spewing curses on others and practically inciting ethnic strife, Kanu has but a one-track mind. What would it look like if any Yoruba or Hausa or Fulani agitator pompously tells their own story of ethnic superiority – story of how the Igbo are weak and subservient to others and on the basis of that demand that the agitator’s group be treated preferentially?

    I know the story has always been of how the Igbo are marginalised and victimised without equal attention paid to how those who speak in the name of the Igbo (which is not the same thing as the Igbo themselves) have played their politics or chosen to relate with others. Either way, is the dishing out of insults and excessive display of aggression the answer to the problem, real and perceived, of Igbo exclusion from national politics? What about reaching out to and winning the support of others? Where does fiction end and fact begin? It was Kanu’s propaganda machine that spawned the Jibril Al Sudan story about President Muhammadu Buhari being a clone of the person we all know bears that name.

    It was a totally fictitious story and when it was shown that such claims are scientifically implausible, Nnamdi Kanu and his supporters doubled down on it and insisted that Buhari was dead and had been replaced by a lookalike politician. I knew an elderly, non-Igbo woman who fell for that garbage of a tall story as were many others who could have gone to war to prove its veracity. Nnamdi Kanu’s word was either the law or the gospel. You either take it or have it rammed down your throat. A lot of what transpired in Justice Binta Nyako’s court was a disgraceful abuse of process, an insult to the judge in particular and the country’s judicial system at large.

    Nnamdi Kanu could and ought to have been held in contempt of the court. He was utterly disrespectful. Had another judge risen to the occasion and done what the law demanded in such circumstances, then would there have been the usual hue and cry about group or individual victimisation. But the politicisation of the entire trial basically tied the judge’s hands and it felt at once sorry and shameful that she was so shabbily treated in her own court. Kanu would have had a hard time had he been compelled to prove some of his claims about a huge sum of money exchanging hands to facilitate his conviction in exchange for the judge’s husband and son standing trial for corruption being provided a soft landing. Was it in his alleged solitary confinement at the DSS detention centre that Kanu learned of those wild claims he purveyed as facts?

    When you consider his wilful arrogance and disdain of other opinion, it is not difficult to see why he was easily picked up like a chicken and extraordinarily renditioned. He is too much in love with his own voice. Even before he escaped from the country while on bail in 2017, he had become a power house and something of a principality in the South-East. He was his own master and confidant. He operated from his Afaraukwu, Abia State residence, as if he was a sovereign, receiving obeisance from his supporters who bowed and fell at his feet while seizing every opportunity to challenge the authority of the state. Symbols of state power were anathema to many who acted in his name. This, in addition to his separatist agenda, is a major part of what differentiates his type of agitation from that of others he is often compared to.

    It was in this situation, while he was on bail, that his people again clashed with military personnel who took the battle into his home and took out several of his followers during the operation Python Dance exercise in the South-East. This was what forced him into exile where he could have remained for good had he not turned his energy into the active promotion of treasonable activities and ethnic disaffection through his broadcasts on his so-called Biafra radio. The circumstances of his arrest speak volumes about his person.

    The Igbo like any other Nigerian group are guaranteed their right of self-determination. Nnamdi Kanu need not monopolise the narrative around that. That right was long recognised before he was born and the idea that the peace of the South-East that has been mostly disrupted in the last five years by IPOB-related activities is dependent on his release is stretching the truth. Kanu’s IPOB may have unleashed a monster that has gone beyond its control in the form of the Eastern Security Network. If only to respect the wish of the South-East political establishment, a political solution should be found to his matter and he should be released. But it can’t all be on his own terms. Justice Binta Nyako is the third on Kanu’s recusal list. How many more are left to go?

    Terminated

  • A lazy opposition in disarray goes for broke, by Rotimi Fasan

    A lazy opposition in disarray goes for broke, by Rotimi Fasan

    In just over two weeks, it would have been two years since President Bola Tinubu won the 2023 presidential election. His victory was hard won and is still the cause of much bitterness among members of the opposition who still cannot reconcile themselves to it. For them, it’s as if there could be a way to overturn his presidency. Which might explain why a man like Rotimi Amaechi would invite Nigerian youths to turn to violence in their struggle for power. As he claimed, Nigerians politicians would steal, maim and kill in order to grab power.

    Those who would wrest power from them, Amaechi went on to say, must be willing to do exactly the same thing. That may sound fair enough, if it’s a piece of advice for politicians like him. But Nigerian youths are not necessarily politicians and need not be incited to violence in the manner Amaechi has been pushing for some time now. In October last year, Amaechi had criticised young Nigerians for not taking to the street to protest the rising cost of living. Clearly, he has something up his sleeves with his periodic calls for violence. And one wonders how old Amaechi himself is that he is not leading such protests if he is so convinced that is the only route open to him and his ilk to power.

    It has to be said that this incitement of the youth is not about them. Rather, it is about politicians like Amaechi who have totally lost out in the power game. They are looking to make young Nigerians cannon fodder for their ambition. They have been at it since Tinubu was declared president on February 25, 2023. At various times and in both overt and covert gestures, opposition elements have tried their hands at inciting violence, even calling on the military not to stand by and look. Some of them literally went on their knees in front of the Defence Headquarters in Abuja, calling on the military. For them any way and anything is acceptable provided it could get them back to power.

    All of this is understandable if not justifiable. Electoral loss is more often than not a very painful affair for

    those concerned. In an environment like ours where winning is something of a zero-sum game, losing an election is even more painful. There is so much at stake with politicians personally bearing the cost of their election unlike in other parts of the world where there are structures for political donors to step in. Here, people steal from the state, maim and kill their opponents or anyone else standing in their way. Rotimi Amaechi, as a politician himself, should know this.

    A loss is often visceral and frequently leads most politicians into financial ruin. They can only survive on public stolen funds. Rotimi Amaechi was not shy to remark at the gathering of malcontents they misnamed a national conference to strengthen democracy, that poverty would not let him leave politics. This, after he has spent about two thirds of his adult life in politics. It is remarkable that he could only explain his involvement in politics in terms of lucre. Like Amaechi, the disgruntled Nasir el Rufai, former Governor of Kaduna state, continues to speak from both sides of the mouth.

    For about a year now, he has been keeping the company of his political enemies like former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar. Yet he wants Nigerians to accept him as a member of the APC and he has vowed to continue his agitation against the party from within the party. How does his partnership with others to form a so-called mega party square with his claim of attacking from within what he finds objectionable about his party? Who does he think is deceived by criticisms of both his party and the APC-led government that has suddenly grown loud?

    Mourning and lamenting their loss, those opposed to the Tinubu administration are daily coming together under different umbrellas. Suddenly, sworn enemies have cozied up to one another and they are all singing the same song of freeing Nigeria from the assumed stranglehold of Bola Tinubu who is now viewed as a dictator. Following the arrest of Omoyele Sowore over his issues with the Police, Atiku Abubakar, Tinubu’s

    one time friend and main rival in the 2023 election, wants the world to know that the president is out to silence all opposition voices.

    He sees nothing wrong in Shehu Madhi. a so-called activist peddling dangerous rumours about France setting up a military base in the north. For Atiku, except Tinubu is stopped, Nigerians would soon become a huge prison yard just because of the prosecution of some people through the judicial system. Just when Atiku Abubakar chose to project his personal fear of losing all chances of ever becoming president on other Nigerians, by accusing Tinubu of despotism, he also accused the ruling party of dolling out N50 million to bribe each opposition party. He made this claim against the background of the drama that played out during the PDP’s Board of Trustees meeting that ended in blows among supporters of the two men claiming to be the party’s National Secretary.

    Rather than provide the kind of leadership required of an opposition party, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar stays abroad and makes periodic trips home to rally supporters around his ambition to lead the PDP into the next election. With the PDP in confusion, the Labour Party out of joint and the other parties not knowing where to turn, the field has been left open for the APC to graze as it pleases and some politicians want to blame that on Tinubu. Are they expecting him or his party to help them win power? Was that how he got it? The sheer foolishness of opposition claims that the APC is bribing their members is self-indicting. It shows the irresponsibility of our politicians.

    They are full of talks about forming another party, a so-called third force or special purpose vehicle that Professor Pat Utomi and others promoted to no avail before the 2023 election. Nobody wants to do the dirty job of building their own party. Rather, they are busy inciting violence among the youth, giving life to baseless rumours of marginalising the north.

    Having failed to make any headway with the manufactured controversies around tax reforms and rising cost of living, the goal is now to encourage the invasion of bandits and the promotion of a political sharia among a south-western population that has never been known for religious intolerance. Why it should be the business of the north to teach the Yoruba about sharia is what nobody has been able to explain among the do-gooders crying more than the bereaved.