The Nigerian Senate erupted again last week. This time, it was not about allegations of its leadership being a cesspool of sleaze, a home of self-serving parliamentarians or corruptible budget-padding that have become a boring refrain. Sequel to an earlier seemingly infantile squabble over sitting arrangement, the female anti-hero of that row, Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, came on air on Friday to allege that her continuous spats with Senate President Godswill Akpabio were due to a sexual harassment she rebuffed in the past. And the social space went bonkers.
First, the two issues that threw Akpoti-Uduaghan and Senate President Godswill Akpabio to centers of discourse have throwbacks to and possess symbolic bearing in American and biblical history. Many have berated her on why a trifling matter of space/seat allocation on the floor of the parliament should get her that worked up. They must, however, have forgotten that one of the issues that women who try to square up to men in a patriarchal society like ours face and fight is visibility. While in pursuit of the male dominance thesis, men try to hold women down, such women try to assert themselves and create visibility for themselves.
Akpoti-Uduaghan’s squabble over seating arrangement and Akpabio’s senate’s resistance and insistence on maintenance of status-quo remind me of the famous Montgomery bus altercation of 1955. On December 1 of that year in Montgomery, Alabama, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks did what philosophers call against method. Paul Feyeraband, an Austrian philosopher, had in 1976 pioneered that thesis. In a racial American society of the time where blacks were inferior and expected to leave their bus seats for whites, Parks refused to give up hers for a white male passenger. Her refusal sparked off a boycott that changed the paradigm of racial relationships in America. It even shot the less-known Martin Luther King Jr to world recognition. At the risk of sanctions for her impudence, Parks had reportedly told the Montgomery bus driver, “My feet are tired.” Like Parks’ fight for the visibility of the black race, Akpoti-Uduaghan’s resistance was a fight for the visibility of women.
If other women in the senate like Ireti Kingibe had seen the fight as being beyond mere seat allocation into an underscore of their womanliness and fight against the irritant male-dominated status-quo, they probably would have given the Kogi senator more collective push. Like Bettina Aptheker wrote in her Foreword to Nawal El Saadawi’s A daughter of Isis, “women (daily) struggle for voice and human dignity and to overcome the binds of patriarchy…and are crushed under patriarchal conventions”. Women’s sexuality is constantly crushed in this struggle.
The second issue that flows from the first is Akpoti-Uduaghan’s allegation of sexual harassment. People have taken stands either on account of their stomachs, what lies between their thighs or their political affiliations. Again, the allegation is a symbolism. Many who cannot stand Akpoti-Uduaghan’s femininity or her boldness to underscore it in a patriarchal senate have likened her allegation to the biblical Portiphar’s wife who alleged that Joseph wanted to sexually assault her. Many have also brought out her alleged history which they claim feeds the trope of her usual allegations of blackmail against the male gender. If allegation is a typecast, Akpabio’s alleged history with women validates Akpoti-Uduaghan’s allegation. A couple of years ago, Joy Nunieh, a former NDDC MD, had alleged that she slapped the senate president when he attempted to sexualise her in his guest house at Apo, Abuja.
On an Arise News interview, Ireti had attempted to infantilise Akpoti-Uduaghan, the same way a huge percentage of the senate fatherlise Akpabio, who is only first among equals in the parliament. This is due to the huge war-chest in the possession of his leadership and capability to substantially jerk up members’ personal finances through graft. The other day, on the same television station, Peter Onyeka Nwebonyi, representing Ebonyi state, did this by claiming that Akpabio was “our father.” Last Friday, Kingibe did this, too, by referring to Akpoti-Uduaghan as “my daughter”. She further fell into the argumentative pitfall of claiming that since Akpabio never assaulted her and the two other female senators, Akpoti-Uduaghan’s allegation must be concocted. I pray thee, do these elderly women still possess their colleague’s sultry disposition? And, isn’t it a rarity to see lascivious flesh-devouring vultures attempt to take grandmothers for supper?
We cannot suffer on all fronts by having a national assembly that is allegedly a cesspit of Nigerian national patrimony-devourers, as well as a home for devourers of the flesh of our women. Yes, it is almost an impossibility to prove sexual harassment by a woman, but Akpoti-Uduaghan’s boldness and the sheaves of evidence she claimed to possess to buttress her claim should be encouraged. No one must attempt a “family affair” settlement, or else one more rascally libido would be let loo loose.
•Dr Adedayo is a lawyer, social critic and columnist.
