Category: Sunday

A noose is dangling over the head of the Nigeria’s legislature and the Kogi State Government. It is known as the Natasha noose. It gave enough warning before creeping up the thick cranial base of her tormentors. We warned too. And we darkly conjectured, even remotely comparing her to the dreaded Empress Catherine, a lady of German extraction who went ahead to rule Tsarist Russia for thirty three years after doing away with her husband, the hapless Tsar, with the help of her lovers. She accounted for the scalp of many feckless Russian noblemen, but can also be wildly generous to them in parting package. Now that Nathasha is precariously perched like the infamous mosquito on the most delicate part of the male anatomy, it will take more considerable diplomatic skills and political acumen than her interlocutors have shown to prise her away.

 But Natasha’s adversaries appear unrelenting, obviously in haste to dragoon and quarter her for good. Having lost the battle to recall her, they have gone ahead to reopen the case with immediate effect, as if adding a few more questionable signatures will redeem the validity, credibility and legitimacy of the whole exercise. Little have they realized the massive pressure they are piling on the weak links of struggling democracy and the net effect of all this on an INEC already hobbled by institutional vulnerabilities and the erosion of public confidence. Despite its fondness for hiding behind one finger, INEC frailties are on ample display in the battle to recall the stormy petrel, even though it is to its credit that it came off very well.

 When they first brought the sack of aramanda voters’ list, INEC threw it back at them claiming that it was an unsigned document. But twenty four hours later, having been briefed or having debriefed itself, INEC countermanded its earlier instance by affirming that things were in order and the recall was on song. Meanwhile, background groaning and grumbling began emanating from the selfsame INEC about how arduous and expensive a recall process can be. Then suddenly last Tuesday evening, the electoral commission dismissed the whole exercise as flawed and lacking in requisite numbers. There are rumours that the commission has been guided by the irate voice vote at Natasha’s Okene rally and its convulsive possibilities. The Okene damsel has become a piece of bone stuck in the throat of gendered hegemony.

  In the end, perhaps nothing could surpass the analytical bravura and penetrating acumen of Ambassador John Galbraith’s observation of Indian society at the turn of the sixties. The great liberal economist and John Kennedy’s ambassador to India noted with caustic asperity that the more underdeveloped a country is, the more overdeveloped its women are. Galbraith might have been driven to sardonic generalization by the great disparity he noticed between the sprawling squalor and appalling misery among Indians in general around this period and the chic sophistication and alluring glamour of many of its women, particularly those from the highest caste.

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  Judging from the events of last Tuesday in particular and the preceding weeks in general, it is clear that Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan is a lot smarter and more politically savvy than all her assailants put together. One may of course object to some of her antics which smack of political desperation and brinksmanship. One may demur at her jankara tactics which do not conduce to the highest form of civility in parliamentary procedure and her lachrymose exertions which amount to sheer emotional blackmail. But there can be no doubt that she has shown extraordinary bravery, courage and fortitude in the face of unrelenting adversity and barely veiled attempts to silence her.  

This being an authoritarian, harshly hierarchical and patriarchal society, the most progressive and egalitarian intervention can only be one that offers a lifeline and support to the female folk where and when they run afoul of the gender patrol unit of the male dominion. As the dominated stratum of a subordinated sub-class, African women are more likely to end up as victims of a double jeopardy: oppressed at home by men who are themselves oppressed abroad. To be sure, some women have proven to be equally adept, if not even more accomplished, in fiscal malfeasance than their male counterparts. But when examined closely, it will be discovered that these are lone, individual aces whose impact on society is far less devastating than the structured financial heists often associated with male-dominated financial empires and consortiums.

   In any case, pitching for women in a male-ordered world is a practical affirmation of the right of all humanity to economic and political freedom. Ultimately, it is an act of enlightened self-interest. This is a struggle for parity which has preoccupied the human society since the advent of the nation-state paradigm about six centuries ago. Some human societies do it better and faster than others, such as Iceland, Finland and the Scandinavian countries and they are happier, more humane, more productive and more prosperous for it. It is unfortunate that many in Nigeria and Africa pay lip service to the imperative of a modern, egalitarian and more democratic country without understanding how the emancipation of women plays a crucial role in the struggle to roll back the boulders of authoritarianism and traditional tyranny in post-independence and post-military Nigerian politics.

Given the normative poverty of contemporary Nigerian politics, it is possible that neither Natasha nor many of her adversaries in the senate understand or appreciate the huge symbolic overcast against which the messy struggle to recall her from the senate is unfurling. Epic developments in history often take place under an ideological occlusion with contending protagonists often shielded from the true historic import of what they are struggling for and the possible outcome. Natasha herself cannot be said to be ideologically driven. Rich and pampered from childhood, she is a scion of the new plutocracy with its morbid acquisitiveness and anti-democratic panache. But then only few heroines of history ever emerge from the side of the people to fight for the people.

   Natasha is still very far from being a Nigerian incarnation of Nancy Astor, the American-born British politician and indefatigable campaigner for female rights. She was the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons and this was in the early twentieth century. Endowed with a caustic tongue and nettling wit, she held her own in verbal duels with male folks particularly against Winston Churchill whom she once memorably dismissed as being perpetually drunk. Once while campaigning on a rural farm, a jeering and sneering farmer thought he had the feisty lady’s back against the wall when he asked her if she even knew how many toes a sow (female pig) has. The imperious lady was having none of that nonsense. “ Remove your boots and count, man!” she shot back.

Natasha does not need to remove her boots. What she has removed are the velvety gloves revealing her capacity to deliver bare knuckle blows to the plexus. She has shown that she needs little help. Judging from the way she has fought her corner like a ferocious kitten, it is obvious that this is going to be one helluva fight.  She has outsmarted and outwitted her fumbling and plodding enemies all the way. She has blindsided and steamrolled the Nigerian senate making the habitués of that hallowed chamber look like a bunch of political neophytes.

 When they were thinking of further hamstringing her locally, she was making a dramatic appearance abroad with her endless supply of tears on the ready. You begin to wonder whether the feisty lady keeps a generous supply of fresh onion bulbs in her swanky upmarket handbag. The reputational damage to the nation’s fledgling democracy is better imagined. And the lady is not done. Last Tuesday, Natasha upped the stakes beyond the imagination and expectation of her complacent adversaries.

  In what must rank as the most fearsome and daring pushback against a sub-national government and its entire security apparatus in post-military Nigeria, the senator representing Kogi Central District defied all odds and stumbling blockades put in place by the state government, including a subsisting ban on all rallies and vehicular processions, to address a rally of her teeming supporters in the politically combustible and volcanic Ebira principal homestead of Okene. Instead of coming by road and battling the heavy duty dragnet inch by inch and ground by ground like an infantry general, she came in a chariot of thunder and dust, descending on the venue from a chopper. The security people must have wisely concluded that they were up against a heavenly mob and the multitude of irate voters about to be violently disenfranchised by the anti-democratic paladin.

Since these are the same constituents who are said to have demanded her ouster and recall from the senate, you would have expected her to be met by a scant crowd of surly and rude denizens tearing into her with verbal rockets. Instead, the reception was tumultuous with the frenzied crowd chanting her name and singing her praises to high heavens as the senator herself latched on to the palpable mood of high octane hostility to launch some fiery broadsides against her adversaries.  To further cement the solidarity of her people against electoral and legislative aberration, she had invoked her Ebira identity reminding the surging crowd that as an Ebira person, fear is unknown to her and she would never succumb to blackmail or be cowed by anybody born of a woman. It was a deft way of summoning the moody, irascible phalanx from the Ebira hilly range.

  Let us use this column to appeal to all men and women of goodwill in the senate to sheath their sword and bury all ego-fueled obsessions with legislative rules of conduct. This is a battle they cannot win. Even if they do, it will be a Pyrrhic victory which would have cost the senate the last shred of its remaining credibility and legitimacy. This will gravely imperil the fortunes of democracy. From all available evidence, this woman will not go down lightly. She may have a few aces further up her sleeves. The salacious and insalubrious revelations have already cost the august gathering considerable reputational damage.

This is not consistent with the higher seriousness Nigerians have come to expect from the upper chambers of their legislature as evidenced by the brilliance and sagacity of their forbears in the First and Second Republics and even the brief Third Republic before it was snuffed out. Let the senate drop this tomfoolery of a recall which has already been compromised at source and reach out to the few surviving elder statesmen in the nation to broker a peace deal with Natasha. At this perilous point, either side needs a soft landing.