Hardball
For a while, it seemed like he had evaded accountability before the law for his Rambo-style aggression against a defenceless woman. But the wheel of justice, as they say, may grind slowly, it does also surely. And so, Senator Elisha Abbo has been convicted by a court of law for assaulting Osimibibra Warmate in an Abuja sex toy shop and ordered to pay her N50million as compensation.
In a verdict early last week, a Federal Capital Territory (FCT) high court held the senator representing Adamawa North district in the red chamber guilty. One of the lawyers who filed a civil suit against the 41-year-old lawmaker, Nelson Onuoha, made the verdict public, saying: “Remember that video of a Nigerian senator slapping/assaulting a young lady at a shop? Well, justice was served today with the court slamming the sum of N50m against the senator. I am delighted to have represented that young lady in this suit. We say no more to oppression.” The new verdict came against the backdrop of another judgment by a magistrate’s court in Zuba, Abuja that had cleared Abbo and dismissed a suit brought by the police against him.
The young lawmaker was in May 2019 – about three months after he became senator-elect and a month before NASS inauguration – caught on video assaulting Warmate after she pleaded with him not to manhandle another lady he had accused of insulting him by calling him a drunk. That assault took place with an armed policeman standing by who, rather than restrain Abbo, had attempted to arrest the victim. Although the assault was reported shortly after the incident, the police dallied on taking action. But when the force eventually dragged Abbo to court on one-count charge of assaulting Warmate, it made such shoddy job of prosecuting that Magistrate Abdullahi Ilelah upheld a no-case submission entered by the lawmaker and dismissed the case. Warmate though took her fate in her hands by filing a fundamental rights suit at the FCT high court, which was eventually decided in her favour.
It is condemnable that the police did not only foot-drag on moving against Abbo, they also bungled the prosecution. If Warmate had not taken up the matter in a civil suit, Abbo might have escaped justice. This suggests the police were more inclined to allowing a lowly citizen suffer injustice than bring a ‘big fry’ to justice. Shame! As for the lawmaker, the impact of this new verdict may not be in the huge compensation he has been ordered to pay Warmate: who knows, he may be able to underwrite that easily. But he is now a convict-senator, and that is a label for history books.
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