By Wole Olujobi
Senator Adeyemi Adaramodu, who represents Ekiti South in the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, will never cease to intrigue me. Adaramodu, a grandmaster of soap-box strategy and elegant essayist in political communications, is a doyen of the communications arts, who deploys both spoken and unspoken media to present his ideas in verbal finesse and strategic graphical details, to give expression to the arrays of political trends that sleep with Nigerians and wake them up dialy to more complex political realities. We saw this in him in his home state of Ekiti.
The Senate’s spokesman hit the limelight as the spokesman of the Kayode Fayemi Campaign Organisation in the 2007 Ekiti State governorship election that Fayemi won, but which the sphinx in the Nigerian power elite group would not allow.
Deploying his creativity in addressing the complex political realities of the time, it was the period that Adaramodu changed the age-long Nigeria’s political lexicon from everyday expressions to a more symbolic communication art and act, including the lucid presentation of the harsh and uncouth realities that the ruling party at the time had forced in the throats of Nigerians.
Coinages, such as “political masturbation”, “political pharisees” and “political ragamuffin”, “the Pharaoh’s disciples”, among others, were coinages by Adaramodu that found their ways to the consciousness of Ekiti people, which also gave a precise and concise expression to the reality of the unrealistic political suffocation in Ekiti State between 2007 and October 15, 2010.
These expressions woke Ekiti people to the reality that far away from the theatre of the absurd, they had worse than a Herod to contend with in their thirst for justice and right to elect the governor of their choice.
Adaramodu used his talents to wake consciousness among Ekiti people to be peacefully determined in the deployment of their grits and democratic rights to get justice. And in the streets and in courts, superior adherence to the rule of law prevailed, as the clock ticked to restore order and justice. Ekiti State was thus spared the crushing pains of the drumbeat of Pharaoh’s orchestra on October 15, 2010, which Adaramodu fought tooth and nail to achieve, after Ekiti State was on the crutches of political manipulation orchestrated for three and half years by those that Adaramodu dubbed as “the political pharisees” that held tightly to the throats of Ekiti people.
Fifteen years after, Adaramodu climbed to the national stage as the Nigerian Senate’s spokesman to draw our attention to how a harmless term in theatre and communication arts, particularly in public relations and entertainment, (that is, content creation), can be exploited by restive and desperate politicians to become irreverent, belligerent, despondent, ridiculous and, indeed, a source and sauce for national uproar and embarrassment, to rock the boat of the nation’s democracy and burn the arse of the mace in a maze of political intrigues that have potential to desecrate the pantheon of the parliament; the very source and fountain of democracy.
On a live programme on television, a brilliant Adaramodu, while explaining in details the events that led to the escalation of the sexual harassment rhetoric in the Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan theatrics, said that what Nigerians were seeing in Senator Natasha was nothing more than a “content creation skills in her Senate Committee on Diaspora and NGOs work” carried too far.
He warned that exploiting such a mundane antic in fighting against a non-existent marginalisation and oppression of women is injurious to the health of the nation’s democracy and her economic development plans.
Recently, the Senate that has been scurrilously turned into an amphitheatre of the absurd, witnessed a pantomime without percussionists and back singers. It was orchestrated by Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. As the composer and arranger, Senator Akpoti from Kogi State, was also the lead and back-up singer, the drummer as well as the saxophonist.
Huge numbers of her party members refused to sing her song. Fellow female members in the Senate turned deaf ears to the offensive lyrics coming from one of their own in her “Portable’s anthem”. Senator Florence Ita-Giwa, a frontline women’s leader, dismissed Natasha’s allegation of sexual harassment as a weakness, arguing that both Akpabio and Natasha share same status as Senators and so Akpabio cannot molest her.
Back home in Kogi State, Natasha’s constituents hit the polls, opting for a recall process over alleged poor representation and shame they felt over alleged preference for the optics and their vanities far above adding value to their lives. But that did not stop other Nigerians from airing their views, as some spoke against discrimination against women.
Discrimination against women is not only bad; it is also evil, criminal and a sin against not only man but also against God. Women should not be discriminated against!
But what is at stake here, according to records and across the party lines, in the Senate? Evidently, following the Senate rules and tradition of changing seats from time to time is the contention and not any act of abuse of women. That much Senator Ned Nwoko explained in his intervention, like other Senators.
According to available facts, the alleged amorous advances happened long time ago and there are pieces of fact-based evidence that suggest that after those alleged advances, both Senate President Godswill Akpabio and Senator Natasha had related well privately and in the Senate. The law courts would dismiss Natasha’s current allegation as an afterthought ill-motivated for political capital.
It is therefore surprising that a mere matter over the shifting of sitting arrangement that is the norm could provoke a drama that triggered a national uproar in the Senate from the morning when the concert begins to the evening when the opera ends. And all this tending towards pitting women against men in a polity that needs robust aggregation of sound debates, formulation of productive principles and enunciation of mission and vision to grow an enduring economic legacy that takes care of the thoroughly abused Nigerians who have over the years been traumatised by the perfidious and jocund fellows in leadership positions, who chose buffooning foppery far above national etho for progress; the prospect that was spurned by the leadership of her party that has a scant regard for the judgment of history.
In Senator Natasha, we have regrettably seen a Socrates’ invention gone awry, and which has become a subject of mirth in the Senate chambers described in the holy writ as hallowed.
Socrates it was who surmised that the best among men must be in the parliament, the bedrock of democracy, to thinker with the best ways for human husbandry to make the society safe. But the events that headlined the polity in recent times in the Senate have shamed Socrates in his grave.
From sitting arrangements to sexual harassment, waist twisting, winking and tongue-wagging, among other nauseating accusations, the Nigerian Senate, like Adaramodu warned, has been turned into the house of humour and amusement for sensuous partisans and the romantic logic of the sensualists in a polity where reputations are very cheap, even as the fifth columnists have emerged to add dangerous pep to the already charged debate.
There was an allegation by an Internet crook who wrote on behalf of Natasha that a woman (Natasha) licensed at polls by Kogi voters to make laws had become licentious after an alleged N500m down-payment, to corral her into an erotic stripping session, and chew away at the restive hot candy lodged between the thighs. The allegation was denied by Natasha.
The sordid trend has drawn the riveting choler of a cross-section of Nigerians who wonder why their representatives should occupy themselves with the pleasure of the body while the very essence of life suffers.
Curiously, it is happening at the time for the annual ritual to plot the health of the nation when the National Assembly is set to start implementing the national budget that bonds all Nigerians to one destiny irrespective of tribes, tongues and ideological identities.
But then, it all boils down to Adaramodu’s suggestion that an elaborate “content creation” skill in the Senate is being propped in redemptive accoutrement for partisan motives to achieve undeserved advantage.
First, it was an excruciating sexual harassment that Natasha endured over time, even though she enjoyed the best of a relationship with somebody of equal strength as a senator. Yet, she said that she suffered from that sexual harassment for a very long time while we later heard that Akpabio is also a close friend of her husband!
When support from the expected quarters among top Nigerian women over alleged sexual harassment failed, the irate Senator expanded her content creation skill and turned to the international arena at the United Nations to tell stories of her ordeals in the hands of a man whose groins are always violently provoked into a vicious stir at the slightest glance at the vital parts of women.
When Nigerians railed at such inanity, another allegation emerged, as Natasha reportedly turned to another symbolic content, opting for a more consuming temptation among the lechers across the globe, saying that Akpabio once talked about her tempting, spherical waist and rotund “bum bum” that the daughters of Eve often flaunt to daze men into unconsciousness in the game of lechery as we have read in David and Uriah’s wife’s story.
All these took Natasha’s attention from her primary duty in the parliament to make laws that take care of the welfare needs of her people. Unfortunately, the bug also caught the attention of the nation that is struggling to overcome the burdens of poverty foisted on Nigerians by her party that is today devising and creating complementary contents to seize the government again, to complete the routing of Nigeria and put the spoils, as usual, in the pockets of members.
Curiously too, the opposition’s method to that power grab malady is being propped through legislative rascality, belligerence and political stratagem rooted in obnoxious content creation by the noxious totems of failed leadership of the past that now thrives in breathtaking blackmail stunts as a superior weapon of political manipulation.
The Natasha drama has since thrown up ludicrous narratives of more dramatic spectacles to the collective shame of the fake freedom fighters in the polity.
I watched in awe on television a pseudo anti-corruption crusader and self-advertised rights activist notorious for the subjugation of her workers, and who once almost turned the diamond in her office into dust in the acts of office abuse, as she harassed a Senator, protesting alleged rights abuse and crime against women and I marvelled at this insipid specimen of gregacious Nigerians in her egregious display of dubiety garnished in redemptive accoutrement!
From the back curtains, like a troubled ghoul, rang out Atiku Abubakar’s shrill voice to further foul the already dense and tense political air, calling Akpabio “a serial women’s abuser”. The Senate President was only spared the coital brutality charge of rape!
Elsewhere in Abeokuta, their grand patron held court in a blackmail seminar on alleged bribery in the Rivers State emergency rule brouhaha, eventhough he holds the trophy as a legend in the Nigeria’s evergreen history of bribery scam to rape the nation’s law in a desperate power chase to lord it over the rest of us.
Nigeria is ripe for fresh hope from fresh hands in a fresh environment devoid of failed men and women of yesterday who buried Nigerians’ hope for a prosperous future.
Nigerians must wake up to the reality that the Pharaohs never relent in the battle for survival. Sexual harassment game is just a smokescreen for the battle ahead in the next presidential poll.
The power grids of the yesterday’s men are fast collapsing, leaving them troubleshooting to hit the stream again.The National Assembly is the turf to test the colour and temper of the complex games that will shape the politics of the next dispensation, even though what Nigerians need are content creations that hold much promise for the nation’s growth.
More interesting times are ahead for more shenanigans and drama, as more scary power grab schemes unfold.
*Olujobi, a journalist, writes from Ado-Ekiti
