Senator Akpoti v. Nigeria

The church had a pastor who really loved the sound of his own voice and he spoke for nearly two hours. His sermon, one day last December in South-East Nigeria, concerned the proper behaviour of men and women in marriage, though his remarks were directed more at women: the wicked, disobedient women whose refusal to submit to their husbands as God intended is to blame for most if not all domestic conflict and social ills. On this occasion the pastor was unusually concerned with the marital bed. ‘A woman’s breasts are her husband’s first restaurant,’ he said. ‘He eats there first.’

A few weeks later, towards the end of February, in an interview with Arise TV, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan accused the Senate president, Godswill Akpabio, the third most powerful man in the country, of sexual harassment. According to Akpoti-Uduaghan, in December 2023, on a visit to the Senate president’s house in Akwa Ibom state, Akpabio held her hand while giving her a tour, her husband walking behind them. In one of the mansion’s many sitting rooms, she says, he asked her if she liked his house and told her: ‘I’m going to create time for us to come spend quality moments here. You will enjoy it.’ In a second incident, Akpoti-Uduaghan says that Akpabio told her a motion she put forward would appear before the Senate if she ‘took care of him’.

After the interview, the allegations appeared in Nigerian newspapers and on social media. Akpoti-Uduaghan was criticised for breaking protocol by going to the media before submitting an official complaint. On 6 March, the Senate Committee on Ethics and Public Petitions dismissed Akpoti-Uduaghan’s formal petition on procedural grounds (she shouldn’t have signed it herself), charged her with bringing ‘public opprobrium’ on the Senate and suspended her for six months without pay, citing her ‘unruly and disruptive’ manner during an argument in the Senate over seating arrangements (Akpabio had moved Akpoti-Uduaghan’s nameplate).

Soon afterwards, the Nigerian Women Crusade for Good Governance, representing a hundred women’s groups, gave a press conference to issue an ‘unreserved apology to the Senate president and Nigerians for the misconduct of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan’. Describing her as ‘disruptive, crude, and distasteful’, they said that her allegations were an embarrassment to Nigerian women and a hindrance to efforts to increase our political representation. Only four of the 109 seats in the Senate are held by women. One of them, Senator Ita Giwa, said: ‘I’m not with Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan, it’s a sign of weakness to accuse a man at that level.’ In other corners of public opinion it has also been claimed that ‘Natasha’ – as she is often called in the media, though Nigerian leaders are never referred to by their first names – has falsely accused other powerful men of sexual misconduct, and rumours have circulated regarding her supposedly colourful sexual past.

There were declarations of support for Akpoti-Uduaghan, too. Hadiza Ado, a women’s rights activist, told the BBC that the senator’s suspension was a ‘sad day for Nigerian women’. The level of attention suggested that the row between Akpoti-Uduaghan and Akpabio might have the potential to force a national reckoning or reawakening to Nigeria’s endemic problems of sexual harassment, assault and violence, and the inadequacy of institutional responses.

The allegations and the reaction to them reveal something of the difficulties of being a woman in Nigeria, but they also speak to the country’s sexual mores and hypocrisy, the gap between values and reality. Sex here is very much an open secret, a facet of ‘inside life’, and a currency of exchange in a patriarchal society. Whether the women who unreservedly apologised to Akpabio believe Akpoti-Uduaghan or not, they know that the kind of ‘care’ and special ‘time’ he allegedly requested from her are very much the norm, an expectation on women filtered through the political, religious and cultural spheres. We just don’t talk about it.

The incident also reveals the customary use of humiliation to put an unruly woman in her place. It wasn’t enough to suspend Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan: she had to be verbally put down for her ‘disruptive behaviour’. Her private life has been dragged out on display for public judgment and consumption. ‘Does she think she is the most beautiful woman on earth?’ one senator asked. ‘In my own assessment, she is not among the beautiful women in Nigeria, and it is high time we come hard on her.’ Another politician said: ‘Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan’s beauty is a problem.’

Pointing out the problem would seem to be the real problem: that it is better to suffer in lady-like silence than risk speaking out. At the highest echelons of society, sexual harassment in the workplace is treated at best with nonchalant dismissal and at worst with hard-edged contempt towards the accuser. Earlier this week, armed vandals attacked Akpoti-Uduaghan’s house.