By Toyin Falola
Since 2023, multiple expressions of indignity have pervaded Nigeria’s legislative chambers. These conducts are beyond the simple attribute of being a rubber stamp; they are symbols of a deep-rooted disregard for responsible, accountable leadership. Yet, I have not penned this to decry every indiscretion of the Nigerian Senate. I am writing to decry a particular one — the raw mistreatment of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. Far from being an isolated case of abuse of office against a single person, the conduct of the Senate has deep reflections on the perception of women in leadership. Given the sensitivity of this topic, particularly for the male folks, I know without a doubt that many contest or even dismiss this without thought.
So, here’s a case in point — Senator Onyekachi’s Nwaebonyi’s altercation with Dr. Oby Ezekwesili. That dismal show was enacted in the wrong setting. It was more befitting of streetside shouting matches, where such often occurs than the chambers of a Senate Committee hearing. Both sides have traded blame, and Dr Ezekwesili has been equally blamed for triggering the exercise in the first place. From her narration of the issues, the feeling that the hearing was just ceremonial is a hovering nag. However, my grouse lies primarily in the contents of Senator Nwaebonyi’s protests against the two-time minister and former Vice President of the World Bank.
In an angry interview with Channels TV’s Seun Okinbaloye, he refused to express remorse for his actions, repeating the very same words that made his utterances unacceptable in the first place. In my view, it is one thing to fault a behaviour on merit and another entirely to level insults using personal attributes such as sex. Especially sex. Nwaebonyi had retorted to the doctor’s description of him as a disgrace to the Senate with a “you’re an insult to womanhood” response of his own. On Channels, he had railed against her, citing her status as a grandmother. It is the 21st century, and it would not be wrong to assume that members of the Nigerian political cadre are, at a minimum, conscious of terms like ‘patriarchy’ and ‘inclusivity’.
They are not mere constituents of the civility lexicon; they are a real challenge, with solutions resting in the hands of the same legislators in whose number Senator Nwaebonyi is a part. Sadly, I did not get the impression that he was bothered or even remotely aware of the uneven territory he had entered. Would it have been better if he had simply responded by attacking her qualifications, too? I have caught myself asking. Was his introduction of sexuality not a flimsy emblem of desire to inflate his status, expecting submission? Crucially, what would he have said if his opponent were a man?
I find a bothersome response to these in Dr Ezekwesili’s statement that this is an off-camera routine. I see an additionally disturbing one in Senator Nwaebonyi’s refusal to acknowledge the complex principles upon which the petitioner, on Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan’s behalf, had declined to proceed with submissions before the committee. This disregard for elementary tenets of fair hearing suggests that quality leadership for Nigerians is purely illusory.
Now, to the genesis of the matter. Ezekwesili and Nwaebonyi would likely not have tangled in such a manner if Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan’s matter had not erupted. To anyone who has observed proceedings at the Senate through time, the Kogi senator’s eventual suspension was not the first time she would crossfire with Godswill Akpabio. In July 2024, Senator Akpabio had shut her down with the statement, “We are not in a nightclub”. Though his remarks for FCT Senatorial District Senator Ireti Kingibe’s prayer on victims of a market fire had arguably been more temperate, it still drew the ire of critics who have sited it within a pattern of condescending, derogatory comments on women.
On the one hand, a case can be made for Akpabio’s verbal incontinence. In times past, he has been known to make out-of-pocket statements that were not by any measure of reason connected to gender. However, That case weakens when the statement’s particularity is considered. The choice of a “nightclub” as a reprimand implies a potentially deeper level of attachment to the context in which it was applied. Even if we were to refrain from overinterpretation, it still seems unbecoming for a professional, similarly elected colleague to be addressed in that fashion.
In 2025, Akpoti-Uduaghan and Akpabio had locked horns over seats. Being only an observer, developing a fairly accurate position on seat change is tricky. The rules of the Senate on the prerogative of its president to allocate seats and the mandate upon each senator to only speak from those were read live on national television. According to the Senate President, the apparent reasoning behind Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan’s refusal to comply was the relative obscurity of the new seat to which she had been assigned. Based on the statements uttered in her protests of defiance, being hidden from the camera’s coverage may have been taken as an action by the senator. Yet, on the face of it, it would seem that there is not much that can be said in her favour, given the regular nature of seat reallocations within the Senate. In reality, there just might be.
We should not expect the procedure always to be applied in good faith. If that were indeed the case, the colourations surrounding Senate committee hearings on the matter, the disregard for judicial injunctions and the blanket refusal of the bulk of the Senate to condemn its leadership would not be occurring. Instead, these signals send a poor message — the institution cannot be trusted. Moving further, delicate as it appears for me to run commentary that seemingly favours loyalty based on identity, I must. The issue in question is not so simple as to be viewed purely within those lenses. Senator Ireti Kingibe, who, ironically, heads the Senate Committee on Women Affairs, has walked a careful line in her reactions. Senator Natasha’s public comments have pencilled her as involved in muting her litigious claims against the senate president.
Senator Kingibe, another of only four female senators in the red chamber, caved under public criticism, quickly highlighting her legislative contributions to advocacy for women’s rights. Another interesting facet of the conversation is that Senator Kingibe had only recently been in the crosshairs of the senate president over a motion for the cessation of demolitions in the FCT. Reacting after a walkout, she had declared that it wasn’t fair for the president to demand a standard for which he had made concessions in the past. The question, therefore, is why a female senator who had not only been on the receiving end of professional indiscretion but was also responsible for a strategic office in a gender-imbalanced senate would practically choose to temper her reactions.
The minimum response in an allegation of sexual harassment, as with other offences, is a fair, unbiased investigation. Senator Kingibe witnessed the blatant disregard Akpabio showed for a fair hearing when he presided over the same session that saw Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan suspended for six months. He failed to exercise his legal training when he oversaw a suspension that excluded a senator from the chamber for more than the court-stipulated two weeks. When the matter came to the Imasuen-led committee on ethics and public petitions, sub judice was only considered when the opportunity arose to apply double standards. Otherwise, it was discarded. I must submit now that my country must be addicted to making the news for all the wrong reasons.
Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan’s suspension has seen us grace the stages of foreign media and international organisations, with the absurdity of Akpabio’s conduct being on full display. The ongoing recall process in Kogi bears different connotations, none of which sound positive. First, if the affair was indeed a people-led push, without undue interference, it is strong evidence of Nigerian society’s deep revulsion for anything that upends the patriarchal status quo. In their submission to INEC, constituents calling for the senator’s recall cited her “gross misconduct, abuse of office, evasion of due process, and a pattern of deceitful behaviour.” They went further to point at her “embarrassment” of the people of Kogi Central and her tarnishment of “the integrity of the Nigerian senate” and the “nation’s democratic institutions.”
These contrivances are the most misinformed reasons to recall a senator. It would be indisputably valid if the thrust emanated from allegations of corruption, unfulfillment of duty, and any other such behaviour that signifies underperforming leadership. There are, without any doubt, senators who abandoned their mandate to the electorate the moment they were elected. Also abundant are others who have arrogated public dividends to themselves throughout their tenure. Where were the calls for a recall? The fact that this constitutes a reason for withdrawing an electoral mandate indicates a paucity of political consciousness amongst the Nigerian masses.
Where things are sane, the minimum expectation is demand for fairness and due process, if nothing at all. I venture on a safe gamble when I say that a random selection of any number of the petitioners for Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan’s recall will reveal a threadbare comprehension of the nuances behind her suspension. Even if that were not the case, finding evidence of foul play in the procedure would be unsurprising. It would be simplistic to see this as anything less than the senator against the mores of Nigerian politics. At every angle, we spot themes, each a replay of the tropes that have always played out. The recall is the big stick of Nigeria’s political topshots against someone who dared to step out of line, as is the convenient curfew imposed in Kogi before her visit.
Grimly, the messaging is painfully crystal to aspiring female politicians — ‘fall in line or pay’. Against this backdrop is a slew of dismal statistics showcasing women’s dearth of political opportunity. It follows that dim representation of demography in spheres of power severely reduces the quality of interventions it gets in its affairs. Unfortunately, this is just not another demography; it is half of the Nigerian population. The ratio of men to the four women in the Nigerian Senate stands at twenty-six to one. For each attempt to introduce new women-focused legislation, a female lawmaker will theoretically be confronted by the opinions and beliefs of 104 males, with only three women who could identify with it. In the House of Representatives, which has 360 members, there are only 16 females.
This statistical trend, placing women in the Senate at less than 4 per cent of the overall number and the lower chamber at 4.4 per cent, represents data not seen since the pre-democracy years, particularly in the upper house. At the state level, 15 out of 36 Houses of Assembly had no women, according to the Policy and Legal and Advocacy Centre in 2023. Cumulatively, Nigeria’s state houses of assembly, totalling 993 members, have just 50 women or 5 per cent of the aggregate. The highest figure for women’s presence in elective offices was 6.4 per cent in 2011. Comparatively, other African countries, with whom we at least share cultural convergences, have an average of 23 per cent and West Africa 15 per cent. This is because the Nigerian leadership has pledged in various spheres to increase women’s representation in key offices.
Alarmingly, we do not often find the few women appointed to have recorded groundbreaking impacts through their portfolios. There is a certain reticence in the approaches taken to leverage the duties with which they have been tasked for the betterment of the teeming female populace. This argument is, however, a risky one because it supposedly blames women for doing nothing about their plights. I do not entirely agree. My contention is more about the quality of persons appointed or elected than it is a gendered one.
For instance, before the reshuffle of the Tinubu Cabinet, the then-Minister of Women Affairs, Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, had advised women to act like fools and keep their mouths shut during arguments with their spouses to avoid domestic violence. She had also backed down on the issue involving the mass marriage of underaged female victims of banditry in Niger State. In the first event, the former minister had entirely reduced the crisis of gender-based violence to talking back during arguments. Her comments suggested a concession to the aggressive male norm, best tamed with silence.
They were not simply disagreeable for the sake of it; they were empty of the sophistication required of the official in charge of managing challenges confronting women. The latter case of acquiescence on the marriage of underage brides may as well have been a publicity stunt in the first place, lacking proper zest for execution. To put the problem into the deserved context, the overwhelming bulk of the country’s 22 million child brides are concentrated in Northern Nigeria. Forty-eight per cent of girls enter matrimony by age 15, and 78 per cent by 18. The consequences are widely documented in literature, but reforms have been a trifle. It was a real opportunity to make a statement that would dovetail with the submissions of women’s rights movements for a long while. What this spells is that the characters appointed or even elected to office are rarely ever feminism-inspired figures; they are simply politically convenient.
The clock is ticking on women’s inclusion in politics. Even before independence, Nigerian women had played active roles in the resistance to colonial interference in their day-to-day lives and sacrificed their lives for it. The Aba Women War and the activities of the Abeokuta Women’s Union under the headship of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti tell us all we need to know about the strategic impacts that women can have. In the present day, these have not receded in the least. Far from their well-known roles in contributing to agriculture, even in the thick of childcare, women constitute a politically critical demographic mass. Excluding them is practically a capital blow to political ambitions. Sadly, the rewards over time have been undereducation, political exclusion, and economic marginalisation. Only so much non-governmental organisations can do to liberate the massive population of those experiencing inequality. The government must shift from dragging its feet over gender-critical legislation to centring these as national priorities. It must equally detach from making mockeries of women by donating paltry goods termed ’empowerment’. It must do more. And more should begin in non-sexist legislative chambers.
- Falola is a distinguished Professor at the University of Texas at Austin
