Natasha’s Ides of May and The Vindication of Akpabio

BY YUSUF ALLI 

The internet was abuzz the night of 2025 May Day, as a United States based activist, Dr Sandra Duru, with the moniker Prof Mgbeke made an expose` on the enfant terrible of the Senate and the suspended Senator representing Kogi Central Senatorial District, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan as a chronic liar, manipulator, and embarking on a malicious campaign of deceit to malign the reputation of the person and President of the Senate, Senator Godswill Akpabio. 

According to Prof Mgbeke, the Kogi Central Senator who was linked to her through a top opposition politician, had sought her support to join in the campaign of calumny against Akpabio and she had actually started pilloring the man. Evidence abound on her social media pages. This was until she asked the Senator for evidence of the sexual harassment allegations. “Natasha told me there was nothing like sexual harassment. I was shocked. Honestly I broke down because I had already started fighting the Senate President, in my effort to support Natasha,” she said. According to her, the sexual harassment allegation was her strategy to garner public sympathy and support in the fight to discredit the Senate President.

For Prof Mgbeke, the confession by Natasha that there was no sexual harassment marked the turning point for her. “Natasha is on a mission to destroy men. I cannot watch her destroy our men, I cannot watch her destroy our sons, I cannot watch her destroy our girls who are following her blindly.”

In her continued desperation to nail Akpabio, Prof Mgbeke further said that after realising that her sexual harassment allegation wasn’t getting much traction and public sympathy, Natasha offered her N200 million to accuse the Senate President of organ harvesting, linking him with the death of a young girl who passed away a few years ago. How desperate can a woman be to manufacture such inanity.

She summed it up this way: “What is happening is not activism. It is an orchestrated strategy and an abuse of gender advocacy, a staged performance designed to provoke public sympathy and manufacture false narratives and target political opponents,” Mgbeke stated.

However before Prof Mgbeke’s explosive exposé, many discerning minds had asked Senator Natasha for evidence of the sexual harassment allegation. To take her seriously, many demanded concerete evidence in the form of private chats, love text messages, pictures, videos and voice recordings, call logs, etc especially with her reputation of having made similar claims about other men in the past which turned out to be false accusations. Till date she has not provided any scintilla of evidence despite making local and international media rounds her favourite pastime. All she was interested in was to drag the reputation of the Senate President in the mud .

Prof Mgbeke only confirmed what many Nigerians had suspected and some questions asked. How can a man sexually harass you in front of your husband and in the presence of many other Senators? How can a victim of sexual harassment indulge in effusive praise and adoration of the abuser in the social media the day after the alleged incident? How can the victim go ahead to travel to different countries with the abuser and taking selfies in foreign countries with the same man whom she alleged sexually harassed her? In any case, why remain silent over such grievious act (by her admission not even informing her husband) for over one year until you were removed as the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Local Content and your seat in the Senate chamber was changed?

However the evidence of Prof Mgbeke were stunning and incontrovertible: from call logs, private chats, voice recordings of the Kogi Senator, it became obvious that Senator Natasha was on a pull-him-down mission through fabricated allegations for political gains. More stunning were Natasha’s claim, according to Prof Mgbeke of having recruited and paid Dr Oby Ezekwesili and Dr Abiola Akiyode of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) to disrupt the Senate Committee sitting and how she bragged about having media organizations on her pay roll to do her biddings. She described her followers who swallowed her lies hook, line and sinker as “gullible and hungry” while those she recruited to wage this war were described as “useful idiots.”

In view of the weighty allegations of the Kogi Senator’s scheme, the security agencies especially the Department of State Services (DSS) and the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) have to get to the roots of the allegation about Natasha’s plot to bring down a “Yoruba Government.” According to Prof Mgbeke “She said the reason for the fight was not really about the Senate President but it is about the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, that they don’t want the Yoruba government to go beyond four years. She said there was no sexual harassment evidence of any kind.” To destabilize the Tinubu administration, her sponsors would reward her with the governorship of Kogi State or the Minister of Petroleum. “She said all she wanted was for the Senate President to step down, that the Senate President is the one shielding Nigeria’s President.”

This is hardly surprising though because no sooner had Natasha made her unfounded allegations than opposition politicians started making political capital out of it. Obviously Natasha was not working alone. The Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the last election, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar jumped into the fray and talked about corruption (laugh out loud) former Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki pontificated about the integrity of the Senate while Ezekwesili called on Akpabio to step aside. So obviously, Natasha was playing a political script, she was dancing naked to the drum beats of the opposition with President Bola Tinubu as their main target using the fabricated allegations against Akpabio.

The puerile attempt by Natasha to deny Prof Mgbeke’s allegations with hard evidence as “entirely untrue and most manipulated to serve Sandra Duru’s ulterior motive” is most unconvincing. It is true to her character. If with the avalanche of proofs and evidence which Prof Mgbeke said she has submitted to security agencies for forensic analysis, Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan still denies knowing the US based activist then she is irredeemable. Concerned citizens are demanding for speedy investigation by security agencies and their findings made public while those found to be involved in the plot to destabilize the administration of President Tinubu be brought to justice on account of their conspiracy.

The story rings true with fact that there was never a thing like sexual harassment. It only existed in the imagination of the Kogi Senator and her gullible followers.

Mallam Yusuf Alli writes from Ekpoma, Edo State.