31/07/2025
Today's Episode on the Boulevards with Gbolahan Badru
Of The 10th Nigerian Senate Leadership: Where Bills Are Passed at The Expense of a Man’s Er****on
By: Gbolahan Badru
If Uncle Akpi is declared untimely and unexpectedly dead tomorrow, carrying out an autopsy will be a total waste of time and resources. Uncle Akpi is strong and very enigmatic. The only thing capable of taming his widest beast and abruptly terminating his life is the narrow path that leads to Aunty Nata's angelic hole. Oops! My bad! But no pardons!. Uncle Akpi will eventually die tomorrow, and will die gently like a dove, whispering the name of Aunty Nata— the one whom life denied him of the opportunity of spending his conceived ‘quality time’ with. To lust after power, they say, is forgivable, but to power after lust is unforgivable. This is a proverb yet to be passed into law.
Though, you need to take a pause before nailing Uncle Akpi. Aunty Nata, in all sincerity, is not your regular Kogi damsel. She is a full-course meal served on fine marble. She is not just pretty porcelain. Of her is a brain brewed in the vineyards of strategy, a charisma so arresting it could disarm a coup. She is beauty sculpted by intellect, eloquence powdered with fire. Not your everyday “slay queen” with Instagram captions and little else. She is the manifesto many dreams are made of. You know... ehm... the sort of woman visionary men don’t merely admire, they reorganize their policies around.
Aunty Nata is not just a woman. She is a civic spectacle. A Rolls Royce in a sea of rickety rickshaws. She brags of a kind of presence that redefines space, time, and expectation. I mean equal parts steel and silk, unbothered by protocol, and unbent by intimidation. She doesn’t just walk into a room. She reorders it. She commands attention not with scandalous indulgence, but with the kind of charisma that makes even silence feel like a TED talk. Aunty is not just another name on the roll call. She represents a rare intersection of elegance, intellect, and political audacity. Her presence in that Chamber commands attention. That won’t be because she courts controversy, but because she refuses to conform to the legislative culture of silence and sycophancy. She is, in every sense, a force: brilliant, assertive, and unapologetically independent.
So, forgive Uncle Akpi — or don’t — for becoming yet another gravitational casualty in her orbit. Because when an unphantomable allegory like Aunty Nata stuns a gathering of men, many men will become pedestrians of common sense. For a man who has wrestled political lions and lived to tell the tale, it is embarrassing that it took only one woman — bold, brilliant, and constitutionally alert- to reduce him to legislative panic mode. So, let’s not kid ourselves. If truth be told, Aunty Nata is the type of woman every visionary man would not only want to spend time with, he would also want to co-sponsor destiny with her. But sadly for uncle Akpi, he checked in without his sight.
What began as political friction. A couple of disagreements over constituency projects and legislative accountability has now snowballed into what can only be described as a poorly scripted episode of “How to Undress Democracy Without Getting Caught.” Faced with a female colleague who refused to stoop, Uncle Akpi chose to swing the gavel. One would agree with me that such should have been done for the sake of justice and the rule of law and not in jealousy and the dictates of lust.
Uncle Akpi, a leader with a title too large for his temperament, seems to have misread the times. He seems to have mistook the Chambers for his private estate, where strong women are either silenced or serenaded. And when serenade failed, suspension became their love letters. But, it seems so cute to admit that history is allergic to cowardice and this Uncle Akpi-orchestrated impasse will not age well. Is it until we replace “representative democracy” with “suspended democracy” before we know that our democratic values are running into coma? This and many other ugly anti-democratic incidents like this are becoming footnotes which no law student will want to cite.
Aunty Nata may have been too fine for uncle Akpi's fragile masculinity, too eloquent for his rehearsed retorts, too principled for his transactional politics. But it needs to be stated clearly that the Chamber is not a harem and the constitution is not a love triangle. Suspending a senator is not governance. It is not cute. It is legislative tantrum and runs contrary to the core essence of democracy. Maybe it’s time to revisit the so-called Section 14 of the Legislative Houses (Powers and Privileges) Act — a statutory club wielded to silence dissenters in designer suits. What Uncle Akpi has done is what small men who have occupied large offices do. No amount of lipsticks smirked on the lips of a pig can make it beautiful.
The said Section streams unconstitutionality that it makes military decrees look polite. I haven’t found the right words to describe an Act that gave the Senate the divine right to exile voices from the people’s altar. An Act that empowered a group of 109 men to mute a constituency because their egos caught fever. Democracy is not a wine bar where entry depends on the mood of the bouncer. This is because representation is not a privilege. It is a constitutional imperative. And yet, Aunty Nata was suspended for speaking, for asking questions, for… not being docile. You can’t silence criticism and call it decorum. I think you can’t weaponize legislative procedure against a fellow senator and still expect the public to believe in due processes.
What’s more embarrassing? The attitude of the court. What has the court done? Kikikikiki. It danced the waltz of cowardice, blew a muted trumpet and offered us judicial jazz with no melody. When the matter reached the hallowed chambers of the judiciary, we expected judicial thunder. But all we got in return were bureaucratic yawns. The court pontificated, pacified and finally paused— indefinitely. Like referees who watched a player get tackled and chose to water the pitch instead. The Dino Melaye'a case was an opportunity missed by the judiciary to wither this hollowing storm of legislative rascality. It was the judiciary's opportunity to affirm that that Chamber is not above the Supreme Law of the land. To state in clear terms that privileges are not superior to fundamental rights. But, no, the judiciary has blown, in the name of judicial non-interference, a muted trumpet, again. And in this silence, democracy has lost yet again another tooth in the hands of the court.
