By Josiah Adedayo
Senator Elisha Abbo is in the news again with another potpourri of political propaganda that relies heavily on historical myth.
He has been reveling in the media and public space of late with a noxious and insidious campaign that is so adept and has the potential to ignite public outrage.
According to media reports, a group of aggrieved senators anointed him as their face to abuzz the media with protest of their disaffection on committee appointments by Senate President Godswill Akpabio even though it was diversionary.
Meanwhile, the real angst of the group of these aggrieved senators is, in their warped illogic, the unwillingness of the Senate President to checkmate what they have insidiously and wickedly described as the ‘Yorubanisation’ – whatever that means – of the country’s financial system and economy.
Besides the appointment of some Yoruba technocrats to manage the affairs of the country’s key financial institutions, the group is also said to be working on behalf of some interest groups in the economy who believe – due to their longstanding sense of entitlement – that they were shortchanged after reaching agreements with the President Tinubu and Senate President Akpabio on the payment of subsidy to petrol importers.
Another interest group said to have infiltrated the rank of the dissident senators are some Electricity Distribution companies – DISCOs – who were said to have also reached an agreement with the presidency and Akpabio for an upward review of 40 per cent of the tariff. That agreement was, however, discountenanced on the Senate floor by Akpabio.
It is superfluous to state that his agitation along with other senators had not dissipated since their loss to President Asiwaju Tinubu. They have been sent tail-spinning into depression and conjuring all kinds of conspiracy theories and weird interpretations.
It is an irrefutable fact that this group, which Abbo is having a sensuous relationship with, is a skyscraper of elements with primordial and unedifying vested interests, who could care less whether Nigeria grows. The fact remains that Nigeria’s perpetual economic under-development has always been what they feed fat on.
When security footage showing Abbo assaulting a nursing mother at an Abuja adult toys store got leaked a few years back, many were hearing the name, Elisha Abbo, for the first time, as very little was known about this 41-year-old young, but naive senator. Online searches didn’t offer much help either
It was widely reported that on May 11, 2019, he physically assaulted a woman at an adult toys shop in Abuja and that was done in the presence of an armed policeman who, rather than assist the victim, arrested her. The action was widely condemned by many, including Amnesty International and opposition presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, while some described it as “motor park behavior.”
Senator Abbo was reported to have infected his wife with HIV and refused to attend to her until she died of kidney failure. The woman’s death attests to the story in the media surrounding his HIV status and why she never had kids for him.
The story is full-scale. A source confirmed that within those exhausting months, she was bedridden, and not a single day did Abbo visit his wife. He also did not contribute financially to her treatment, he was busy gallivanting and campaigning for his election.
According to the source, what further aggravated her condition was directly linked to domestic violence that led to her cracked bones which induced her loss of blood.
The prevalent opinions about Senator Abbo are not contrasting that someone like Abbo is not fit for the lawmaking role he has been placed in, especially as a husband not in need. In that vein, the popular sentiment was the invocation of the Sexual Offences Bill passed in 2015 by the Senate to criminalize his act of intentionally infecting another person with a life-threatening, sexually transmitted disease such as HIV. Such person, it adds, “shall be guilty of an offense, whether or not he or she is married to that other person, and shall be liable, upon conviction, to imprisonment for a term of not less than twenty years but which may be enhanced to imprisonment for life” to secure our rights and our dignity as a people.
The source further alleged that this is not the first time he is doing it and he has lied on national television that he has never done it before. But he will do it again and again.
With the many scandalous accusations against Abbo and subsequent investigation indicting him, he not only impaired his credibility but also those who screened him and puts him as a senator to go and represent them.
Now that he has pulled the string from the backstage to battle the Senate President in representing his faceless cohort, the embattled senator’s end may well be in sight, because of his self-inflicted travails.
The infamous video of his assault on a nursing mother at an Abuja adult shop is the Pandora’s box that brought him to a bad light. The floodgate is now opened and more damaging revelations are coming into the open, as more grave allegations will surface from different quarters which he may escape if he can reflect and disengage from his politics of vilification and disparagement for pecuniary gains.
