ONWUASOANYA FCC JONES
One of my best books is “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu. Maybe, after the Holy Bible and a few other books, this book is another one I go to from time to time to seek ideas that guide my daily living. I recommend it especially to leaders and politicians, because, all wars are not fought with guns, bombs and missiles. Most of the wars are fought at boardrooms, legislative chambers, business rooms, media and everywhere else, where you need negotiation skills and quick wits on dispute resolution. The most important thing you can learn about war is in the Bible; “As long as it is within your powers, be at peace with everyone” and another like it is said by Sub Tzu; “The best victory is when an opponent surrenders without actual hostilities… You can win a war without fighting”.
One of the mistakes we make is to think that we must assert ourselves, to believe that we must show how powerful and how strong we are. Until we learn how to play our rivals into abandoning the fight before it starts, we are not real warriors. When you get into a fight with a weaker opponent, you could win, but you must suffer bruises. So, what you can do is to make sure that you don’t give that weaker opponent the pleasure of having a fight with you.
In politics, one of the silliest things you can do is to get into a media fight with an opposition figure, especially, the one who knows how best to deploy the media to great advantage. You can’t win that war. You will walk away with your tail between your legs. Beaten to stupor, embarrassed and humiliated. The narrative will always favour the weak and the seemingly oppressed.
Whenever I am managing someone’s image, one of the things I try to advise is to avoid a brush with those I call “Professional troublemakers”. We call them “ndi ori na crisis”. These people do not have much to lose, but they would so pour mud on your white dresses that you would wonder why you got into a fight with them in the first place. Is it not an ancient parable that when you fight with the pig, you would swim in the mud and slime with the pig, and get dirty, while the pig gets happy.
Natasha set a trap for our distinguished Senate President and he fell yakata into it. He wanted to prove that the Senate has rules and that as the presiding officer, he has the powers of law to enforce these rules. Natasha knows these rules, but chose either to protest them or to outrightly disobey them. She knew that the microphones were on and cameras were beaming. It was an opportunity she couldn’t miss. If she has to deliberately design a media operation that would give her the visibility she is enjoying presently from this fallout, a budget of 100 billion Naira would fall short. But she is getting it all free now, to the detriment of the Senate’s image and the pains of Akpabio.
Akpabio will press charges in court, and most likely, he will get the Privileges Committee to recommend her suspension from the Senate, indefinitely. But, that’s what Natasha wants. What would she get from going to sit in the Senate chambers that she wouldn’t get from taking up advocacy roles, to campaign against “intimidation of women in power”? Akpabio would be finding her a new job, and she desperately needs that job.
Senator Akpabio would have avoided all these dramas if he had a better temperament. Yes, the Senate President was within his rights and powers to reallocate seats in the chambers following the defection of some Senators to the APC. But, we say in Igbo that when you wake up in the morning and see a fowl pursuing you, you must run because you wouldn’t know if it grew some teeth the previous night. And, that a big man runs from the cow stylishly.
I wouldn’t know if Natasha was doing very well as a legislator within the time she has been there. If she wasn’t, this ongoing drama will effectively remove attention from her performance and focus on the popular assumption that she is being intimidated by the male-dominated Senate, either because she is a woman or because she is of the opposition or both.
Her appearance on Arise TV this morning would have sent shivers down the spines of Senator Akpabio and his colleagues. If Akpabio had fantasies about what colour the flesh between her laps is, then, he will have serious cause to be troubled, because Natasha will spice up things and make it look like it was her refusal to allow him a peep or a lick that triggered Akpabio. Many women will believe her, those who don’t believe her will hail her, because she is representing. Women use the powers of their weakness well. Once a woman accuses a man of abuse, the table is naturally pointed against the man.
Do many women lie about being abused in order to gain sympathy and advantages? Many times. Would men all keep quiet and allow women to blackmail us out of our rights because we are afraid of being wrongly accused of abuse? I do not advise that. But, there are better ways of handling situations like this one, because the mob can be very erratic.
Many times in more advanced countries, powerful men have been made to lose their jobs because a woman came up to claim that the man tried to have them on their beds. Bill Clinton as President of the United States escaped impeachment by the whiskers because of Lewinsky. Today, Lewinsky is a big public figure enjoying big pay, just because she could come up to share what happened behind drawn curtains.
Akpabio shouldn’t have allowed this fight to happen, and this is one fight he can’t win. But it has become a dicey situation. If he pulls back from the fight now, he risks being seen as a coward, and nothing hurts a man than having his ego bruised. If he moves on, probably gets Natasha thrown out of the Senate, the fight will rage on in the courts and the media, and even if Natasha doesn’t win in court, she will get some sympathy from the public, unless, some very smart media operatives get involved on behalf of Akpabio.
Whatever Akpabio decides to do, the most important thing is to ensure that “the dog doesn’t die in the fight”. If he has to make peace, let him do so, and this whole thing can end for good, but if he feels, it is best to fight on and get Natasha to eat the humble pie, then, that would be victory for the brotherhood. If he eats the humble pie himself by allowing Natasha to walk right back to the Senate without tendering apologies, well, we will take it in our strides and consider it one of those prices we have to pay for the beauty of womanhood.
Let good judgement prevail.
