HOW SENATOR ABBO HAD PLANNED TO DEFEND HIMSELF,BEFORE ATIKU PREVAIL ON HIM TO APOLOGIZE

If you just read the apology of Senator Abbo for his video-recorded assault on a woman, you need to know that apologizing was not on the Senator’s plan initially.  He had wanted to do what a typical abuser does  –  deny, deny, deny, and then attack the victim again. But the leader of PDP,  his political party, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, had a better understanding of the corrosive effect of such damaging video on a minority party that is actively seeking for justice.

The political ramifications of the conduct of Senator Abbo might not have been initially obvious. But on a second look, it is indeed a dynamite at this point in time against the PDP party.  Political parties are made of politicians, human beings, whose individual controversies may be attributed to their parties.  The APC, the ruling party, has been under attack for all kind of shenanigans, from alleged election rigging to colluding with the electoral body to deny the existence of servers used in collating election results and the highly controversial land grab for cattle rearers.

With the APC constantly depicted as wild and lawless and the PDP being seen as the harmless victim,  a viral video of a PDP Senator viciously assaulting a defenseless woman could be a dramatic game changer.  Also, known PDP Senators like Senator Melaye, Senator Ekweremadu and Senator Saraki were recently known to have complained of being persecuted by the police.

All that will be seen as the table turning if a PDP Senator is now the one that the police are hesitating to arrest in face of a mountain of evidence of a crime.  The people were left wondering how PDP politicians would react now that the table turned. Human beings hate hypocrisy and the video tended to reveal a hypocrisy that might badly damage the PDP.

Obviously, Senator Abbo did not realize this.  He seems too naive, too self-absorbed and too daft to grasp the ramifications of his conduct.  This lack of depth is seen in Senator Abbo’s initial line of defence as seen in the statement he gave to the press before he was forced to apologize.

Senator Abbo first lied and claimed to have also been physically assaulted in the incident but that a part of the video was edited out. He said on Channels Television on Wednesday:

“Where I had to call an ambulance and police to come to the scene and it got out of hand I was also assaulted. We will soon release an official statement to the viral video which happened before I became a senator where my younger sister was beaten to a pulp in a shop and I was called upon there”.

In a gesture of a counterattack, he said he would be demanding the release of the full recording. According to him, “This is a political season and now I am now a politician, before I was not a politician but now the reality of the fact is that I am now a politician and politicians are not people who are liked, they exhume things of 20 years and they hang it on their neck now”. Such a bold-faced blackmail against the people infuriated many.

He then tried to intimidate with the following words: “As I said before we will release a robust response to everything, and we will also ask for the entire video to be released since they have the video. We will seat and discuss the video. Just to be clear that video was taken long before now and it was released just as this point.”

However,  more experienced PDP leaders knew they had to avoid the spread of the damage. First,  Chief Femi Fani-Kayode was the first PDP figure to publicly call for the arrest of Senator Abbo. It was a good move to distance PDP from the Senator’s debacle.  Then came the moves by Atiku. The presidential candidate of the PDP and its de facto national leader, called Senator Abbo and advised him (it was probably an order) to publicly apologize unconditionally. Atiku did more than that.  He also called the party machinery to initiate disciplinary process against the Senator and he urged the police to ensure that the law was enforced.

These were the events that caused the Senator to abandon his grandstanding and to apologize. He was even reported to have wept as a show of remorse. The only place the leaders of the PDP could have done more was in assigning an adult or experienced professional to the Senator to help him draft a more effective apology.

Allowing him to draft his apology without help was not the best.  The poorly written apology he gave may be subject of further attacks, which risks prolonging a matter they would rather see behind them.