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…if we carefully rummage through the lurid, the grotesque, the salacious stories of their Sex-cellencies – even at state levels with the governors – we may find anchors to how power politics in Nigeria and Africa can be explained through sex. That was also the view of Zimbabwean journalist and blogger, Fungai Machirori. According to her, we may need to study the sexual histories of our men in power. This is because, from the rhythm of the silent but jangling bells of their dangling penises, a silent compass to their politics may just as well be hiding.
Did you listen to last week’s broadside from Senate President Godswill Akpabio against former Edo State governor, Senator Adams Oshiomhole? If you did, you must have caught a glimpse of how sex threatens the Nigerian state. Historically, libido has always been a threat to governance. Psychoanalyst Robert Michels summarised this Freudian reality cleanly: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” To him, life is driven by sex, and sex itself is an expression of power and aggression. Often misattributed to Oscar Wilde — likely due to the Irish poet’s own fatal fall from artistic glory via a rascally libido — history teaches that even among the powerful, libido is king. In recent Nigerian power narratives, Akpabio and Oshiomhole feature prominently, perfectly approximating the power of the libido.
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During a recent plenary session at the senate, Akpabio woke up the ghost of the former Edo governor’s alleged boundless libido. Oshiomhole, in a photograph with a visiting female dignitary some years ago, had been shown with a bulging, apparently carelessly-packed, intrusion by his zippers. In the process of waking the ghost, Akpabio revived a well-known Yoruba proverb, which says, “Aja o ran ti imu e ti ‘o gbe...” (Only a listless dog ignores its own soggy nose to bark about the cat’s bathroom manners). I will illustrate this presently with the story of Akpabio and the woman who purportedly slapped him for demanding sex off her.
Last week, however, Akpabio was on a vengeance mission against Oshiomhole. The latter had recently gone on a media junket criticising the Senate President. In doing so, he ignoredJamaican reggae star, Peter Tosh’s counsel: “If you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones; if you can’t take blows, brother, don’t throw blows.” On his media junket, Oshiomhole had picked holes in Akpabio’s attempt to award himself a life presidency in the Senate, accusing him of enacting rules to gag future occupiers of the post. At another forum, Oshiomhole pointedly accused Akpabio of cronyism, alleging that his daughter secured a lucrative position at the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) without proper procedures.
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To secure a pound of flesh for Oshiomhole’s limitless irritancy and ostensible mouth diarrhoea, Akpabio’s time for payback came last week. On the Senate floor, Oshiomhole had stood up to oppose the confirmation of former Federal University of Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE) Vice-Chancellor, Abayomi Fasina, as a non-career ambassador. Fasina had recently waddled inside an ocean of controversy bordering on an alleged reckless and meandering phallus.
“It’s of public knowledge that this gentleman… has been accused by two women,” the 74-year-old former governor pontificated. “As a matter of sensitivity, for the Senate to endorse a man who faces cases like that… we need to bring necessity to the feelings of women. It will be more prudent that we wait and ask the guy to clear himself before the courts.”
Then, Akpabio threw his jabbing broadside, which seemed to imply that Oshiomhole himself had not properly acquitted himself in the eye of the public: “I would have asked a question when there was a picture showing one of our senators on a plane massaging the leg of a girl. Senator Oshiomhole… we just ignored the massage because we thought it was AI. But if you have another evidence, we have a petition before us…”
The broadside was an intended jab. In February, a video of Oshiomhole massaging the feet of a lady aboard a private jet, later identified as South African lifestyle influencer and adult content creator, Ms. Leshaan Dagama, had gone viral. For context, a lifestyle influencer and adult content creator is what Gen Z call Olosho and which, in the early 1930s, appeared in early Nigerian newspapers as ashewo. These women of easy virtue also variously appeared in early colonial Nigeria as karuwa, asape, akunakuna and Marina girls.
The jab hit its mark. In his tango with Dagama, while Oshiomhole’s media aide, Oseni Momodu, claimed the video was AI-generated, Dagama herself put a lie to the denial. In a tongue-in-cheek Instagram post, she said: “The video wasn’t AI, but okay, believe your Senator.” A flurry of public commentary followed Oshiomhole’s romance with a call girl, with many wondering how, with their self-portrayals as supposedly busy in the service of Nigeria, top public servants found so much time and public patrimony for carnal matters. Some of them cheekily claimed that, as the Yoruba say that a child’s name always haunts them, the senator was merely scavenging and responding to the “hole” in his name. Interestingly, Dagama’s entanglements weren’t strictly Nigerian; in 2022, she was involved in a pregnancy scandal with Zimbabwean socialite preacher, Passion Java, an associate of President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
This intersection of libido and governance is deeply rooted in history. In When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958, Professor Saheed Aderinto documented moral degeneration among the ruling elite, showing how men of power have long been implicated in what he called the “commoditization of sex.”
A recent story of a Nigerian state governor’s lady friend whose baffling acquisitions, running into billions of Naira, were confiscated by the EFCC reminded me of how, in the words of Aderinto, prostitutes also contributed to the domestic economy. Aderinto told the story of a Ruth, a native of Warri, who returned home after a five-year stint of prostitution in Lagos, deployed proceeds of the flesh to fund her two brothers’ marriage expenses. This forced the District Officer of Obubra Division to write to the Resident of Ogoja Division on 7 February, 1941 for a new tax regime for returnee prostitutes. To buttress how sex was also an elite challenge, Aderinto told the story of the sex scandal in February 1908 by Hubert Silberrad, an assistant district commissioner at Nyeri in central Kenya, involving a 12-year old native girl called Nyakayena.
During the colonial era, elite sexual scandals were prominent. One of the few bold attempts to dwell on illicit sex in colonial Nigeria came from HE Coker, editor of The West African Pilot of Nnamdi Azikiwe. In a pamphlet he authored in 1948 entitled Surplus Women, Coker lamented the social calamity to come. Mazi Mbonu Ojike, one of Zik’s allies and another columnist in the newspaper, in his weekly column called “Weekend Cathecism” also supported Coker’s clairvoyance. Earlier, in Aderinto’s research, he found Miss Silva, one of the 1940s’ most influential female columnists and pseudonymous editor of The West African Pilot’s Women column, Milady’s Bower. The column also condemned the scourge of prostitution in Lagos.
The EFCC seizure also reminds me of an autobiography of a Lagos female prostitute in the colonial period . It is a most detailed sexual narrative. Segilola made so much money from men in power in Lagos and wrote in Yoruba, her memoir entitled, Ìtàn Ìgbésí Aiyé Èmi Segilola El’ẹyinju Ẹgẹ, Elegberun Ọkọ L’aiyé (The Life History of Me Segilola Endowed With Fascinating Eyes, the Sweetheart of a Thousand And One Men). Advertised in the 5 July, 1930 edition of the bi-lingual newspaper, Akéde Èkó (The Lagos Herald), the book, which British anthropologist, Karin Barber, called the first Yoruba novel, sold out during the period of its 30-chapter serialisation in the newspaper. It became such a literary hot cake to gobble that it caused peer jealousy and rivalry between The Lagos Herald and the dominant newspaper of the time, The Nigerian Daily Times.
Born in September 1882, Segilola was a lady of noble parentage, sole survivor of her parents’ six children, who chose to commercialise her body for men’s sensual feasts. From the time she lost her virginity to a herbalist, whom she ran to for procurement of sex charm, Segilola courted men across generations. One of her lovers promised her pocket money of £10 and another, between 1910s and 1920s, spent £30 on her in three months.
In a journal article titled “The Carnality of Power,” University of Pennsylvania professor, Wale Adebanwi, explored how men of power use sex as a locus of authority. He argued that society needs to pay closer attention to how obscenity explains the nature of power. In many African political landscapes, there is an expectation that a man of power must exhibit sexual virility. The article also asks all of us, scholars, lay scholars and society as a whole, to pay attention “to the ways in which obscenity can help explain the nature of power.” Perhaps, Oshiomhole and Akpabio are flexing these powers?
Conversely, a perceived lack of virility by a political leader is treated as a political vulnerability. On 6 February, 2022, in a piece with the title, “Atiku Abubakar and the sexual history of the Nigerian presidency,” I articulated how Nigerian, African and global big wigs also suffer affliction of the libido like ordinary Nigerians on the street. Permit me to regurgitate my arguments in the piece. In it, I cited how, in early 2014, the Zimbabwean public sphere literally caught fire when rumours circulated that former Prime Minister and the presidential candidate of the Movement for Democratic Change, (MDC) Morgan Tsvangirai, had suffered “a nasty blow from below,” an euphemism for zero virility. At about the same time, the virility-restoring prowess of Emmanuel Makandiwa, a ‘miracle-working’ Pentecostal prophet, froze the stratosphere like snowflakes in winter. Estranged wife of Tsvangirai, Elizabeth Macheka, had lit the fire. In an interview she granted The Herald, which was entitled, “Why I ditched Tsvangirai: Wife,” Macheka had been quoted to have said that she had separated from Tsvangirai due to ‘sensitive personal issues’ and that this was known to her and Tsvangirai alone and which only the two of them could resolve.
For a Zimbabwean public that salivated on riveting gossips and rumours in high and low places, Macheka’s statement was the confirmation it needed for a high-quality rumour it hitherto circulated. In whooshing whispers and mouth-to-ear transmission, the news of the PM having been afflicted by an “under-neath,” below-the-trousers problem of ‘erectile dysfunctional disorder’ hit the wave. The Herald did not also help matters. It immediately and unabashedly tagged what Macheka dubbed ‘sensitive personal issues’ as ‘a medical one.’ Thereafter, Fungai Machirori, Zimbabwean journalist and blogger, did a salacious piece on the issue which she entitled, Of Penises, Politics and Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe, an essay which she called an “exposé of trouble in the un-paradise that is Tsvangirai’s love life’’.
As the story went, in the bid to seek spiritual remedy for the restoration of his numb member, Tsvangirai had to make a sudden visit to Nigeria to meet the infamous miracle-hawking pastor, TB Joshua, now late. The Zimbabwean yellow press world immediately interpreted this visit to Lagos as a spirited spiritual search for cure to what Adebanwi tagged his “double jeopardy” – an under-the-trousers virility trouble and a dwindling political fortune. Joshua had been catapulted to the zenith of migration of Zimbabweans and Southern Africans to his shrine for spiritual patronage. This was due to a 2012 prophecy he made that an African leader who he said was ‘old and unwell,’ would die. At the exit of Malawian president, Bingu wa Mutharika,, the popular belief was that Joshua was ‘spiritually powerful.’ However, Macheka, unable to endure the penile starvation from Tsvangirai, had packed her things and fled her marital home.
In 2016, the then US Ambassador to Nigeria, James Entwistle, had accused members of the Nigerian House of Representatives of improper conduct while on an official trip to the US. According to Entwistle in a letter dated 9 June, 2016 addressed to then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, the members attempted rape and solicitation of prostitutes while in America.
In Nigeria, political power and marital dislocations often intertwine. The place of sex in the Nigerian presidency became an issue of discourse in 2019. During the 2023 election cycle, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar faced his own domestic storm when his wife, Jennifer Iwenjiora Douglas — who years prior was linked to a US Senate probe investigating slush funds — announced their marriage had broken down irretrievably over property disputes and her relocation to the UK. Jennifer had loomed large as subject of a probe some 12 years ago by the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, chaired by Senator Carl Levin, alleging that she, in cahoots with her husband, had funnelled slush funds allegedly stolen from the Nigerian government, into America.
On the flip side are African leaders who cultivated the image of libidinous behemoths to project dominance. Nigeria’s goggled dictator, General Sani Abacha, famously died in the Presidential Villa amid street lore claiming he suffered a heart attack after consuming Viagra and poisoned apples from imported prostitutes. Other leaders in this virility league included Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema (who allegedly slept with the wives of his ministers). Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma were also in the league.
In Africa, when a man of power “uses his manhood well,” he is seen as not being effeminate as Tsvangirai. If he is then “blessed” with an imposing virility, whether he uses it licitly or illicitly, this easily gains traction, making his rule to be seen as dominant and domineering. Another example in this regard is Robert Mugabe, who never hid the illicitness of his virility and who had been dating Grace, who he later married, even before his late wife’s death.
The man of power who possesses the Eyadema, Zuma and Mobutu image of a libidinous behemoth in Nigeria’s power calculus is Olusegun Obasanjo. During the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) saga when he and Abubakar aimed at each other’s jugular, Atiku had alleged that Obasanjo bought a 607 Peugeot car for a woman friend who resided in Abeokuta with slush funds accruing from the PTDF scandal. Like Mugabe, Obasanjo was then married to Stella, who was Nigeria’s First Lady. In 2018, Obasanjo’s son, Gbenga, even alleged in a court affidavit that his father was having an affair with his wife, Moji. In The Carnality of Power, Adebanwi talks about “one prominent and ‘internationally respected’ West African president (who was) famous for breaking meetings – even abroad – to have a ‘quickie’ with his countless paramours.”
Even Military President Ibrahim Babangida’s libido leaked into public record. In his book Honour for Sale, former military aide, Major Debo Bashorun recalled an official trip to France where First Lady Maryam Babangida physically pummelled the General behind locked doors after catching the scent of another woman’s perfume on his suite. Aides eventually prised the door open to find the self-proclaimed military strongman panting, bruised, and wearing a torn uniform.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari similarly invoked this African link between masculinity and power. When asked about his wife’s role in government during a visit to Germany, he famously quipped that she belonged to “zi oza room“ — a euphemism deployed to project an active libido despite his prevailing health challenges.
Bill Clinton appears to be an archetype of the philandering powerful man in office. Referred to as “a hard dog to keep on the porch” by his wife, Hillary, his dalliances in the White House as president of America nearly got him to kiss the American presidency bye. Remember Paula Jones and White House intern, Monica Lewinsky?
A historical excursion into the psychology of power and powerful people reveals what excites them. It also tells us why they veer into the accursed path of weaponising sex as a major constituent of power. More importantly, we also learn why they sometimes are very careless, unconscionable and reckless when a gush of blood momentarily rushes into their groins.
Sex is however a diversionary weapon of power. With Akpabio hoping he had taken victory off Oshiomhole, he seemed to have forgotten his own scandal with former Managing Director of the NDDC, Ms Joi Nunieh and the drama that ensued. Nunieh served the public a blockbuster menu of systemic heist mixed with allegations of sexual harassment, famously claiming she dealt Akpabio a dirty slap in his Apo guest house to prove that “Rivers women do not tolerate nonsense.”
Ultimately, as Adebanwi and all have counselled, if we carefully rummage through the lurid, the grotesque, the salacious stories of their Sex-cellencies – even at state levels with the governors – we may find anchors to how power politics in Nigeria and Africa can be explained through sex. That was also the view of Zimbabwean journalist and blogger, Fungai Machirori. According to her, we may need to study the sexual histories of our men in power. This is because, from the rhythm of the silent but jangling bells of their dangling penises, a silent compass to their politics may just as well be hiding.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
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