Sen. Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan sparked controversy at the Abuja airport on Tuesday morning by alleging that her international passport had been unlawfully seized.
The Kogi Central Senator claimed the seizure was carried out by immigration officers acting on the alleged orders of Senate President Godswill Akpabio.
Persecondnews reports that Akpoti-Uduaghan shared a video on her official Facebook page detailing the incident, where the officers reportedly told her they had specific “instructions from above” to prevent her from traveling by withholding her document.
“Hello fellow Nigerians, good morning. Having completed my second year in office, I wanted to take a week off. I am at the airport, and my passport has been withheld again,” she said in the clip.
According to Natasha, this is not the first time she has faced such an incident.
She alleged that on a previous occasion, security officers told her that the directive came from the Senate President himself.
“The last time this happened, the officer in charge told us that the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, said each time I travel out of the country, I smear the image of Nigeria by granting interviews to international media,” she claimed.
The senator insisted that she has committed no offence and that there is no court order authorizing the seizure of her travel documents.
“You have no right to withhold my passport. You have no right to deny me exit and entrance into my country. This must stop! I think I have to sue you for embarrassing me,” she said in the video.
“I have been standing here for the past 20 minutes. The last time, I had to call someone influential to make you release my passport. Is Godswill Akpabio so important that he can overrule national boundaries?”
“Godswill Akpabio, the Senate President has instructed the Comptroller-General of Customs to deny me exit, to withhold my passport,” she angrily said!
Natasha further alleged that President Bola Tinubu had previously instructed that all politically motivated cases against her be terminated, but claimed Akpabio had ignored the President’s directive.
“There was no order, yes, I know I have two federal government cases against me, but the President ordered that they be terminated because he admitted they were politically witch-hunting cases,” she said.
The standoff ended when the passport was finally handed back to Senator Natasha, which she immediately displayed to the camera as evidence of its release.
Despite the high-profile nature of the allegation, there has been no official response yet.
As this report is being filed, neither Senate President Godswill Akpabio nor the Nigeria Customs Service has commented on the incident.
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