Mrs. Akpoti-Uduaghan blocked a fellow senator's office entrance at the National Assembly in protest of her alleged exclusion from the North-Central Development Commission's budget defense session. In protest over a fellow senator's purported refusal to attend a committee meeting of which she is a member, Kogi Central Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan barricaded the door to her office in the National Assembly on Monday.
The meeting in question was the North-Central Development Commission's (NCDC) budget defense session. The Senate Committee on the NCDC, which was presided over by Senator Titus Zam, who represents Benue North-West, had heard testimony from the commission's management.
Kogi, Benue, Plateau, Niger, Kwara, and Nasarawa are the six states in the North-Central geographical zone that are covered by the commission.
The committee chairman and other members expressed pleasure with the commission's budget proposal for the year at the end of the budget defense, which started at around 10 a.m. and ended around 11 a.m.
Shortly after the committee meeting concluded, Mrs. Akpoti-Uduaghan entered the room. She went to Mr. Zam's office to file a complaint, apparently incensed by the development.
Because she was talking loudly within the office building while complaining about the purported exclusion, she was originally refused entrance to the chairman. She was not permitted to visit Mr. Zam's main office, but she was permitted to enter the secretary's office.
When Mrs. Akpoti-Uduaghan gave one of her assistants instructions to take a video of the incident, the atmosphere became more heated. She was prevented from entering the office by one of Mr. Zam's assistants, whose identity could not be confirmed. She protested by setting a chair at the doorway and vowed to stay until the chairman emerged to speak to her.
When one of Mrs. Akpoti-Uduaghan's assistants—whose identity was unknown at the time this report was filed—slapped Mr. Zam's secretary after the secretary advised against the event going viral on social media, the situation worsened. A brief altercation broke out between the two sides' staff members.
Before Adeniyi Adegbonmire, the senator for Ondo Central, arrived to mediate, the stalemate lasted almost ten minutes. In an attempt to defuse the issue, he then brought Mrs. Akpoti-Uduaghan to the legislative aides' office of Mr. Zam.
