By Obi Nwakanma

As the days grow shorter towards Nigeria’s general elections, two weeks hence on March 28, the stakes grow higher; campaigns fiercer, more laced with calumny and denigration, and the posturings are dense with hyperbole. In the high stakes game to win hearts and minds, politicians throw everything into the grinder, including the devil’s poop, to make a special kind of smoothie for public consumption.

Take the APC’s posturing to take the president’s wife, an unelected public figure, whose job description under the presidency is merely to keep the presidential bedchambers warm as “first lady” and nothing else, before the International Criminal Court. On what grounds, pray? The Congress has apparently not read the international charter of the ICC. That’s a fundamental ground to question their preparedness to govern Africa’s largest democracy and economic powerhouse.

Other self-respecting African nations, conscious and proud of their sovereign status are beginning to question whether Africans should submit to the ICC, which in recent years have been seen as witch-hunting African leaders, infantilizing the African continent, and subverting Africa’s hard-worn sovereignty and autonomy. That the APC has not asked themselves these questions, or clearly articulated a powerful foreign policy agenda continues to make them open to the charge that they bring nothing new to the table. The PDP administration, of course, from 1999 to date has run the weakest foreign office of any government in Nigeria since independence in 1960.

Sixteen years of PDP’s lackadaisical foreign policy has rendered Nigeria internationally weak and vulnerable. You may quibble about Nigeria’s military rule, and I indeed have very little nostalgia for it, but you may not quibble about Nigeria’s robust foreign policy even under the soldiers. Nigeria’s voice was clearly heard and respected globally. Nigeria did not ride on anybody’s coat-tails.

Two critical foreign policy thrusts under the Babangida administration is key to Nigeria’s strategic international interest and security: the organization of the West African Partnership force, ECOMOG, which stabilized West Africa, cleared Liberia and Sierra-Leone of insurgency, and made certain that Nigeria’s neighborhood was intact, secure and virile in the 1990s, and Nigeria’s International Volunteer Technical Corp, modeled after the US peace corps, which sent Nigerian teachers, doctors, and other professionals to other African countries to serve and help in their development efforts. If Nigeria took itself seriously as an African power, the US would not send its military and warships to secure the Gulf of Guinea, or send its Marines into Liberia and Sierra-Leone to build structures for intervention on the Ebola crisis. Nigeria would have mobilized ECOMOG to lead that intervention, and even train, deploy, and direct the Special Forces now operating against Boko Haram in the Sahel.

If Nigeria took itself seriously, France would not be operating a military base for its Legionnaires, right as the crow flies into Nigeria’s borders by Chad in the Sahara. In the last sixteen years of the PDP, Nigeria has been far more a minion state, or as a friend of mine would say, a breeding ground for all kinds of strange international adventures and misadventures. Its foreign policy is not self-directed but cauterized on the table of its dependency. The Jonathan administration has continued Obasanjo’s ventriloquist foreign policy agenda which does grievous harm to Nigeria’s long term strategic interest, its international standing, and even its domestic security.

The question Nigerians now ask is: what happened to the virile force called ECOMOG, so much so that Boko Haram would operate seamlessly on Nigeria’s borders, and it’d take the Nigerian Armed Forces just this long to begin to clear this rag-tag insurgency? What is Nigeria’s strategic foreign policy with regards to its perceived and oft-stated place as an African power? When APC says it will drag Nigeria’s first lady to the International Criminals Court, is it suggesting that no court in Nigeria is big enough to try Mrs. Jonathan, if indeed she has criminal liability; or that there is no jail in Nigeria secure enough to hold her if she is ever found guilty of a domestic crime? If this is so, then Nigeria’s claim to nationhood must be subject to revision, and the APC should not bother to seek elections in what the writer and polemicist, Chinweizu would call a “noyau state.”

If a state falls to seeking external help for its unique domestic economic, political, and security questions, that nation has no reason any longer to exist, or to claim a sovereign will. But still on the subject of Mrs. Patience Jonathan: the first lady apparently has a real gift for rubbing people the wrong way; particularly her husband’s opponents. Among them, Vanguard columnist, Ms. Donu Kogbara. Last week, she wrote of herself as once an enthusiastic supporter of President Jonathan, but not anymore.

She will not vote for the incumbent for reasons of his great many failures, but chief of which is President Jonathan’s inability to bring his “overbearing wife” to heel. Donu, daughter of the late Ignatius Kogbara, Biafra’s Ambassador to London (1967-70), ought by now to know that there are at least two things sensible men, even the most powerful among them, do not do: they do not retire a winning horse from the race, and they do not monkey around that fierce and imponderable divinity called our “wives.” Not if you want peace and long life.

There are certainly a great many things which thoughtful people should consider in not re-electing President Jonathan, but not his wife. Unless Donu Kogbara is contending access to the presidential bedchambers; and I do not see why not. She’d certainly make a fine first lady. But it is worth giving some thought: the first lady is like Ezeulu, against whose body all of Umuaro throw their perennial anxieties, to carry to his god, Ulu. In any case, as endorsements go, voters should know which is pure koolaid. Take Ohaneze, the Igbo socio-cultural organization for example. It is currently engaged in an endorsement war.

Please note that I emphasize that this is a “socio-cultural” organization; it is not a political organization; and it has no political campaign structures. Yet it purports to speak for every Igbo vote. Last week, Joe Nwaorgu its spokesman, emphasized in an interview that the Igbo vote is in the kitty for Jonathan, based apparently on Ohaneze’s endorsement.

I should say, that is a doggone presumption, and I should ask that question thrown once to the Pope: how many battalions does Ohaneze control to enforce a universal Igbo vote? In any case, why should the Igbo vote Jonathan? Ohaneze has not made this clear to many Igbo, and if the Igbo are anything, they are certainly not herds. In fact, they are quite stubborn, argumentative, and not liable to follow any unconvincing dicta.

The Igbo are certainly not going to rely on Fani-Kayode, who has written many abominable things about them to convince them to vote Jonathan. They will look and see that the Igbo still have the highest number of unemployed and under-employed university graduates nationwide; they’ll ask questions of this administration, and if they vote for Jonathan, it will be in spite of Ohaneze’s endorsements.

The Igbo vote generally on three questions: jobs, national security, and guarantee of liberty. Ohaneze’s endorsement will be of no consequence, if in their various composite Town Union meetings, the Igbo decide that they benefit nothing from the incumbent. These endorsements are therefore exactly what they are: posturing and self-positioning, and both the PDP and the APC should take note, take their campaigns to the people, and show their paces.