Nigeria’S Policy Somersault at UN
December 30, 2014, will go down in the memory of all Nigerians as the day the fine principles on which the country had hitherto built its foreign policy bit the dust. In bewilderment, we now wonder what our new foreign policy is, or would be, or if there is going to be any at all. What happened can easily be traced to the slave-mentality that has besieged our present leadership, a mentality that has taken us hostage and finally handed us back to colonialists. On that day, Nigeria abstained from a UN vote that would have advanced the Palestinian cause. And our positive vote would have swung things in its favour.
Let all Nigerians be informed that we must now start to fight for our independence. Our right to self-determination has been given away on a platter of mud and the onus is for us to get it back. Naturally, the Israelis and Americans are very much aware of the total lack of intellectual capacity of our present leaders who, from all indications, do not seem to know what places a nation above others. They seem not to know that what makes the country a giant is the ability to stick, through thick and thin, to its principles at national and international levels.
At the domestic front, we have demonstrated an embarrassing inability to secure life and property, nor our territorial integrity, and now at the international front, we have lost our credibility and voice to be part of any honourable process. We gave our word and we broke it at the last minute. Israel has become suddenly so important to Nigeria that a phone call from Netanyahu is all it took to blow decades of solidly built foreign policy to smithereens. The core of our foreign policy is built around the principle of support for the rights of all peoples to self-determination and freedom. Nigeria since independence decades ago, has worked tirelessly to ensure that people of all hue – white and black get the necessary support for the attainment of their aspirations to independence and self-determination. To this, Nigeria has always been at the forefront of the struggle for Palestinian independence and was one of the first to recognise it.
Lest we forget, Israel has never been a friend of Nigeria – or Africa for that matter. At the peak for the quest for independence by African nations, Israel was forging strategic partnership with the apartheid regime in Pretoria and all other antifreedom regimes around the world. That South Africa was able to assert herself as an independent nation speaks volumes of the giant of Africa. No one dares to approach South Africa with such a phone call because, in the short time they have been independent, her foreign policy ideals have cut a clear path. The duo who called President Jonathan had the confidence that he does not understand what statehood is all about. They were aware that the President of Nigeria will definitely place a self-serving interest above one of utmost importance – like the matter of a people’s independence. It is a paradox of sorts that at the time some European nations are beginning to thaw in their attitude to the Palestinian cause, the supposed leader of the black race who has always been at the forefront in the support for the quest for freedom by all people will chose the critical moment to turn its back on history. Surely, the president and his team should know that wining and dining with the US and Israel surely adds no value to its status at a moment like this? Nigeria’s last-minute abstention from voting has taken the cause of the Palestinian people back many decades.
