After spending years advocating Igbo presidency, and briefly offering himself for that number one role, Orji Kalu, a former Abia State governor and currently chief whip of the Senate, abjured his political beliefs and has become the chief campaigner for a northern presidency, presumably eight years after a northerner occupied that position. He wants his friend and senate president Ahmad Lawan, a north-easterner, to pick the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential ticket. His argument is simple: “Congratulations to the PDP for electing a north-easterner. Nigerians must have seen what I saw yesterday. For our party, the APC, it is no longer feasible to talk about a southern candidate except the APC wants to go on political retirement. I urge the national chairman of the party and the entire NWC to stamp their feet and zone the APC presidential ticket to the Northeast. President Buhari has a right to choose his successor, and I call on him to pick Senator Ahmad Lawan as his successor. In every democratic setting, presidents and governors support and pick their successors.”

For a few dizzying months, south-eastern political and cultural leaders swore by Igbo presidency, insisting in some instances that any Igbo politician who took the running mate ticket would be regarded as a traitor. Senator Kalu was a strident voice for the Igbo project. Now, not only has the Southeast moderated its opposition to a northern politician securing the presidential ticket, the region has begun to be desperate for the running mate ticket to thwart the South-South’s push for the ticket. The Southeast will, however, face the dilemma of pushing for the junior ticket on both the APC platform and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) platform. It is unlikely they’ll have their cake and eat it.

But more critically is the questionable role politicians like Sen Kalu are playing in the unfolding 2023 game. The former Abia State governor’s politics over the years has been, to put it mildly, objectionable and unprincipled. He was never capable of taking a stand, let alone sticking to that stand for a considerable length of time. His idea of wheeling and dealing is not even as engaging as that term is; he actually trades in votes, prostitutes principles, and leaves his dwindling followers in the lurch every time he stands to gain something by flip-flopping. The Igbo know him well; and though he manages to raise his voice and make himself heard anytime there is an advantage to be had, few in the Southeast take him seriously.

As governor, he was undistinguished, leaving his state worse than he met it, and getting himself embroiled in all manner of malfeasances from which he is yet to extricate himself. Abians have a low opinion of him; the generality of the Igbo have an even lower opinion of him. But he does not care. He is convinced he can sell any product no matter how defective. At a time the Igbo have sought to raise their self-esteem by politicking for the presidency from a position of strength, Sen Kalu has valiantly worked to lower that self-esteem by advocating for Igbo subserviency. In his obtuse logic, if the Igbo could not win a fight, it was useless fighting it at all. To him they cannot win the presidency, and so it would be pointless fighting for the standard-bearer ticket.

His main argument for jettisoning the Igbo presidential project and backing Sen Lawan for the APC presidential ticket is simply because the PDP gave the ticket to a north-easterner, former vice president Atiku Abubakar. That logic is insane; but it is rife in the ruling party, and has obviously gained traction as party leaders prevaricate over the morality of keeping the presidency in the North for another eight years. In his statement declaring support for Sen Lawan, the former Abia governor painted a doomsday scenario of APC being sent into premature retirement should it give its ticket to any southerner. It is not clear why he thinks he can speak for the entire South. If his self-abnegating politics leads him to trade Igbo pride for a pittance, surely he must know that other parts of the South still possess, and would wish to retain, their self-pride.

Sen Kalu then caps his ignoble politicking with the abominable argument that President Muhammadu Buhari reserves the right to pick his successor. It is true that last week the president seemed to have asked a meeting of progressive governors to reserve that right for him, but Sen Kalu comes from a region wailing against marginalisation, alienation and even provocation orchestrated by quislings and other agents provocateurs killing and maiming in the Southeast. His political instincts, had they been well developed, should have prompted him into embracing at least the silhouette of democracy. That faint democratic instinct should have nurtured in him respect for proper democratic elections either in intraparty affairs or inter-party affairs. Sen Kalu, alas, is destitute of any democratic instinct.

In fact, his support for Sen Lawan and the northern presidential agenda is strictly speaking business. He and the senate president are close friends, some say, right from their University of Maiduguri undergraduate days; and so Sen Kalu elevates the narrow purviews of friendship and business above the existential struggles of his Igbo race. He can of course repudiate any respect and affection for the rest of the South, but to rubbish the Igbo cause with shallow and pedantic arguments about the ogre of PDP challenge betrays the little regard Abia and the Igbo people had for him, which made him a two-term governor.

Sen Kalu is of course not the only one who quickly abandoned the resolve of the Southeast to press for the presidential ticket as a right from the leading parties. Presidential aspirant Peter Obi himself shrunk from the challenge within the PDP and has scurried to the ineffective Labour Party. Worse, the region’s delegates to the PDP special convention also collectively repudiated the few Igbo aspirants left in the race, given them a collective 15 votes out of about 95. If south-easterners do not even have faith in their own advocacy, including the unprincipled Sen Kalu whose execrable politics remains incomparable, why should any outsider back them?

The Anambra murders

It is not difficult to explain why the country is in uproar over the gruesome and despicable murder in Anambra State of pregnant Harira Jibril and her four children, all of them from Adamawa State. But surely it cannot simply be because of their ethnic group or religion. Murderers and terrorists, with their twisted and unpredictable logic, often don’t discriminate. In any case, appalling murders and rights abuse have also been perpetrated elsewhere in the country, particularly in the Northeast and Northwest. The gruesome murder of a military couple, Gloria Matthew and Linus Andu, in Imo State weeks earlier and the Jibril murders are a logical progression from the unchecked murders elsewhere, either by Boko Haram, kidnappers, ritual killers or bandits, most of whom are known. Having failed to check the menace in the past, the problem has metastisised, become more vicious, and the country is probably doomed to witness many more horrendous massacres in the coming weeks and months, despite the threat by President Buhari to crack down.

It will be surprising should the federal government feign ignorance of the motivation for these south-eastern murders. Together with provocative cyber campaigns from other regions, including from the Southwest, there are now an army of agents provocateurs intent on setting the country ablaze. Had the Buhari administration nipped these problems in the bud, and properly situated the context in which these crimes were committed, mitigation would have been possible. Now, with an economy heading into a tailspin, an insurgency and banditry recrudescing wildly, all in an atmosphere of incompetent management of the politics of the nation and law enforcement, there seems to be no immediate hope that peace and stability would be restored. Too many criminals have tasted blood and liked it; they will get bolder in the months ahead, regardless of whatever the government does. Hopefully the murderers of the military couple and the Jibril family will be caught and brought to trial; but it will have little impact on a problem that is already replicating everywhere, for the criminals on rampage have sold their souls to the devil and don’t give a damn what happens next.