Nigeria Today: Neoliberal Crisis, Private Accumulation, Class and the Nationality Question; By Omotoye Olorode

AS the crisis of governance and, especially, the consequent escalation of poverty, inequality and violence deepen in Nigeria, various interpretations of Nigeria’s history as explications for the said crisis and the viability of what some have come to characterise as “The Nigeria Project”, have been canvassed.

The narration of “history” is often about “facts” and memory – what facts are remembered! In regard to both, narrations of Nigeria’s history, especially today, have become both selective and tendentious; it has created considerable difficulty and confusion in the effort to resolve at least some of the elements of the crisis.

There had been questions regarding whether the British colonialists indeed “forced” what they called the “Protectorates” together and whether the “nationalities” existed, when colonialism intervened, as we know them now. All these raise questions of how the Colony of Lagos became part of the Southern Protectorate along with the Oil River Protectorate, or how the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria was forged!

What we know for certain is that, prior to British colonial conquests, none of what the British dubbed protectorates was a politically coherent entity, beyond the “city state” form. There were therefore only nationalities in which even linguistic and cultural identities are tenuous. Some of them today are still so tenuous that that the languages (dialects) are hardly mutually intelligible! These identities are inventions of the ruling classes any way; they are constructed and deconstructed as political exigencies require or as group and individual aspirations of alleged leaders command.

In short, Nigeria’s ruling class, collaborating with the former colonial forces that handed state power to them in 1960, is running an unjust society. And an unjust society can have neither peace nor security. Because the ruling class is busy creating, maintaining and profiting from the current increased hostilities among the poor and underprivileged across Nigeria. They are uninterested in addressing the consequent needs of the poor in the rural and the urban locations.

The city states which were largely independent, as Sparta and Athens in ancient Greece, actually wage wars and annexed one another as colonies (as Ibadan did to city states or sub-nationalities they now called Yoruba towns, in the 19^th century)! No ethnic group or nationality, as they are conceived today, was conquered by the colonialists as such; the European conquests were achieved piecemeal and city state-by-city state occasioning various degrees of collaboration between African city states and the marauding European conquerors.

On the question of the frantic effort by segments of the Nigerian elite, especially, to repudiate their identity as “Nigerians”, it should suffice say, again, that this is an illustration of how identities are manufactured and dismantled, remixed, etc., forcing new identities, and so on!

Yes, the British amalgamated Nigeria for their colonial administrative convenience and more effective exploitation of the territory and its peoples; but before 1945 or thereabout, and contrary to the claims in certain quarters, all the nationalist groups saw themselves as “Nigerian nationals” and “nationalists”. The first indigenous political party set up in 1923, even without a single branch outside Lagos, was named Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP); in 1944, the party that rallied Nigerians and Cameroonians for independence (National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons – NCNC) was a “national” party comprising nationalists, labour, students, women and the youth generally.

The pivotal role of the working class in Nigeria’s Independence Struggle and continued fight against exploitation and for national unity
We can assert without any fear of contradiction that of all the nationalist resistance to colonial rule, organised worker’s resistance had been the most consistent since the first trade union, the Civil Service Union, was established in Nigeria in 1912.

It is of course a notorious fact of history that the exploiting class, everywhere and always, start by considering trade unions illegal until agitations force their recognition. It is also the truth that the colonial situation had its own specific character because colonialism was maintained by force of occupation and the ideology of racism. Even after the 1939 Trade Union Ordinance, the Colliery Workers Union of the coal miners, founded in 1940, was not recognised until 1948. The British colonialists had been mining coal in Enugu since 1915.

Since the mid-1940s, Nigeria’s labour movement advanced organisationally as its ranks grew numerically. As we will observe below, major trade union and political activities followed the traditions of the 1941 Great Trek and the 1941 COLA agitations of Africa Civil Service Technical Workers Union (ACTWU). Among the most important direct trade union activities in these general regards were the General Strike of 1945 and that of 1964. The termination of the First Republic by the January 1966 military coup and the subsequent Civil War (1967-70) demobilised the trade union movement significantly until the Apena Declaration of December 1975 whose thrust of re-invention of the movement was smothered by the ruling military dictatorship that accused the labour leaders of running a political party.

Many of the trade unions, their federations and labour centres, and the trade union activists, as groups and individuals, were directly involved in political action as trade unions and/or as part of affiliations or alliances with political parties, quasi-political formations, youth movements and social-cultural groups. The political activities of the labour movement were audacious, strategic and unabashed, thus yielding no quarter whatsoever to the ruling class as to their right or legitimacy of political activities as a class. It was the legitimacy of these activities that the military wing of Nigeria’s ruling class abrogated in 1976. We need to cite a few specific labour movement engagements since the early 1940s in regard to the bold and consistent combination of trade-union activities with political, nationalist and anti-imperialist popular engagements.

It can be asserted categorically that the agitation for Nigeria’s sovereignty and ultimate independence and for national unity was powered largely by the Nigerian working people in the trade union and labour movements and in the political alliances they spear-headed or helped to midwife.

As early as 1930, a workers’ political party, Nigeria Labour Organisation, was formed while the African Workers’ Union, a political party, was founded in 1931. By 1937, worker education classes were being organised in Lagos by the NYM.

On August 26, 1944, the NCNC (National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons), a political party of nationalists, was founded in a rally organised by Nigerian Union of Students (NUS); many trade unionists and over forty organisations attended the rally.

The year 1946 was a particularly momentous one in the history of Nigeria’s labour movement because of the coming together of many events.

First, it was the year of the inauguration of the Zikist Movement – a radical, nationalist, anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and socialist organisation.

Also in 1946, NEPA (Northern Elements Progressive Association), the antecedent of NEPU, was founded in Kano and led by Habib Raji Abdallah, who also became a member of the Zikist Movement. In this same 1946, even religious organisations such as the National Church of Nigeria became part and parcel of Nigeria’s nationalist and anti-imperialist movement and, as Madunagu observed; “It developed relationship with the Zikist Movement and the Labour Movement and also became formally affiliated to the NCNC”. The Zikist Movement was of course affiliated with NCNC. Even whole labour centres like TUC and NNFL at different points between 1946 and 1948 were affiliated with NCNC.

In this same 1946, the NCNC organised a national tour of Nigeria to campaign against the Richard’s Constitution [of Nigeria] which sought to ‘regionalise’ the governance of Nigeria. The nationalists saw this as divisive and separatist. We must note that this was the period of the separatists, divisive and incendiary regionalist and tribalist statements which inform, and are congruent with most of today’s vocabulary of “restructuring”, “self-determination”, secession, etc.

One consequence of the foregoing development was that Nigeria’s radical patriotic labour movement started to part ways with politicians who started to play increasingly regionalist and tribal cards and began to build regionalist political parties on those platforms. Needless to say, the virulence of the colonial state elicited in bans (as that of the Zikists’ Movement and others), took its toll on radical anti-imperialist nationalist and labour movement.

“Nigerian” nationalists, labour and “Nigerian nationalism”, labour and the politics of class liberation
For over a full decade after the 1964 General Strike, the intervention of the military wing of Nigeria’s ruling class, especially touting the excuse of national emergency during the Civil War, subverted the legitimacy and unity of the Nigerian labour movement. Peasant uprisings in the Southwest and militant armed uprising against oil exploration and ecological degradation were brutally repressed in the Niger Delta. On the specific question of the suppression of the labour movement, Olorode (2003) p.12 observed:

“Since the mid-1940s, Nigeria’s labour movement advanced organizationally as its ranks grew numerically. As we will observe below, major trade union and political activities followed the traditions of the 1941 Great Trek and the 1941 COLA agitations of Africa Civil Service Technical Workers Union (ACTWU). Among the most important direct trade union activities in these general regards were the General Strike of 1945 and that of 1964. The termination of the First Republic by the January 1966 military coup and the subsequent Civil War (1967-70) demobilized the trade union movement significantly until the Apena Declaration of December 1975 whose thrust of re-invention of the movement was smothered by the ruling military dictatorship that accused the labour leaders of running a political party”.

Ruling class economic policies, ruling class unity and the manipulation of ethnic and confessional differences in Nigeria
The formulation and consistent implementation of ruling class social and economic policies, which they endorse across ethnic and religious divides, produce consequences that generate poverty, fear and anger among ordinary people, the victims, across ethnic and religious divides.

The said consequences are manifested indirectly as criminality, banditry, cultism, robberies, inter-communal conflicts and generalised violence in the entire polity. They are also manifested directly as unemployment, ecological crises, landlessness among farmers-herder clashes, reduced access to social services and basic needs, etc.

Ruling class monopoly of political and decision-making power, in the interest of the ruling class, engenders periodic mass upheavals against the ruling class. In colonial times, these manifested as women’s upheavals as the Aba Women’s Protests of 1929, various tax “riots” as in Western Nigeria in 1952-1953, and the General Strike of 1945. These upheavals were reproduced in post-colonial periods in episodes like the 1965 General Strike, the Western State Agbekoya  (Farmers Reject Suffering) “Riots” of 1969, the students’ upheavals of 1978, the Farmers Protests at Bakolori in the 1980s, NLC’s General Strikes and NANS Protests of early 1980s and the anti-SAP Protests of the middle and late 1980s, etc.

At other levels, because of the hard times arising from ruling class economic and social policies, our people turn against one-another. Examples of these internal bleedings abound across Nigeria and they have been selectively highlighted or suppressed by the ruling class and their media in their class interest and to keep the oppressed divided. We may cite the cases of the Nassarawa Egon, Ezi and Eza (Ebonyi), Tiv-Jukun, Fulani versus Hausa in Zamfara, northern versus southern Bauchi, Okene,  the current Konshisha-Oju violence in Benue, and conflicts in the Delta, Taraba, etc., not to mention the simmering antipathies across Nigeria that are constantly instigated or ignored by the ruling circles depending on the statuses of intra-ruling class  negotiations conflicts and truces especially when rigging up the trading associations which the call political parties.

In short, Nigeria’s ruling class, collaborating with the former colonial forces that handed state power to them in 1960, is running an unjust society. And an unjust society can have neither peace nor security. Because the ruling class is busy creating, maintaining and profiting from the current increased hostilities among the poor and underprivileged across Nigeria. They are uninterested in addressing the consequent needs of the poor in the rural and the urban locations.

To be concluded…