THIS CONTRIBUTION locates Comrade Dr Segun Osoba in the moments of the movement of Nigeria’s working people in the last fifty years or so. The contribution relates to Segun Osoba – his persona, strength of character, humanism, private relationships, and endurance – in terms of the critical factor of the individual as an element in the response of the collective to moments, and to the roles of various Nigerian collectives in the evolution of the movement of Nigeria’s working people.
Our encounter with Dr Segun Osoba at the University of Ife in the early 1970s coincided more or less with the end of Nigeria’s Civil War (1967-1970), which especially devastated most of South East Nigeria and created considerable cost of living and related material stress across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
By this, we mean how the conjuncture thus identified influences, and is influenced by, the conditions and development of social formations (social classes, labour, women, the youth, etc.), the state and its institutions, and the ruling class that superintends it.
Comrade Dr Osoba’s interventions, needless to say are, and they have continued to be, in the specific context of the committed intellectual as activist, student, organiser and mentor at local, national, and international levels. This is the context in which Dr Osoba had functioned throughout his active years which now straddles at least three generations of radical intellectual and political activists.
This discussion is about the trajectory and the content of the actual engagements by Comrade Segun Osoba at Ile-Ife, where he retired as a Senior Lecturer in History, and his contributions to the struggles of Nigeria’s working people.
State of the polity, moments and social movements of immediate post-independence decade in Nigeria
General social and political perspectives in immediate post-independence Nigeria were shaped by two broad social forces which were to determine social-economic and political events since then.
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First, there was the independence movement which was powered by general anti-colonial resistance: a coalition of Nigeria’s educated elite, the youth, women, and the students’ movement, and the workers (trade unions, etc.), and the peasants. Some of these were direct resistance against colonial conquest, colonial state and administration, colonial taxes, forced labour, and colonial culture and apparatuses of colonial culture.
Secondly, there was the segment of various social levels of the elite that were directly involved, largely as enablers of the colonial state such as the business and commercial elite, civil servants, operatives of law enforcement and armed forces, the clergy, the so-called “traditional rulers” and segments of the “professionals who are satisfied generally with colonial polity”.
The labour movement which was held down by anti-labour laws during the Civil War had become restive; militant and more conscious segments of it began to organise for labour unity and specifically for unity of the labour centres. There were agitations for wage increases in the early 1970s which led to the so-called Udoji Award. Increased burdens on rural communities (taxes, etc.) already elicited a major farmers’ revolt (the 1969 Agbekoya Upheaval) in Western Nigeria.
The foregoing subsisted generally between 1960 and the mid-1970s and late 1970s when imperialism, again, seized control of Nigeria definitely. The situation ripened into the “austerity” measures, growing debt profile, and the IMF-World Bank prescriptions (Structural Adjustment Program – SAP) that the military governments implemented between January 1984 and 1999 and which the “civilian” regimes had enforced since then, entrenching repatriation of surpluses to the metropolitan centres on one hand, and massive private accumulation by the indigenous bourgeoisie on the other.
The Decade of our Encounter with Dr. Segun Osoba (1970-1980)
Our encounter with Dr Segun Osoba at the University of Ife in the early 1970s coincided more or less with the end of Nigeria’s Civil War (1967-1970), which especially devastated most of South East Nigeria and created considerable cost of living and related material stress across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
The post-civil War increase in crude oil production and enhanced price of crude oil enabled so much petrodollars in Post-War Government Treasury that functionaries of the federal government declared that the problem was not money but how to spend it!
Both the Second National Development Plan (NDP): (1970-1974), and the Third National Development Plan: (1975-1980), entailed a vision, actually an illusion, in the ruling circles of a national bourgeoisie that was not only ready to act as a bourgeoisie in control of the country’s economy but also build an equalitarian society – an “egalitarian” society; a country full of opportunities for all.
The legal and policy instrument for realising the first vision was the Nigerian Enterprises Promotion (NEP) Decree of 1972 which was amended in 1977. Also known as the Indigenisation Decree, its purpose was “to give indigenous capital assertive control”. The 3rd National Development Plan (1975-1980) had a welfare state, basically social democracy, vision of development.
As we observed above, imperialism had taken full control of, and initiative in, Nigeria by the end of the 1970s. And, needless to say, the entire dream of the bourgeoisie taking control of capitalism and its reproduction collapsed completely by 1977/1978. The exigencies of local capitalist accumulation – “normal” and primitive – simply delivered Nigeria’s economy to foreign capitalist interests. These exigencies, as we warned, enforced a subaltern status of local capitalists and entrenched the neo-colonial recolonization regime. This period witnessed increased inequality in the polity.
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The labour movement which was held down by anti-labour laws during the Civil War had become restive; militant and more conscious segments of it began to organise for labour unity and specifically for unity of the labour centres. There were agitations for wage increases in the early 1970s which led to the so-called Udoji Award. Increased burdens on rural communities (taxes, etc.) already elicited a major farmers’ revolt (the 1969 Agbekoya Upheaval) in Western Nigeria.
By 1977/1978 the illusion of welfare state paradigm created by the 3rd National Development Plan had collapsed completely and the IMF/World Bank austerity measures had started. In the education sector which was benefitting from the social democratic illusions of the 3rd NDP via the 1976 National Policy on Education (NPE), the World Bank cost-recovery prescriptions precipitated a major upheaval – the “Alli Must Go” students’ protests. Early in the early 1970s, university teachers went on strike to demand higher wages and improved conditions of service.
In 1976, the student’s movement mounted huge agitation against proposed low remuneration for new graduates serving or about to serve in the National Youth Service Corp – a dress rehearsal for the “Ali Must Go” protests against increased charges in the education sector.
Osoba: From Ife Dialogue to the Socialist Forum Collective (SFC)
The foregoing was the general ambiance in which we encountered Comrade Segun Osoba as students and as colleagues at the University of Ife in the Nigeria of the early 1970s. Needless to say this ambiance shaped our consciousness (individual and collective) as we shaped it.
The journal acquired spontaneous popularity; it also elicited unease within the Dialogue Committee itself and with certain acolytes of the University of Ife authorities. The unease within the committee eventually led, over a report by the journal, on the condition, and the editorial statement on it of living of University of Ife staff in a rented estate – Sijuwade Estate on Ondo Road, Ile-Ife. By the time Layi Ogunkoya engineered a truce in the Committee, some members have resigned from it. Comrade Osoba was so disappointed about the disowning of the reports on Sijuade Estate by some members of the Committee he resigned as Editor of Ife Dialogue even though he continued to make monumental contributions to the Dialogue Committee and to the work of the Editorial Board.
The evolution of the organisations in which we operated was the result of complex deliberately engineered or chance events and processes that had their origins necessarily, in chance contacts or efforts to seek out people. We read or hear about. This was how the organisations we came to working in started and grew.
Ife Dialogue Committee (IDC) 1971/1972.
The Dialogue Committee formed comprised about eleven members who had different degrees of personal ideological contacts and/or identities with Comrade Dr Segun Osoba. The Committee was an overlapping generation of academics with the Chairman (Professor Layi Ogunkoya) and Segun Osoba being the most senior. Ife Dialogue: An Independent Journal of Issues behind the News. [Published by the Dialogue Committee, University of Ife, Ile-Ife] debuted early in 1972 with Comrade Dr Segun Osoba as the foundation Editor (see members of the Editorial Board of Ife Dialogue in the reference to Volume 1, No. 2 of the journal below). The following opening paragraph of Ife Dialogue Vol.1, No. 2 (Dec. 1972/ Jan. 1973) gives an idea of the character and thrust of the journal.
A sample of the sorts of issues raised in Ife Dialogue is illustrated by the [Table of] Contents of Ife Dialogue Vol.1, No.2 Dec. 1972/Jan.1973:
Ife Dialogue Vol.1, No.2
December 1972/ January 1973
Editorial Comments
We would like to seize this opportunity to wish all our readers, the Nigerian academic community and the whole Nigerian people a happy and prosperous New Year. May 1973 mark for our people the dawn of a new era of creative thinking and committed service to the nation we all claim to love so much. The most welcome New Year’s present we members of the Nigerian elite can give to the nation is less of empty, platitudinous speech-making and much more available to our people some of the cosy comfort that we ourselves are already enjoying in abundance.
Table of contents.
- Editorial comments:
The press and Its Readers
University of Ife and the Tenth Anniversary Fiesta
Official Vehicles: Use or Misuse
Good News from Benin!
A welcome change in Student Consciousness
- Boys’ Quarters, Outriders and paupers’ cemeteries:
Manifestations of a Leadership Crisis – Toye Olorode
3. The Romance of “international” Journals – Sesan Dipeolu
4. Neo-colonialism and the System of Education in Francophone Africa: Dahomey as a Typical Example – Olaleye Yayi
5. Nigerian Universities and Dependence Mentality (2): The Case of I.U.C. and O.E.S. as external Assessors – Segun Osoba
6. Willian Hazalit (1778-1830) “On the Ignorance of the Learned”.
7. The Need for a National Scientific Research Policy in Nigeria – Adeyinka Afolayan
8. A Cartoon.
9. The International Context of the South African Liberation Struggle – Seretse Choabi
10. A Cartoon
11. Religious Fanaticism: Positive Evidence of Anti-Intellectualism in Our Universities – Adeleye Adegite
12. Teacher Education and the University of Ife: Part II – Sope Oyelaran
13. A Cartoon
14. A Review of the University of Ife Anniversary Symposium: The First Decade – Toye Olorode
15. Academic Tourism: A Booming Industry in Nigeria – Segun Osoba
16. Our Letter Box
17. Classified Advertisement: A Reconstruction of Reality.
18. Notes on our Main Contributions.
19. Some of the Articles coming out in our next issue.
Editorial Board: Segun Osoba (Editor); Sope Oyelaran (Associate Editor); Toye Olorode (Business Manager); Siyan Olawoyin (Legal Adviser) and Ade Adenuga.
The journal acquired spontaneous popularity; it also elicited unease within the Dialogue Committee itself and with certain acolytes of the University of Ife authorities. The unease within the committee eventually led, over a report by the journal, on the condition, and the editorial statement on it of living of University of Ife staff in a rented estate – Sijuwade Estate on Ondo Road, Ile-Ife. By the time Layi Ogunkoya engineered a truce in the Committee, some members have resigned from it. Comrade Osoba was so disappointed about the disowning of the reports on Sijuade Estate by some members of the Committee he resigned as Editor of Ife Dialogue even though he continued to make monumental contributions to the Dialogue Committee and to the work of the Editorial Board.
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By March 1974 when Ife Dialogue reached Volume 2, No.1, it became clear that for what was left of the Dialogue Committee to make quality leap forward towards “…more of hard thinking and constructive work on how to make available to our people some of the cosy comfort that we ourselves are already enjoying in abundance” (Editorial Comments Vol.2. No.2 already cited above), a clearer ideological line had become imperative. Dialogue Committee was dissolved and the Wednesday Club was established.
At this stage, Ife Dialogue already created a definitive and robust tradition of open and inclusive debate on all issues – politics, economics, history, academic programs and curriculum, university autonomy, religion, environment and general perspectives on University tradition. We must also mention that contributors to Ife Dialogue cut across the entire community – all levels of faculty, students and, to a lesser extent, non-academic staff. There were also contributions from outside the University of Ife.
The Wednesday Club and the Socialist Forum Collective.
The clear thrust of Ife Dialogue was socialist notwithstanding the rather broad ideological spectrum of the membership. It was also the breadth of that spectrum that generated the split less than two years into its formation.
Segun Osoba and SFC Comrades, as members of ASUU, were pivotal in the activities of trade unions inside and outside the University of Ile-Ife that established the Ife Local Government Chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress. The Ife local government chapter of the NLC organised yearly Worker Education Classes (in English and Yoruba Languages) and birthed the NLC LG Chapters of Ilesa, Osogbo, Ogbomoso and Eruwa. Needless to say, these efforts collapsed for lack of support from organized labour.
The establishment of the Wednesday Club and its decision to openly proceed on the Marxist socialist road was enhanced by the arrival of more academic staff at Ife who were largely young and/or with socialist tendencies and convictions—quite a few of them were expatriate including West Indian, American, Greek, South African, Eritrean and European. Segun Osoba was the magnet that drew many of them!
The Socialist Forum Collective (SFC)
The Wednesday Club met regularly on Wednesdays and held regular internal educational classes. It was pivotal to the establishment of the Cleaners’ Union made up of workers of private cleaning companies to which the University of Ife contracted its cleaning services as part of the growing paradigm of outsourcing public service. As we noted above the second half of the 1970s was also the period of the re-assertion of the control of Nigeria by international finance capital precipitating upheavals of the students’ movement and attempts by labour to unite the labour centres. SFC was directly involved in these broad movements. Our direct involvement with the “Alli Must Go” student’s protests led to the detention of Comrade Osoba by Obasanjo’s secrete police (the NSO).
The SFC managed to create a ramified radical cell in situ at Ife and started a reach out (first to socialist comrades in Ibadan where the Socialist Party of Farmers, Workers and Youth—SPFWY—was active), to APM (Anti-Poverty Movement), and to other socialist groups across the country. We shall return to the progress of this outreach later.
The SFC, with the Cleaners’ Union as the nucleus, engaged in intensive working class organising which comprised actual organisation of an autonomous, self-propelling trade union, a combined Consumer/Producer Cooperative; including production, procurement and distribution of agricultural products. This experience extended the activities of cooperative farming and procurement to rural communities to Efon Alaye, Erio and Ifaki in Ekiti State. This segment of SFC work involved actual physical crop and livestock production, political, education at work, literacy campaign, etc., with peasant cooperatives. Some of us already had working relationship with late Comrade Dr. Seinde Arigbede who pioneered work with peasant communities at Ode-Omu. The success of this category of SFC work was limited by inadequate manpower at cadre-ship level.
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Segun Osoba and SFC Comrades, as members of ASUU, were pivotal in the activities of trade unions inside and outside the University of Ile-Ife that established the Ife Local Government Chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress. The Ife local government chapter of the NLC organised yearly Worker Education Classes (in English and Yoruba Languages) and birthed the NLC LG Chapters of Ilesa, Osogbo, Ogbomoso and Eruwa. Needless to say, these efforts collapsed for lack of support from organized labour.
The SFC, also, worked very hard to build a vibrant Oyo State Chapter of the NLC in the 1980s with the exemplary efforts of late Comrade Isiaka Ibrahim of the Civil Service Technical Workers Union of Nigeria (CSTWUN) as Chairman, and Comrade Ibikunle (NUT) as Comrade Secretary.
The foregoing were the foundations of SFC’s ramified outreach, interactions and collaborative work at different levels and across the country from the close of the 1970s.
SFC’s Socialist Forum: A Marxist Journal for Social Change.
The debut of Socialist Forum: A Marxist Journal for Social Change in January 1980 was a crucial milestone achievement for the Socialist Forum Collective which also became known as the Ife Collective. The “Statement of Objective” of the journal appeared on p.1 of the foundation number (No. 1) as shown below:
SOCIALIST FORUM
A Marxist Journal for Change
Statement of Objectives
The objectives of the Socialist Forum Collective are:
- To create a framework that will generate a community committed to class struggle in transforming the Nigerian Society.
- To work towards the creation of a Nigerian Marxist organisation that has political clarity and is rooted in the exploited classes in Nigeria.
- To create a journal which, through its analyses of theoretical issues, its reports and commentaries on the Nigerian reality, will politicise and the petty bourgeoisie, the Labour movement, and the peasantry.
- The politicising referred to in 3 above consists in: Marxist analyses of the causes of class exploitation, presentation of the scientific socialist alternative, and working out strategies, for achieving that alternative.
CONTENTS
- The Role of the Army in the Nigerian Colonial and Neo-colonial Eras.
- Why was the Return to Civilian Rule Imperative?
- Should Socialists work in the Existing parties?
- Economic affairs:
Looters and Compradors: Three Reports.
- The Labour Movement Under the Military and the Transition to Civilian Rule.
- Iva Valley Massacre Remembered.
- An Open Letter to President Shehu Sgagari.
- The Axe-Blade and the Axe-Handle.
- Britain’s Duplicity on Zimbabwe.
- Symposium and Exhibition on Southern Africa at War.
- South Africa Bombs Angola: Interview with Angola Minister.
- Fascist Sentences on Liberation Fighters: Statement by ANC.
The “Editorial Guidelines” of the journal insisted that contributions “…must be written in a language sufficiently simple that a reader having not more than newspaper reading competence, or a high school leaver can understand… [and] must rely on class analysis”. However, the journal had a standard class and political commitment. Again, the Editorial Guidelines prescribed: “[contributions] …must demonstrably be in the interest of the working class and the peasantry…in which these classes speak for themselves”. The Editorial Committee was listed as Olasope Oyelaran, Omotoye Olorode, Segun Osoba, Biodun Jeyifo and Kayode Adetugbo.
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The Socialist Forum Collective operated as an authentic collective especially regarding collective leadership. As a characterisation of Comrade Dr Segun Osoba towards the end of this presentation will amply demonstrate, Segun Osoba, the individual was pivotal to entrenching collectivism, individual and collective committed hard work, in the SFC by being immersed almost anonymously in the moments that animate and invigorate our movement. SFC and its contents were the most eloquent evidence for this general observation. Comrade Segun Osoba’s authority in the SFC derived from this exemplary collectivist worldview; not from any organisational designation!
SFC, Constitution Making and Transition to “Civil Rule” in Nigeria (1976-1979).
Let us return, somewhat, to periodising our collective trajectory with Comrade Segun Osoba.
Sometime in 1970, two years or so before Ife Dialogue Committee came into being, Comrade Osoba was invited by Dr. Bala Usman to Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, to deliver a lecture under the auspices of the ABU branch of the Historical Society of Nigeria. That contact was to develop into collaborative work which produced the now famous 1976 Minority Report and Draft Constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, authored by Olusegun Osoba and Yusufu Bala Usman. The fact of the rejection and suppression of that alternative constitution by the military junta headed by General Olusegun Obasanjo, is now history.
The SFC, of course, discussed Comrade Osobas’ nomination by the Military junta to serve on the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) and endorsed his participation. Reports on the progress of the CDC were also evaluated by SFC regularly up to the publication of the Minority Report. Similarly, when Comrade Osoba was nominated by the Murtala Mohammed government to join the Federal Military Government’s National Delegation to visit China, the acceptability, or otherwise, of the nomination was discussed fully, and approved, at a formal meeting of our organization; a formal report of the China visit was also formally discussed at our meeting. These points need emphasis to underscore the point that SFC was a democratic and disciplined organization with zero tolerance for unilateralism.
The close of the 1970s also saw a major attack on, and tendentious bureaucratization of, the labour movement engendered by two major decrees – Trade Union (Disqualification of Certain Persons) Act 15 of 1977, and the Trade Unions (Amendment) Decree 22 of 1978. The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had remained burdened, especially from about 1988, by Decree 22 of 1978 whose major effect had been the control of organised labour by its bureaucracies on one hand, and the state on the other.
The SFC also kept a very close tab on the “Transition” to Civil Rule” program of the military junta under General Obasanjo. We were part of the general “left” response to the transition program. Comrade Dr Osoba and the late Dr. Seinde Arigbede actually represented SFC at the Conference of Nigeria Socialists at Ahmadu Bello University (Zaria) in July 1977. We quote from Comrade Professor Eskor Toyo’s (1977) Zaria Socialist Conference and the Peoples Charter:
In July 1977, a well-attended Conference of Nigeria’s Socialists took place in ABU (Ahmadu Bello University), Zaria.
The Conference itself would have broken up but for Eskor Toyo’s appeal to it. After the Conference, 3 (three) fighting factions emerged around S.G. Ikoku, Ola Oni and Mang Obassi. It became impossible for a follow-up Conference to be called. The people were left in the limbo.
Conference was of the view that the struggle for a socialist alternative in Nigeria required an independent, principled socialist party. Such a party may form an alliance with other democratic parties for specific political purposes, but it must exist as an independent party.
Conference noted that the effort at bourgeois democracy in the First Republic collapsed. Even while that so-called democracy lasted, there were many departures from even liberal democratic norms. Since 1966 we have had a military dictatorship which has not changed the neo-colonial, semi-feudal, increasingly capitalist character of the country.
As noted above, the reported dispute or tail-end rowdiness does not detract in any way from the importance of the consensus reached on really weighty issues.
Long live Socialism!
Eskor Toyo
Segun Osoba, SFC and the Evolution of the radical triad (the student and youth, “organized labour”, and the academics)–1977-1990
The early 1980s were to become a major part of Nigeria’s history in which the labour movement (workers, peasants, the youth and students, women) engaged in major class actions and acquired considerable visibility.
Comrade Segun Osoba was the one who suggested, in an invited public lecture under Comrade Hassan Sunmonu’s presidency of the NLC in Lagos, that the Nigeria Labour Congress should encourage ASUU to seek affiliation with the NLC. The 1980-1990 decade thus began with the organised possibility of the students’ movement, an academic union of universities led by officials and members that clearly defined the historical mission of their generation of intellectuals, and an organised labour that was politically conscious of the mission of the Nigerian working class.
We already alluded to the resistance of National Association of Nigeria Students to increases in the cost of education in 1977/1978 and the attack on, and sack of, university lecturers (including two Vice-Chancellors), who supported the students’ protests.
The close of the 1970s also saw a major attack on, and tendentious bureaucratization of, the labour movement engendered by two major decrees – Trade Union (Disqualification of Certain Persons) Act 15 of 1977, and the Trade Unions (Amendment) Decree 22 of 1978. The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had remained burdened, especially from about 1988, by Decree 22 of 1978 whose major effect had been the control of organised labour by its bureaucracies on one hand, and the state on the other.
In 1978 the SFC was one of the epicentres of the resistance against military dictatorship and its social and economic policies. Segun Osoba was already arguing that Nigeria Association of University Teachers (NAUT) should merge with Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) to bolster the strength of the resistance in the Nigeria education sector.
When Comrade Dr. Biodun Jeyifo (a member of SFC) emerged as the President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, he was an ASUU member at the Ife branch, where SFC (after a vigorous debate on the potential of ASUU) decided to work to realize the envisaged potentials of the union. It was during Comrade Jeyifo’s presidency of ASUU (1981-1982) that the Union was registered with the Registrar of Trade Unions. ASUU also became affiliated to the Nigeria Labour Congress.
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Comrade Segun Osoba was the one who suggested, in an invited public lecture under Comrade Hassan Sunmonu’s presidency of the NLC in Lagos, that the Nigeria Labour Congress should encourage ASUU to seek affiliation with the NLC. The 1980-1990 decade thus began with the organised possibility of the students’ movement, an academic union of universities led by officials and members that clearly defined the historical mission of their generation of intellectuals, and an organised labour that was politically conscious of the mission of the Nigerian working class.
Regarding the latter, we must emphasize that the consciousness had its origins in the socialist (and worker’s ideology) tradition of those who were banned from participating in trade union activities (Michael Imuodu, Wahab Goodluck, H. P. Adebola, etc.) by Decree 15 of 1977. It was also the triumph of the objectives of Decree 15 (1977) and Decree 22 (1978) that had taken Nigeria and Nigeria’s working people hostage since 1998 or so.
To be continued…
Emeritus Prof. Olorode, progressive intellectual and elder statesman, is Member, Secretariat Collective, Campaign for Socialist Transformation of Nigeria (CAST-Nigeria) Campaign Organisation. He contributed this article to the Segun Osoba Conference held recently. Prof Olorode can be reached via email: omotoopo@gmail.com
Comrade Awopetu retired as Professor of Zoology at OAU, Ilé Ifẹ where he was a member of the Ifẹ Collective. He was Branch Chair of ASUU at Ifẹ and, later, National Treasurer of ASUU. He is a an active labour and public intellectual; a member of SCON (Socialist Congress of Nigeria).
This article was edited on January 4, 2024 to include Prof Awopetu as co-author. His byline and subsequent introduction were initially omitted due to insufficient information upon submission of the article. This is regretted, please.
