Read Part I here.
TO emphasise the fact of the abandonment of our people, the question is not just a north/south affair as we saw immediately above. There are various, and previous, and existing problems that the ruling class is unwilling and unable to address: abandoned property phenomenon in Port Harcourt, Rivers State; deportation from Lagos to Ogun, Oyo, and various parts of Nigeria; deportation from Imo to Anambra; state creation and antipathies in Oyo-Osun; Cross River State-Akwa Ibom; Kano-Kaduna deportations in recent times; attacks on, and demolition of, poor peoples’ quarters in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, etc.; and sharing of the land among the rich; the criminal hoarding of the COVID-19 palliatives by Nigeria’s criminal ruling class across Nigeria.
As Claude Ake (1978) observed, when accumulation becomes the preoccupation of a ruling class, unequal access to power of accumulation stresses the cohesion of the class. They start to recruit support from the oppressed victims of their class rule.
Centralisation of state power helps the class to rationalise the crisis via intra-ruling class negotiations. These processes were relatively smooth under military dictatorship which operated largely via mutual liquidations within the military top brass. When military dictatorship, as the road to accumulation, started threatening imperialism and its Nigerian class agents, they manufacture a caricature of liberal democracy with political parties of ethnic and religious coalitions. The ease with which they camp and de-camp in the so-called parties, and the identity of their economic and social policies, underscore the fact that ruling class political parties are, actually, factions of single grand conspiracy against the oppressed of Nigeria.
As the crisis festers, internal agitation inside the ruling class produces demands for decentralisation, true federalism, restructuring, secession and new interpretations of history on issues like the 1914 amalgamation.
Private/primitive accumulation creates and deepens social depression, deprivation, and anger among the poor
Ruling class state power enforces the deprivation via constant deployment of its forces of coercion.
The various internal and violent divisions inside homogeneous ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups (Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, etc.) in Nigeria also speak to the fact of the situation under exploitative systems. There are “minorities” inside “majorities” and inside “minorities”. And as long as the economic foundation of society is exploitative, the hegemonic class will find a means of dividing the oppressed for sustaining their own intra-class negotiations.
Class monopoly of state power forces occasional upheavals against the ruling class as we observed earlier on, and many times turns the oppressed against members of their own class – generalised criminality, NURTW wars in some states, inter-community and intra-community violence, religious conflicts, herder-farmers clashes, gang wars, cultism and ritual murders, etc.
Class, class struggle and the material base of the superstructure of societies
Basically, the materialist position, which I must confess I endorse, is that class distinction arose when segments of society acquired capacity to exploit another through systematic expropriation of surplus value from the labour of another segment of society. This development coincided with the development of the forces of labour and the instruments of labour – tools, machines, etc.
Class question arose with the question of exploitation
Claude Ake addressed the question of class in Chapter 3 [pp. 56-81] of his book. There are Exploiters by class situation; they own capital; there are Exploiters by class position: the politicians, political decision-makers, top civil servants, and top military brass especially under military rule, who may not own capital but who service accumulation.
The existence of classes is said in Marxist (materialist) quarters to make class struggle the motive force of history. The economic, and therefore material, base therefore determine various elements of the superstructure of society – systems of production, distribution and exchange, social relations (slaves and slave owners, employers and employed, borrowers and lenders, beggars and donors, etc.), law and law enforcement (police, army, private security), culture (education, religions and beliefs, attitudes to the physical environment), and general processes of socialisation (biases, prejudices, beliefs about one’s group and other groups in society – race and racism; ethnic, sub-ethnic and sectional groups; tribal, regional and geo-political or statist and local government groups).
There is a load of evidence on ground that the Nigerian ruling class today, along with imperialism, is an enemy of the masses. Look at the states and the local governments. There are enormous powers for economic and social transformation at both levels across Nigeria. What does the ruling class do with this power besides looting?
We need to emphasize that the role(s) which individuals or groups play in relation to the material (economic) substructure, to a large extent, determines their attitudes to the question of class in society. Thus, at the dawn of independence in many parts of Africa, the working people were far ahead of most of the African elite on the class question because they bore all the burden of colonial oppression. Consequently, it is a historical fact that the more conscious segments of Nigeria’s working people already parted ways, at ideological and practical political levels with the bourgeoisie (in the three Nigerian regions) who were angling to inherit the colonial state!
Like slavery as the base of previous economic systems, colonial exploitation got threatened by revolts of the exploited classes especially after the global responses of the oppressed after World War II expressed in many locations as demand for independence, working class power and socialist transformation. And in spite of the enunciation of varieties of socialism (including “African” Socialism) by segments of the post-independence ruling-class, some of them, like Obafemi Awolowo of Nigeria, rejected the necessity of class struggle in that transformation. This stance had surfaced repeatedly since, as in the Ahiara Declaration in Biafra (1969), and in Awolowo’s Kwame Nkrumah lecture in Ghana in 1976.
If we harvest all the evidence, what will the truth look like?
OBJ on June 12: May 25 ADG Meeting in Otta 1993 with notables of various ethnic groups and his consistent dismissal of MKO Abiola! Both OBJ and MKO are Yoruba “brothers” of Oyo extraction. Remember Emeka Anyaoku on July 7 1998 with Thomas Pickering and Kofi Annan in Aso Rock? Remember the murder of Maman Vatsa under IBB? Both non-Fulani! IBB and Danjuma: first major donors to OBJ’s [1998/1999] campaign; OBJ and General Malu in the Odi Massacre: 2005; Danjuma and the Zaki-Biam Massacre under OBJ’s civilian presidency.
Do you know that one of the army officers (one is from the “north”) who were accused of the murder of Dele Giwa is in the forefront of the anti-Fulani diatribes in Upper Ogun? Remember who arrested Ironsi and Fajuyi [Ibadan] May 1966 leading “Northern” soldiers? Remember Daboh and Tarka corruption allegations under Gowon?
Privatisation [looting] of public property; who got what? What did they pay? How are they maintained today? [banks, power, roads, rolling mills, machines tools industries]. Who owns Abuja, Lekki, Victoria Island, Ikoyi, the main GRAs? How does a Yoruba General come to own vast tracts of farmland in Cross Rivers State, from Oyo States upper Ogun to Badagry, and in Taraba State?
How does a Jukun General own Oil Blocks in Delta and large tracts of real estate in Lagos? Who and who were quarrelling over oil prospecting in the borders between Benue and Anambra States? What are key beneficiaries of state power and sinecures in Nigeria today, at federal, state and local government levels (vice president, ministers, permanent secretaries, commissioners, heads of MDAs, vice-chancellors, the religious leaders, traditional rulers, etc.) saying about inequality, poverty, underfunding of education, public debt, sale of public assets, etc?
Which alleged representatives of the major ethnic groups are not pivotal to the crimes of the so-called political parties that are robbing the Nigerian masses?
The long and short of all these is that the Nigerian elite (the ruling class) is united across ethic, regional, geopolitical and religious boundaries in the crime of looting Nigeria and entrenching poverty, inequality and under-development among Nigerians across ethnic and religious boundaries? Hegemonic groups always prefer ethnic, sub-ethnic and confessional divisions when private accumulation is the dominant ideology!
Capitalist accumulation, which is necessarily private, repressive, primitive and necessarily generative of inequalities, must promote ethnicity, sub-ethnicity, religious and sectarian antagonisms even inside ethnically homogeneous state like Somalia or religiously homogeneous elite as in Great Britain or Saudi Arabia.
The various internal and violent divisions inside homogeneous ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups (Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, etc.) in Nigeria also speak to the fact of the situation under exploitative systems. There are “minorities” inside “majorities” and inside “minorities”. And as long as the economic foundation of society is exploitative, the hegemonic class will find a means of dividing the oppressed for sustaining their own intra-class negotiations.
Ruling-class Restructuring is different from working-class Restructuring; Ethno-nationalist Restructuring is different from Economic and Social Justice Restructuring!
There is no doubt in my mind that from our own perspectives, and having regard to our understanding of restructuring will mean for them, a united Nigeria under the full control of the masses of Nigeria’s working people is possible. It is what we should work for; with the working people.
There is a load of evidence on ground that the Nigerian ruling class today, along with imperialism, is an enemy of the masses. Look at the states and the local governments. There are enormous powers for economic and social transformation at both levels across Nigeria. What does the ruling class do with this power besides looting?
Having worked with the masses of our people in different locations across Nigeria, we are aware that in spite of the massive confusion the ruling class have orchestrated since 1960, we know there is an agenda for liberation around which the can, and ought to, mobilise to avoid the catastrophe that the Nigerian ruling class and imperialism are trying to impose on all of us; hence the proposal below (from ASCAB’s position paper at The People’s Alternative Political Summit (TPAPS) in Abuja, 25-27 April, 2021) which we consider a minimum agenda.
Nigerian Working Class Manifesto for true Independence of Nigeria: Seven-Point Agenda for National Unity, Economic Restructuring and Social Justice.
- We must wage a new patriotic struggle for political and economic independence of Nigeria from the two vultures. Nigeria’s working people must take their country back by declaring that the masses, not a few rich and their foreign masters, own Nigeria.
- Our movement must insist that to wipe out poverty, inequality, illiteracy, violence and crimes, Nigeria’s economy needs planning and with market mechanisms controlled by the interests of the masses of Nigeria’s working people.
- We insist that to enable planning, maximise use of our human and material resources and stop wastes, public ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy in production, distribution and exchange had become necessary; education, health, water supply, housing and environmental protection must also be principally in the public sector.
- All the IMF- and World Bank-inspired policies of reduction of the public sector, devaluation of the Naira, unending debt slavery, liberalisation of trade, removal of subsidies, sale and privatisation of public assets, etc. must be reversed immediately. Education, public health and agriculture must receive public subsidies as a priority.
- We insist that corruption is the product of the ideology of capitalist accumulation of private-sector-led economies. We see Chief Executives in handcuffs in USA and other capitalist countries almost every day; that has not reduced corruption there. Corruption will not disappear because a few scape-goats are disgraced or imprisoned! Capitalism produces and reproduces corruption because the rich also fund the ruling-class political parties! There are always members of the ruling circles that cannot be punished.
- We insist that only socialist economic planning arising from pubic control of the economy can cure an economy of the disease of periodic changes from “prosperity” to “recessions”; there is no Policy Document cure for this disease under the so-called “market-forces” economies!
- All of Nigeria’s public assets that were looted through what they call privatisation, concessioning, PPP, etc. must be taken back from the looters. Since no political party told Nigerians that public properties and assets would be sold or auctioned, all public officers and political office holders who do not accept a people-oriented organisation of the Nigerian economy as stated in Chapter II of Nigeria’s Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria must resign immediately!Concluded.
