Who bought Nigeria?

By Omotoye Olorode

The fight within the political class in the country is threatening once more, the corporate existence of the country. Does this situation equate to John Campbell’s (2010) description of Nigeria as “dancing on the brinks”, or Karl Mier’s (sic) “the house has fallen” or Chinua Achebe’s “things fall apart”?……

Unfortunately working people have been mobilised to be partisan by accepting some of the canvassed positions which are heavily identity-based rather than ideological…

Introduction

I need to start by observing that the two quotes attributed differently to Karl Maeir and Chinua Achebe were both, actually, from Chinua Achebe! The title of Karl Maeir’s (2000) book, This House has Fallen, was actually a quote, according to Maeir, from Achebe. I must also add here that while the ruling circles in Nigeria constantly find refuge in the ethnic and confessional drums of war, commentators are not only selective regarding their evidence, they tend quite often to be “working to the answer”! I think, indeed, that the trio (Campbell, Maeir and Achebe) referred to in the NLC Concept Note (above) was doing exactly that! This “working to the answer” is indeed an indulgence of state actors and pseudo-state actors as exemplified by the publication of Colonel Christopher J. Kinnan (co-authored by four other colonels) of the US Air Force (Failed State 2030 Nigeria—A Case Study. Occasional Paper 67 (February, 2011: Centre for Strategy and Technology, Air War College Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, USA). In the circumstances, the foreign actors do not only articulate their own “national interests”, they condition the victims of imperialism and its local agents to psychologically expect collapse of their countries!

Ultimately, the various factions of the Nigerian ruling class are behind the establishment and escalation of ethno-nationalist, religious and intra-cultural antipathies, separatist ideologies and violence in our country. While they need to keep the cauldron boiling for their intra-elite negotiations, they generally prefer that the cauldron does not boil over. Consequently, they get scared when the victims of their class try to advance separatist formations and ideologies such as in MAD, Arewa Consultative Forum, Middle Belt Forum, OPC, IPOB, Egbesu, MASSOB or Arewa youth etc. do currently, and the multiplicity of sectional and alleged “religious” groups.

While the Nigerian elite is selling Nigeria to multinationals and themselves, they engage in the rowdy diversion of religious and ethno-nationalist and intra-cultural drums of war! Naomi Klein’s quotation of Arundathi Roy’s characterisation of the conjuncture of Hindu nationalism and the embrace of corporate globalisation by the Indian elite provides a perfect analogy here: “….a pincer action.With one hand, they are selling the country to multinationals. With the other hand, they are orchestrating this howling cultural nationalism”.

[The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile : Conversation with Arundathi Roy—Interview with David Barsamian, 2004: South End Press; Cambridge, Massachusetts: p. x].

But along with this ethnic war drums, there had been various intra-ethnic wars all over Nigeria within culturally and linguistically homogeneous groups. These may be exemplified, among others, byUmuleri/Aguleri conflict since the 1890s; the Ezi and Eza blow-up as late as just a couple of years ago; theOgoni/Andoni feud that led to the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa; the Tiv/Jukun conflict and the Zaki Biam Massacre; the Ife/Modakeke conflict, etc. There are various other bloody intra-community clashes that never made the headlines.

Legendary opulence among the elite side-by-side with mass poverty among ordinary people across Nigeria.

But something fundamental, tremendous private wealth, separates the masses of the Nigerian people from the elite many of who held public offices or were/are closely tied to government the state power of resource allocation. Depending on where they come from or sequester their wealth, they have been variously identified as Kaduna Mafia; the Nnewi Mafia;the Langtang Mafia; the Ibadan Mafia; the Kaduna Mafia; the Ilorin Mafia; the Lagos Mafia; Bayelsa Mafia; the Minna Mafia, etc., etc.

Of course, any noteworthy member of any of the foregoing mafias has his or her big knife on the big cake called Lagos and the one called Abuja! Members of these formations are also the same as wrecked the so-called failed banks, the Stock Exchange, etc. They are the ones that milked the country dry in the Petroleum Development Fund (PTDF) scam and the Fuel Subsidy frauds!

In a feature on the so-called Langtang Mafia captioned Mafia without clout? The News(7^th June 1993:p.12) commented as follows:

“….lacking in basic amenities, Langtang hardly merits its reputation as the watering hole of the famous Mafia….

[there is a] house is popularly referred to as ECOMOG because it was built during his brief tenure as ECOMOG commander. The house is an architectural masterpiece, painted brown reddish with tennis court, swimming pool and satellite dishes, gulped close to N3 million. It also boasts of a conference hall that can accommodate about 500 people at a go”.

We see replicas of the above all over Nigeria!

Sharia, and Religious Violence in the North (in the early 2000s)

Over the epidemic of Sharia Law Declarations in many parts of the north, M.D. Yusuf was quoted  regarding resort to manipulation of religion there (Maeir, p. 144) as saying:

“Sure the northern leaders are angry. It is natural. Anyone who has the feeling of power and then loses it will not take it happily”. However, Maeir (Ibid.) noted perceptively: “….the teeming impoverished masses of the north harboured a quiet rage over more mundane matters, such as their lack of clean water, decent schools, health clinics and jobs. As much as counterparts in the Niger Delta or the slums of Lagos, they saw the hoped for benefits of civilian rule passing them by.”

Maeir (Ibid) observed further: “President Obasanjo [OBJ], perhaps worried that his born again Christian faith and his southern Yoruba ethnicity would disqualify him as a neutral arbiter in the dispute dawdled and hoped that the brouhaha would fizzle. It didn’t.”

Religious violence and murders occurred in Kaduna where CAN opposed the prospects of Sharia. Many were killed and /or displaced. The violence moved to Aba where over 400 were reported killed. OBJ called a meeting of northern governors for Feb.27 2000; but Kano already signed Sharia into law. In President Obasanjo’s March 1 2000 nation-wide broadcast he railed on the autocracy of past leaders and mindlessness of the citizens as the cause of the crisis and assured foreign investors that Nigeria was on course. Foreign investors, not Nigerian people!

In his report of his interview with Ibrahim Dasuki, the same Karl Maeir (Ibid, pp. 158-159) observed as follows: “Dasuki’s invocation of God’s will is echoed often by northern Nigerians especially the rich and powerful when attempting to justify their privileged position in an ocean of poverty. Dasuki explained: ‘What you get and what you don’t get is from Allah’. Not all northerners agree with this philosophy. There are others, less patient Muslims who regard the succession of Muslims military leaders and their allies among the Emirs are un-Islamic. Although they are still a far cry from Dan Fodio’s jihad, these groups have gained steady ground in the slums of Kano, Zaria and Kaduna, especially among the unemployed youth who are known as yandaba, or‘sons of evil’ in Hausa.”

The case of the permission of Reverend Reinhard Bonnke to preach in Kano (1991) and denial of permission to Louis Farrakan and a South African Muslim preacher (Ahmed Deedat) are also often cited as examples of what appear as deliberate programmes of the ruling circles to create religious conflicts and confusion! All these turn urban centres to hell for all concerned!

History of the strategic manipulation of ethnic, religious and geo-political divisionsas a negotiating instrument when the ruling class is in trouble.

1966: Leaders of Thought, Aburi, Meetings following the January coup and the pogroms in parts of Northern Nigeria.

1993: The May 25th Otta Summit of the Generals. Just a few days before the June 12th, 1993 Polls! And 6 months (!) after the November 17th, 1992 cancellation of the Ciroma/Yar’Adua NRC/SDP primaries!

The Otta kind of summits and confabs have become routine for ruling-class mediated negotiations among ethnic and confessional notables They have been re-invented repeatedly as veritable diversions from increasing impatience of the oppressed with the crimes of the various ethnic and confessional notables of the ruling class. Among the more notable of the jamborees were The Abacha Confab, the Obasanjo Ford-sponsored Confab, and the Goodluck Jonathan Confab of 2014 in which Conferees (including many of our NGO and CSO stalwarts, “activists”, and ethnic irredentists and alleged “religious” leaders) were reported to have collected upwards of N12 millioneach!

Conferees in many of these Confabs were handpicked nominees of incumbent rulers. Of course, the confabs were also characterised by high doses of Muslims/Christians horse trading and balancing and thus distorting the crisis of poverty, exploitation and ruling-class greed as resulting from tribal and religious differences in the country.

In all these public debates and government-sponsored confabs, mainstream ruling-class media at local and international levels, especially the latter, float tendentious reportage insisting on characterising the “north” as Hausa-Fulani Muslim and the “south” as “Christian and animist”! In the wake of the Action Group crisis of 1962 in Western Region, a Kaduna-based daily further fuelled the “anti-North” sentiment in the then Western Region by referring to it as the “Wild, wild, West”! Thirty years later, a Lagos magazine, in the thick of the Sharia crisis and the Tiv/Jukun conflict on the Plateau, carried an issue headline, “Wild, wild, North”!

Compared with the September 1989 Alternative to SAP Conference at Gani Fawehinmi’s  Chambers and the September 6-9 1990 National Consultative Forum (NCF) National Conference at Iganmu, both of which were disrupted by armed police, ruling class confabs were largely confabs of nationalities in which the agendas completely ignore the economic and class foundations of the Nigerian crisis. Even the PRONACO of 1995 (led by Enahoro, Soyinka etc.) was largely about ethno-nationalism and it was notdisrupted by police.

Party formations since independence and even before were also based on ethnic alliances and calculations.

Claude Ake’s perceptive observation (1978) that the origin of political crisis and underdevelopment had been the pre-occupation of African ruling class with private accumulation as subalterns o the ruling classes of bourgeois (imperialist) nations.The ruling class cannot mobilise the masses for this preoccupation; hence the strategic and extremely efficacious utility of the manipulation of ethnic and confessional antipathies among the oppressed. This is also why the labour movement and organised labour are the strategic formations that can build and sustain solidarity and fraternity among the masses of the Nigerian people; they have always been—as organised labour (NLC, TUC), organised youth and the students’movement, professional associations (the Nigerian Bar Association, the Nigerian Medical Association), women, and the intellectuals (journalists, academics,etc.).

Precisely because of ruling-class preoccupation with private accumulation and because of their inability to mobilise mass political support on that basis, their so-called political parties are set up for that purpose of, and as associations for, negotiating processes and magnitudes of accumulation.This explains the general instability of the horse-trading associations they call political parties!

There are, therefore, no political parties in Nigeria even under the so-called democratic dispensations! What they call political parties are actually traders’ associations in which individuals move freely and unceremoniously from one formation to another! Kwankwaso relocated from PDP to APC and is now being rumoured to be relocating back to PDP ahead of 2019 and his rumoured ambition to be president of Nigeria. Obanikoro is said to have joined APC from PDP; just to cite more recent examples!

Two primary conflicts arise from this kind of situation:

(1) Conflicts between the rulers and the masses of the oppressed; (2) Conflicts within the ruling circles.One conflict is inter-class; the other is intra-class.

Andbeyond myths and rumours, if we will understand the basis of poverty, inequality and generalised violence in Nigeria, we must ask WHO ARE THE OWNERS OF NIGERIA? WHO BOUGHT NIGERIA? Are they just Hausa-Fulani, Ibibio, Igbo, Yoruba, Andoni, Ijaw,  Tiv, Idoma, or constantly mushrooming conspiracies inside the elites from these groups? Are they Muslims or Christians? Who “bought” or who are the owners of thereal estate –Osborne, Abuja, Ikoyi, Port Harcourt? Who own thebanks, insurance companies and the Pension Fund Administrations; who bought the auctioned power Discos and the Gencos? Who owns the Private Universities? Who owns Oil and gas companies, the Oil Prospecting Licences etc.? Who owns the Airlines and the Shipping lines to which public investments have handed over massive airport and shipping port infrastructures? Who bought public-owned Cement factories? Who are fronts for Fronts of MNCs? Who stole what at Federal and State levels in the bureaucracies?

The Intellectuals (including some of the radical ones) in the ethnic and religious affray.

Was there ever an organisation called Centre for Middle Belt Studies (CMBS) with a Doctor Zabadi Senior Research Fellow, National Defence College Abuja from Adamawa as the arrow head? And, allegedly, sponsored by Danjuma through Jerry Gana and John Darah?

Is there a Ph.D. thesis of University of Keele by a late Dr. Paul Logams of the University of Jos titled: The Middle Belt Movement in Nigerian Political Development: A study in Political Identity 1949-1967 which argued forcefully a religious definition of the Middle Belt that “all parts of the north where there are Christians in substantial number [Southern Borno, the Zuru in Kebbi, Southern Kaduna, the non-Emirate areas of Adamawa and Taraba, the Maguzawa settlements in Kano and Katsina, plus the core Benue, Plateau, Kogi, Kwara, Niger, etc.] as Middle Belt?

This definition is not geographical in the sense of North Central Zone, nor political in terms of the minority question, nor even communitarian in terms of people sharing a specific cultural or ecological space; but Christianity!”

In President Goodluck Jonathan’s 2014 Conference, a coalition defined a Greater South [southern Nigeria and religious Middle Belt] as opposed to Gideon Okar’s Caliphal or Core North. The coalition is said to include intellectual and ethnic-nationalist activists of Delta, Middle Belt, Igbo and Yoruba extractions.

Restructuring for Economic and Social Transformation: Working Class and Nigerian Nationalist position.

Nigeria’s ruling class is a doomed class; their “reforms”, being anti-people, are also doomed. They can always produce and reproduce themselves. To abandon Nigeria to this class is to condemn Nigeria to barbarism. Only the victims of the existing order and their allies have abiding interest in building a united and more humane Nigeria. That was why it was the Nigerian labour movement that forced the Political Debate of 1986 and got the Cookey Political Bureau to conclude that the masses of the Nigerian people insist on a Socialist Transformation of Nigeria. It was also the Nigerian labour movement, also in 1986, that exposed the program of the military regime, during the IMF Loan Debate, to sell Nigeria into IMF/World Bank slavery. On both counts, the military wing of the Nigerian ruling class and their civilian friends across the country betrayed the Nigerian people. We are still in the slavery in 2017—thirty years after!

A formidable working peoples’ organisation rooted in the toilers, the patriots and their allies need to be forged now! This is what makes a nationalist and anti-imperialist people’s organisation imperative today. In broad outline, and flowing from the heritage of Nigeria’s working-class movement and the Nigerian nationalist movement, the vision of the proposed working people’s organisation or movement must be guided by three central commitments. The first commitment is to build a united Nigeria with a united people who are genuinely sovereign. The second is commitment to a just and humane economic order in which the welfare of the people is the primary goal of the state and in which the resources of our land and their exploitation and allocation are under the full control of the toiling people thus immediately enabling the minimum of a welfare state and incremental socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. The third commitment of the movement will be the pursuit of a social and cultural policy that promotes cultural freedom and solidarity among our people, and frees their minds from superstitions and from ethnic and confessional prejudices.

Labour and Working-Class Position onConstitutional, Procedural and Technical Elements of Restructuring for Economic and Social Transformation.

The three elements of the task of labour and the labour movement articulated above are congruent with the NLC Labour Policy Document of 2007.

All of the forgoing underlies the position of the Nigerian Labour Movement as encapsulated in The Position of Labour at the National Conference submitted to the National Conference organized by the Federal Government of Nigeria at Abuja between March and June, 2014.

Why the labour movement is committed to the unity of Nigeria: There is no contradiction between National Policy Coordination and Devolution of Powers.

There is the overall tendency of the divisive forces in our country to pose the question of Restructuring as a question arising from the alleged “antagonisms”, ”incompatibility” or fundamental “cultural” or “historical” differences of the Nigerian peoples.We are quite often confronted with the clearly self-serving, but false, allegations that the British “forced these incompatible peoples together”. The truth is that what constitute various cultural groups today evolved as major movements and integration of distinctive groups in the 14th, 15th and 16^th centuries [i.e.about four to five centuries] ago. Most of the so-called Northerners/Southerners were not Muslims or Christians from the beginning of time; these identities emerged only as few centuries hence! It is these clearly newly acquired identities that the ruling class now manipulate to divide, rule and exploit our peoples. The continual invention of new identities by the exploiting classes had also led to new wars within, between and among states and local governments.

The truth is also that economic and cultural contact, cooperation and integration among our peoples occurred and developed among distant and contiguous cultural, linguistic and geographical spaces leading to economic, cultural and linguistic exchanges and mutually beneficial exchanges among our peoples. In actual fact, tribalist ideologies did not surface in the politics of Nigerian nationalists until about 1945! That was when disparaging remarks, quite subversive about the viability of the “Nigeria Project”, became rampant among politicians who were   parading themselves as regional “leaders”.

Only the labour movement (as organized labour, in the political parties and in the organizations of the women, peasants and the youth) remained focused on, and committed to a united Nigeria. The reasons for this are not difficult for the masses of the Nigerian people to fathom. The demographic advantages of a united Nigeria are obvious from the insistently massive spread and mixture of our peoples across Nigeria, the continuous validation of the advantages of the economic and cultural ties among them in the nooks and crannies of the country; all these in spite of the equally insistent manipulation of history and of differences by the Nigerian ruling class at nationality and sub-nationality levels. To the foregoing clear advantages and Nigeria’s unity and diversity, we must add the enabling advantages of diverse ecological, agricultural and environmental factors that provide almost infinite possibilities of exchangeable natural resources without boarder restrictions and disabilities. Ample attention also need to be paid to the consequences of the fragmentation of Nigeria’s oppressed in fragmented enclaves still dominated by this same ruling-class authorities and where they will impose and implement, capricious slave wages, withhold worker’s salaries for months, and run local and state police systems that will be at the beck-and-call of those authorities; we have gone through this bitter experience in Nigeria’s first republic; and subsequently.

We must re-iterate here, for the avoidance of any doubt, the robustness of the position of Labour on the question of Devolution of Power from the Federal Government to lower levels as canvassed in the Position of Labour at the National Conference in 2014. Labour, indeed, conceive this devolution as the fundamental and ultimate basis of popular ownership and control of the commanding heights of production, distribution and exchange in our country.

Nigerian Working Class Manifesto for Transformative Restructuring: Eight-Point Agenda for Economic Democracy and Social Justice. 

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. All the IMF- and World Bank-inspired policies of reduction of the public sector, devaluation of the Naira, 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.

5. 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 just 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.

6. 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 cure for this disease under the so-called “market-forces” economies!

7. All of Nigeria’s public assets that were looted through what they call privatisation, concessioning, Public-Private Partnership, etc. must be taken back from the looters.

8. 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 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria must resign immediately!

Being Olorode’s contribution presented at the NLC Colloquium on “The Labour Movement and the Future of a United Nigeria: What Role for Restructuring”? Sheraton Hotel, Abuja: Aug. 23, 2017.

Views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of TheCable.