Harvest of abandoned or badly managed strategic projects
A very bad example of a strategic project that is lost to economic chaos and policy inconsistency by a national ruling class
Simon Kolawole has written a piece, (don’t know when as it bears December 6th, 2019) but which is just being circulated massively among WhatsApp chat groups. In one sentence, the piece most graphically interrogates and dismisses the agency of what passes for the ruling class, (in both the Marxist and empirical sense of the concept) in Nigeria. In street grammar, he finished them, with a powerful caricature. His is the post Cold War epitaph to a long running matter in Left circles.
Does Nigeria have a ruling class was an ever present question, one way or the other in that circle. It was implied in the notion of looking at the domestic bourgeoisie as junior partners of their foreign counterpart, especially on the basis of what the late Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim told Parliament as early as 1961 about how impotent the Nigerian ruling class is when it comes to testing strength against their foreign counterpart, an admission quoted at length in ex-OAU, Ife Historian, Prof Segun Osoba’s 1978 essay with the memorable but prophetic title of ‘The Deepening Crisis of the Nigerian National Bourgeoisie’. That essay consolidated the idea of classifying the ruling class as an ‘Ijebu’ ruling class, meaning a fake bourgeoisie, mere traders, importers and exporters rather than an industrial bourgeoisie capable of patriotic, industrial transformation of the economy. Also now late Claude Ake added petrol when he dismissed the Indigenization exercise as a case of distinction without difference because of the insignificance of the spheres of investment from which the foreign patrons were excluded.
The most constant star of the Nigerian establishment , successfully transforming from the class of the ‘militariat’ to a capitalist farmer
Another constant star but who is difficult to classify but certainly not a capitalist in the classical sense
It was the now late Prof Eskor Toyo who killed this progression. It must be in one of the books published as outcome of the series of Government House, Kano seminars under the Rimi administration between 1979 and 1983. Eskor Toyo’s argument is that where the domestic bourgeoisie wants to assert itself, it does so and that such a national bourgeoisie cannot be called junior partners of their foreign counterpart without qualification. The Murtala riot act to the foreign partners in 1976, the nationalization of BP before Toyo’s intervention and the Buhari tit-for-tat with Britain over Umaru Dikko gave Toyo’s analysis credibility apart from his own stature in Left politics. Dr. Yusuf Bangura, an Ahmadu Bello University academic had added spice to Toyo’s direction too in reading the 2nd National development Plan as a product of Third Worldist orientation championed by the technocratic section of the ruling class in favour of shaking off foreign dominance towards independent, nationalist and anti-imperialist economic policies. The nationalist sentiment running through the pages of the Plan could be summed up in the phrase that “a nation cannot plan what it does not control”. That is very similar to what Toyo had said in his 1980 essay, “The Mode of Production “Nucleus” as Integrator of Economic and Political Sciences” where he talked of the African context of nurture capitalism as having “patriotic and “state-socialist” sentiments of the Bismarck variety reflected in the ideology of “mixed economy” which affect the way in which primitive accumulation is encouraged by the state in ideology and in fact”.
petty bourgeois politicians and their present day technocrats, (the Osinbajos and Boss Mustaphas)
the archetypal comprador bourgeoisie
But, true to the zigzag nature of history, the technocratic section of the ruling class was what the military purge of the mid 1970s targeted. By the time the military fraction was done with the purge, there was no more and never again a technocratic section of the ruling class with a nationalist self – understanding. The universities were also destroyed in the same manner. Today, the universities and the civil service are mere shadows of what they used to be.
And what is there to show for it, seriously speaking, in the absence of infrastructure, social services, security and what have you?
Where else can the people turn to if not to religion,the soul of a souless world?
There is the view that, as things are today, Nigeria is not just confronted with a ruling class nobody can confidently classify, it is, in fact, confronted with a ruling class which has become a threat to the very idea of Nigeria. This is precisely the point in Kolawole’s column and which is to say that every ruling class has a back-breaking mission of building a nation state. Building a modern nation state is a very difficult task but a ruling class is a ruling class only because it possesses or must possess the extra capability of overcoming whatever difficulties it finds on its way, be it the Americans, the British, the French, the Germans, the Australians, the Canadians, the Koreans on both sides and the Chinese, amongst others. Some even had to engage in colonialism to save itself from the wrath of the people asking for bread, bread, bread. And then the more recent examples Kolawole listed – Japanese, the Dutch, the Emirati, each of which had to confront insurmountable cultural, geopolitical or natural roadblocks.
So, the argument of a fake or not fake ruling class has come back full circle, courtesy of someone who might not have read all these essays and might have had nothing to do with Left politics. Kolawole has undercut all the excuses the ruling class tender for running away from accomplishing a great nation with the countries he selected. Praised for putting in place institutional mechanisms such as Federal Character principle, Quota, NYSC and so on for managing diversity conflict, the ruling class slide of today into localism and voodoo development thinking is shocking. In the late 1980s, someone said Nigeria should be rented to the brains that built what was then NICON-NOGA Hilton, now Transcorp Hilton, Abuja. Some Nigerians looked at the speaker in a manner that made him flee in his own interest. But, considering that a 2nd Republic governor also called for the return of the British and given the number of Nigerians doing everything possible to flee the country, is it not time for the members of the ruling class to think again and resolve their crisis of mission quickly? This is simply because they will be in trouble as soon as the common folks and the Kolawoles refuse to be sold diversionary excuses of ethno-religious incompatibility, regional inequality and such other fairy tales.
