If the Nigerian Left or what remains of it has not publicly acknowledged Peter Obi for forcing an ontological moment in there, it might only be because the recovery from the Obi shocker for it is understandably slow. Otherwise, Peter Obi has, without knowing it, triggered a moment in radical Left and things will never be the same again. Surely, only very few elements of the Left – of whichever tendency – would not have secretly wished that it were one of its stars rather than a Peter Obi who came to be the signifier of the “dissident” imagination and on the platform of the Left’s own party – the Labour Party.
For a Peter Obi who only four years ago was the Vice-Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), this reality challenges everything that the dominant kind of Marxism in the Nigerian Left speaks to, especially the dogma of the pre-given revolutionary agency of the working class and the primacy of the economy determining social relations of production and all those stuff. But, instead of any of that, Peter Obi proved the superiority of the contention about the constructedness of reality in a contingent manner. Obi, a super capitalist merchant, could have become the elected president of Nigeria on the platform of the Left party about which he knows almost nothing regarding the founding intention, the agenda or vision. The very successful representation of the Obi candidacy to certain audiences in national politics as the answer to the current crisis and on the basis of which Obi went far provides the most recent rupturing of Foundationalism as an ontological category.
What Obi’s productive enterism has so clearly brought out is that the Left has been a peripheral actor in Nigerian politics not because it lacks the financial and human resources but because it has become a victim of its directive principle and the weaknesses of that directive principle. More than the constraints of Western metaphysics on classical Marxism, there is the current pluralism that any emancipatory agenda must take into consideration through a logic of equivalence frame rather than a casual concession. Let’s exemplify this point in a polity such as Nigeria. What would be more exclusionary and inconsiderate than subordinating the victimhood of women to the category of the working class in the 2st century when more women die due to maternal mortality than anything that the working class suffers? What manner of structural violence can be more than this? The argument before now is that it is workers who have a strategic location in the dynamics of capitalism as to have the burden of the overthrow of capitalism. But, what of the indigenous peoples that capitalism chases around the world, expropriating their land, ancestry, identity and livelihood? Is it still possible to insist that they do not have a strategic location in the dynamics of capitalism, especially after David Harvey’s thesis of the ‘Spatial Fix’ as one of the major ways by which capitalism has managed to keep re-inventing itself? Emancipation politics must speak the language which the confluence of victims of the entrenched order must understand because, as has been argued, “…, contemporary political mobilisation gave the lie to the notions of agency preferred by Marxists. The radicalism of the late twentieth century was not necessarily ‘class’ in character, but rather one propelled by specific injustices, oppressions and exclusions that pointed towards an amelioration of the system, rather than its overthrow. It was the ‘new social movements’ who provided political energy and impetus to change, not the working class, which was merely one among a number of political actors who had to be addressed by radical theorists”.
It is not only the Left in Nigeria that has this problem. The only difference between the Left in Nigeria and other Left formations is the level of awareness of the limitations of foundationalism and the various attempts to overcome it. The tragedy in Nigeria is the near absolute lack of recognition of the limitations vis-a- vis the plausible ways out within the context and constraints of the Nigerian situation. Without such attempt at collective/organisational self-updating, it finds itself in paradoxical moments best illustrated by the Obi enterism and about which the Left was and is completely unable to do anything.
It was total disarray instead of a collective anything. Some of the Left members didn’t accept the ontological sacrilege. Others became its cheer leaders while some others kept quiet. This is the scenario the Left is also heading in the event that Asiwaju Tinubu is inaugurated. The Left will end up in that government not as a collective but through consensual absorption via Asiwaju’s personal links to established individuals in Left politics. Such a reality is not necessarily good or bad EXCEPT that the process of absorption will be over and above the Left formation in any organisational sense.
What this means is a Left ideologically, ethically and organisationally so weak as to be so vulnerable to any of Obi or Tinubu and even an Atiku Abubakar were Atiku’ politics conscious of invading and incorporating Left elements. So also Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso if he tried. With a read cap symbol, some Left would have had no qualms going over and rationalising that by connecting Kwankwaso to the Aminu Kano trajectory.
This level of vulnerability has never been the case. There have been Left elements who thought they had overgrown Left politics and became professional politicians, with many of them making a success of it in bourgeois terms but, other than those, no Left ever left to serve a party or government without the nod. And it was publicly acknowledged in most cases.
The Left in Nigeria must update itself. There’s a sense of the craving for that among a section of the Left but the suffocating grip of a particular detachment has acted as a fetter on that tendency to updating. Otherwise, there was a strong hint of the need for updating which came via the question that drove the 2018 version of the ‘Marxism in Africa’ Conference series: why is the world no longer experiencing revolutions as we knew it?
That question appeared to have been borne out of the problems that radical politics in the Leninist foundational moment has encountered between 1945 and 1965. Although it is debatable if these problems are universal since they all happened on the European soil, it seems the elements within the Nigerian Left that framed that question appreciated that nearly all the intellectual and ideological responses to the problems have an African origin. This is in the sense that nearly all the French thinkers who put different critiques of orthodoxy derived the inspiration directly and indirectly from what they saw in the Algerian struggle for independence, be it Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Fanon. Ernesto Laclau who didn’t have this connection is a Peronist with many years of involvement in radical politics. His wife, though a Belgian, studied under the French thinkers under reference.
Putting together the most cruel manifestations of orthodoxy in the First and Second World wars, the Holocaust, colonialism, the crisis of Socialism in the defunct USSR and East Europe, the violence involved in suppressing the Algerian war of independence, the rise of nationalism and populism, the successful imposition of neoliberalism globally, the problems of Empire and race and, above all, the pluralistic identity crisis that the articulation of capitalism had brought about, these scholar-activists fell back on forebears such as the Frankfurt Scholars and Gramsci to come to the conclusion that, in spite of the great insights of classical Marxism, it has the major defect of impossibilising politics itself. And they advanced alternative approaches towards overcoming the junctions, particularly the notion that politics is superior to the economy. And they provided certain new concepts and practices by which this makes sense.
There is still no consensus on that but a sharp awareness of the attendant debates and the limit and potential of each alternative strategy has become a requirement for any progress in radical politics. The Nigerian Left does not suggest it accepts this analysis or that it cannot move into being a factor in Nigerian politics without re-mastering these updating itself on these debates. Individuals within it might have mastered them but certainly not the block. The dominant language or expressions do not show any sign of coming to grips with these updates in an organisational sense and deploying what is most suitable in relation to Nigeria.
There is thus nothing surprising that the question and the implications it embodies for the theoretical must, I am sure, be troubling most members of the radical assemblage in Nigeria today. The question must be how it came to be that the Left in Nigeria has said nothing of consequence as another of Nigeria’s most pregnant moment unfolded since the party primaries in 2022 which threw up the elements whose election or non-election are in debates now and on the tense moment after the February 25th, 2023 presidential poll and its aftermath? The Left would have been the only credible voice standing at a time when statesmanship and moral authority of individual agency are most lacking in Nigeria. A Left without political presence with particular reference to setting the borders of the debates, who to be put in his or her place when it comes to rhetorical recklessness, which fraction to privilege on a particular issue and vice versa and which hawks to chase away before coming to chide careless chicks so as to, in all cases, moderate intra-class quibbling to keep them within the bounds of law and order becomes, without design, an accomplice of whatever implosion the current tension results into. In the current level of material development of the world, the most immediate task of all agencies connected with emancipatory politics in a setting such as Nigeria is disciplining an inherently chaotic elite and doing so organisationally.
There lies the tragedy at hand that the Nigerian Left which has paid its due years back is not going to be a variable in the impending negotiation of stability in Nigeria. Without its own rich and critical insights into the nature of the struggle for control of the centre, other actors will force their way in, frame the crisis from the own perspective with implications for the solutions but only for the Left to start complaining about imperialism and neocolonialism.
All said and done, the Left is needed as a balancer in Nigerian politics. This is more so as the querulous Nigerian elite steps back to review, compensate and reconcile themselves after the bitter fight for offices in the just concluded series of elections, a process within which popular democratic interests of the people will not feature, except by accident.
Does the solution lie in a strategy of looking back so as to move more brilliantly into the immediate future? Perhaps, an organizational self-review will benefit from editing, publishing and making a big show of the minutes of meetings of the defunct Socialist Congress of Nigeria, (SCON) because the minutes will show a glorious past and the areas that needs reworking. With that big event, it will launch itself into articulatory politics within which what it wants can be constructed to acquire the force of action. Freed from the constraints of narrativised ontological categories, it can then gather the confluences of victims of marginality into a ‘historic block’, speak to them in a language they can understand so that they too can speak truth to power in their own interest. Otherwise, Left politics in Nigeria will remain nothing but a space of show!