The Nigerian government and the people leading it got the lowest rating at the opening ceremony in Abuja Monday (January 22nd) of the centenary of the passage of Vladimir Lenin, founding figure behind the socialist revolution and the emergence of the defunct USSR. The Nigerian system is denied the label of democracy and instead called a lootocracy while the people who lead it are called lootocrats.
But it is not only the governmental system that was hit. Leadership of the labour movement equally came under fierce fire, particularly the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC). They were charged with ineffective and useless leadership from which they must come out, using the opportunity offered by the centenary. NLC and TUC bashers said it didn’t make sense for a capitalist like Peter Obi to become presidential candidate of the Labour Party formed for a radical cause. Prof Nuhu Yakubu who led the attack in a section of his Keynote address wondered if Peter Obi would have anything to say if asked the question, ‘what is Marxism?’
Under fire
While the spokesperson of the NLC, Cde Benson Upah who absorbed the blows as representative of Cde Joe Ajaero, NLC president was able to respond to the charges, there was no one from any arm of the Nigerian government to respond basically because governance in Nigeria is not seen as an articulatory practice.
Speaker after speaker at the opening ceremony took a swipe at one aspect or another of a the situation in Nigeria considered to have radically deteriorated. As Prof W. O Alli who delivered the Welcome address put it, “This conference is offering us an opportunity to review the state of our nation, the grand socio-economic crisis, the high level of unemployment, the high level of poverty, the frustration and desperation among the people, the frightening scale of insecurity, and an atmosphere of desperation and suffocating misery now expressed in a growing wave of suicide in the society, compounded by growing criminality, deterioration of civility and good order, and the huge crisis facing our youth now sold on materialism and money. Meanwhile, the ruling class live in obscene affluence squandering our patrimony on debauchery and the indecent glorification of meaningless anniversaries”.
Although Nigeria was not the substantive subject matter but concern with Nigeria ran through the goodwill messages because, as Ene Obi, former Country Director of ActionAid International – Nigeria put it, “the country of the black race is going down”.
Powerful memories, emotions and interpretations of Lenin echoed at the opening ceremony which compensated the compactness of the audience with a symbolic diversity of presences (including ambassadorial level) spanning Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Canada, Ghana, USA and, above all, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, complete with standing up in solidarity with the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Ambassador to Nigeria said in his goodwill message that the war on Gaza is not war exclusively against Palestinians but all people seeking freedom any and everywhere in the world. The story of the Palestinian people is the story of all without freedom, he said.
While recognising that there was a Hamas action against Israel on October 7th, 2023, the ambassador said the Palestinians’ call for an international inquiry into that action had been set aside in favour of lies to justify the war against Gaza which he said had destroyed 60 % of Gaza, including schools and universities. Universities are rarely targeted during wars, even as early as the two world wars when European leaders agreed among themselves against doing so although some British universities were still hit during that war.
Cde Owei Lakemfa, Chairman of the Centenary Conference Committee started the case for the Palestinians by drawing attention to the paradox of Israel defeating six Arab countries in the Six-day war in 1967 within just six days but unable to achieve anything close to that for four months in a test of strength with just one Palestinian movement.
The Centenary, said Lakemfa, is to make a statement against forgetting the past or fear of ideas. The opportunity is to offer anyone who has better ideas to come forward because the world as well as Nigeria is in ruins and ‘they’ are not afraid of alternatives.
Before the ‘Labour Aristocracy’ came under fire, Cde Benson Upah read a goodwill message from NLC president, Joe Ajaero in which he said it was time to not only embrace Leninism but even make it more potent. And that Nigerians should not see the impending negotiation of new salary structure for workers as an exclusive struggle of the NLC and TUC but a struggle to overcome those who have made up their minds to pay starvation wages. Though not a worker himself, Lenin, said Ajaero, played a pivotal role in empowering the trade union movement to challenge subordination to the logic of profit.
The Socialist Movement of Ghana told the audience that Lenin showed that the world is not a given but something that can be recreated, an interesting interpretivist lens on Marxism – Leninism. He added how Lenin applied Marxist clarion call to Russia, signposts internationalism as against dividing people against ethnic and racial lines.
The International Communist League from the USA lauded Lenin’s contribution to Bolshevism and building the Bolshevik Party machine. The League does not see how any discussion of genuine national development in the borderlands of the world could be unhinged from Lenin.
Ascerbic ASUU as usual!
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) which espoused the lootocracy/lootocrats framing of contemporary governance in Nigeria also declared that the situation had reached a stage where radicals can no longer leave things to go on. Nigeria is receding and people have to, like Lenin, go beyond theory to the level of praxis, said ASUU which also posts the sure to be controversial argument too that it was not socialism that failed in Russia but state capitalism.
ASUU points out how nothing happening today in the world have not already been well covered and foretold in the literature from the leading lights in socialism.
An Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria based Marxist-Leninist caucus in those days, the Movement for Progressive Nigeria (MPN) caused a stir by hoping that the centenary would not end without a position on a socialist platform. The MPN is not sure if doing something needs necessarily be about going into the bush but it is alarmed enough to say that “the degeneration of Nigeria has reached where our own survival is at stake”.
Omoyole Sowore, presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) in the February 2023 elections in Nigeria contested the notion by an earlier speaker that the parties in Nigeria are not ideological, saying his party is. The problem is that the Left is so divided that the different fractions cannot even recognise ideology. It is to the point that nothing is left in the Left just as nothing is right in the Right wing, said Sowore who insisted that the amount of money stolen between 2015 and 2022 by one named suspect in an on-going trial is enough to pay workers 250, 000 monthly wage in Nigeria.
In obvious defiance of the ‘edict’ against the attitude of “my Marxism is better than yours”, the bearer of a goodwill message on behalf of a Chinese platform in Nigeria said Marxism – Leninism is not a model but something to be updated and read in the context of time and space. That is why the Chinese came to the position about ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics, he stated, adding that, as such, the conclusion that could be reached in Nigeria is unlikely to be the same with the one by which the Chinese have been able to raise hundreds of millions out of poverty within so short a time. The speaker came closest to a discourse approach to Marxism which only the bearer of the goodwill message from the Ghana Socialist Movement evoked.
It remains an interesting paradox that promoters of dialectical materialism/classical Marxism in Nigeria do not reckon much with Marx as the actual originator of discourse analysis in his strong emphasis on consciousness but which he cautiously subordinated to the material.
It would require more Marxism-Leninism conferences in Nigeria to overcome the theoretical and organisational problems of building a fighting Left but what is clear is the strength of socialist sentiments, particularly in the wake of collapse of ruling class consensus in the face of escalation of the Nigerian crisis to its limits. It would be interesting reading the substantive topics and discussions at the conference sessions, with particular reference to problematising.
The conference ends Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024. A communique is expected. For a start, Intervention will publish Prof WO Alli’s welcome address as soon as it is confirmed publishable.
