By Adagbo Onoja
Nigeria’s Prof Adele Jenaidu has been the source of a number of conceptual innovations of late. Hardship and hunger should not prevent us from further engagement with them. One of such conceptual innovations is judicial activism. For those who subscribe to relationality of meaning, that concept promises a lot were it to be more pugnaciously reinscribed in the national public sphere. Now, the Prof has moved to the rhetorical question of where that coalition that produced democracy defining discourses between 1980s and 2000 has melted into. With food riots across Nigeria, the case for a coalition implied by that rhetorical question is made. No concept or practice can be more strategic than such a coalition, more so that Jenaidu was talking about a coalition in a specific sense of it: the moral and cultural leadership that can lead in articulatory warfare which Gramsci emphasised rather than the tactical sense that Lenin preferred.
There can be no debate about it that Nigeria in particular had a sophisticated version of this form of coalition, a claim we do not need to prove beyond citing a few definitive signifiers of that process.
Prof Eskor Toyo would be a consensus candidate for Chief Doctrine Officer of that coalition. His mastery of the underpinning of the concepts, paradigms and practices were not direct capture of the original. His mediation of any such concepts with examples from actually existing capitalism meant that he did not just consume Marxism, he always added value. All it will require to test this is to read again his essay in the edition of the Nigerian Journal of Political Science in 1981 which had the Bala Usman – Sam Oyovbaire debate on the cover. His insistence on distinguishing dialectics as a special form of thinking and how he sought to demonstrate that by using a semi-industrial economy such as Nigeria speaks to that uncommon depth and a striving for originality.
In this edition is to be found Prof Eskor Toyo’s arguably most creative essay
Bala Usman was, unarguably, the chief provocateur for the coalition. He specialised in pointing out the nationalist or patriotic deficits of the power elite, hoping they would one day feel embarrassed by such deficits. There is no doubt that he focused on the northern fraction of the power elite, hammering them for harbouring anti-modernist tendencies and therefore suggesting, wrongly, that the other regional fractions were inclined to transformation. 1999 to date has shown that Bala Usman was wrong on that but no one would deny him the title earlier assigned to him. He was absolutely consistent on that. His For the Liberation of Nigeria remains an excellent documentation of the elementary malfeasance of the postcolonial state in action in Nigeria.
There was Claude Ake whose title has to be thought out. He was certainly the boldest, if one took as evidence, the title of his books: Social Science as Imperialism, Revolutionary Pressures in Africa, Feasibility of Democracy, Democracy and Development. There is a particular paper he wrote which one cannot recollect off – head but which coincided with the post-foundational Marxism about the primacy of the political in social relations although, in his case, he was accounting for the mess in Africa. At the time he circulated the paper in the mid1980s, one had to be an Ake to do so. As far as every book or essay is an articulatory practice, it makes no sense to say that the totality of his interventions were academic. There is no such China Wall between a theory and a political rally. A book is actually a non-stop political rally. We have to say ‘thank you, Ake’. It is as if he anticipated early death and wrote some of his works so that he could still be part of the conversation long after he is gone to his ancestors.
The coalition was dominated by the intellectuals and the list of the top flight elements cannot but be them. But there was someone who was not in that mould but who was no less. Alao Aka Bashorun was him. He was in the same rank with Sidi Ali Sirajo and SG Ikoku but I say this strictly in the sense that all three of them were formal students at Nkrumah School of ideology. They had been in Winneba, meaning that they were trained Socialists as opposed to those who became socialists on the pages of newspapers while doing something else.
Aka Bashorun remained faithful to that training, rejecting co-optation into the Babangida regime because he could not imagine drafting detention decrees. It is debatable if that were pragmatic enough since someone who never heard of socialism took that job and did it ONLY to the best of his ability when an Aka Bashorun could have been a powerful influence around the Babangida regime. The debate will remain a debate because orthodox socialists harbour the mistaken notion that the state is an instrument of the bourgeoisie when in truth, the state, like any other object, can only be a contested space. As long as that belief reigns, most socialists will take the Aka BasHorun option, reducing the sources of emancipatory practices that a single qualitative individual can unleash even in a most hopeless government especially if appointed as a candidate of a platform rather than as an individual.
Aka Bashorun therefore leaves the coalition with an essentialism to be re-debated. Is it that the state is an instrument of the bourgeoisie or that the bourgeoisie do find it easier to clobber the state? The two things do not mean the same thing. Belief in the state as an instrument of the bourgeoisie implies the pointlessness of counter-hegemonic politics or the impossibility of a counter-hegemonic agenda.
The other key point about Aka Bashorun is that he remained an organisation person to the last day. In other words, he would find Bonapartism a strange culture of leadership. He did give the Democratic Alternative (DA) that benefit of quality leadership at a very dark moment.
Another scholar practitioner was Mahmud Modibbo Tukur (not to be confused with Mahmud Tukur generally regarded as a leading philosopher of the Kaduna Mafia and Minister for Commerce under the Buhari regime in 1983) This Mahmud M. Tukur was the one – time president of ASUU and the author of the Minority Report in the FG Committee on privatisation in 1984. The report in question defines his radicalism because every word uttered in it have come to happen as he predicted. Interestingly, it was the same Buhari who accepted the Minority Report in 1985 who turned around to smash it between 2015 and 2023. Beyond ASUU leadership, he is a foremost Historian as testified to by his tradition of historiography and his PhD thesis on British colonialism which has since been posthumously published. He was above chauvinism – ethnic, religious, cultural or geographical.
Let us round off this exemplification with Prof Festus Iyayi. Iyayi’s forte was creativity, illustrating the dehumanising evidences of the postcolonial order. Some of his critics say he was converting the novel into political statements, thereby degrading the literary. That criticism used to apply to the entirety of African literature which was accused of being sociological treatises rather than the literary. Now that the criticism has subsided in the face of decoloniality should suggest that the original criticism may not escape imprisonment in a court not presided over by judges suffering from residual Eurocentrism. Iyayi was different in another respect. He did not just critique and criticise the system, he set agenda for the system, in whichever realm thinkable. Lastly, his SG reports to the Socialist Congress of Nigeria (SCON) predicted EVERYTHING happening in Nigeria today and EXACTLY the way they are happening. And he was SG around 1989.
He shared something with Ake: the intellectual as a professional who can survive without selling his brain to any bidder but by doing something which could earn him or her decent money. He did not follow the Ake strategy of doing this but it is the same strand of versatility at a time when evil is on rampage against an intellectual who knows his onion in conceptual, theoretical, methodological and empirical senses and can deploy them. He made more money as a temporary consultant when Mammangida sacked him from the services of the University of Benin. He got the job back because the judge had the courage to see through what played out.
At organisational or institutional level, let us mention the flagbearers of the coalition: ASUU, NANS, the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) of the Second Republic, NANS, Women in Nigeria (WIN), SCON and, above all, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC).
Back to Prof Jenaidu’s clarion call: what happened that, one by one, each of these individuals and organisations, started melting into thin air, never to reappear in the form in which they were?
By mid-2000, all but one of the six flag bearers named earlier, had died. Only Eskor Toyo lived to old age. Except Aka Basorun and Toyo, all the rest died strangely. Mahmud Modibbo was the first to go. He was asthmatic but some people believe it was not Asthma that killed him. Ake died in one of the okwu-eko aircrafts permitted by SAP economy. Bala Usman died of malaria (in the 21st century) and Iyayi was killed in a road accident.
Splits followed splits in each of these organizations, each split followed by take-over by ‘strangers.’ The universities were turned upside down, with secret service operatives pretending to be students but whose assignment was to intimidate others, especially student activists. That was how campus cultism was born. Regular students copied from those original ones. The universities were soon taken over by stronger Muslim Students Society (MSS) platforms, Charismatic groups, Scripture Unions and all manner of expressivism that were hitherto either strange or infinitesimal. Media diversification cut both ways: it widened outlets for voices that would otherwise not have been heard but it gave room for new moneymen to establish and control media content. The diversity of voices fell to the diversity of ownership. NGOism took over as the dominant expression of the emergent civil society. That offered society a lot of advantages but the lever on NGOs in Africa does not normally lie within.
The origin of misery, enmity, confusion, splits, fights, etc
Prof Iyayi
The combination of features were such that by 1999 when democracy berthed, the atmosphere had changed ASUU remained a fighting body but the democracy – in – town choir was such a loud ensemble that it did not take long before democracy was replaced with sycophancy.
The collapse of the USSR and the split in the Left had created problems of understanding of what happened to Socialism and whether it still made sense. The cadres that understood and practicalised a National democratic revolution in the 1980s had been routed from the leading radical platforms. The system successfully filtered those it recruited as governors, ministers, legislators. Chief Obasanjo who was thought to have come as an elevated statesperson got into petty fights, coming out from many of them bloodied. 1999 was thus not when democracy was operationalised at an elevated level as was done in the Gulf states, if we must cite an example. What that meant is that as brilliant as the coalition Prof Jenaidu is referring to, it only won a few battles but lost the war. How might we explain that?
Perhaps it is now an unfair charge against Prof Jibrin Ibrahim is saying he has not theorised. Maybe the charge sheet should be revised to read that he has not theorised enough because he has, indeed, theorised. At a seminar at the Aminu Kano Centre for Democratic Research and Training in 2011, he did say that what the radical activists had been doing was advocacy, not a revolution. It was a baffling claim for those of us who were foot soldiers for anyone to come and say that what we thought we were doing was not about overthrowing the bourgeoisie but advocacy. Theoretically, advocacy is an articulatory practice and amounts to revolutionary practice. But Jibo is still right in the sense that power was not expressly posed as the essence of the struggle. Instead of that, we were advising the power elite how to consolidate their grip on power, how to serve us better, how they should avoid corruption. The coalition was setting agenda but it did not have the structures to be a factor in a test of class strength if power was on the floor.
That was how the military came in 1993 but, thinking that the radicals constituted such a formidable force, they sought alliance with them. If the Abacha coup in 1993 had failed, many who had become signifiers of radical activism would have been shot because Abacha sent emissaries to them, meaning that they knew about a coup but did not report it.
That answers the question of where the coalition disappeared to. The coalition evaporated because it had reached the height of advocacy and there was nothing else to do. In 1999, the radical activists could not even contest elections. The few who ended up in the Obasanjo regime did so through association with someone else or groups, not as representatives of any major platforms. The radical collective were neither skilful in that game nor prepared for the kind of coalition work across Latin America where the radical ensemble always win, be it national or local elections. In one such election in Bolivia, it was a spectacle how activists radically reconceptualised ‘indigeneity’ into the rallying cry. It implied a mastery of new ways of organising corresponding to new forms of socialist struggle. Without being bookish (about which nothing is wrong anyway if we say a book is a non-stop rally) those cases of victory cannot be divorced from good mastery of the Marxism corresponding to the era. Then a mastery of the idea of a ‘historic bloc’ in the re-invigorated sense of it beyond Gramsci.
Otherwise, the embarrassing thing that happened in the event of the Tinubu-Obi square off in Nigeria recently would have also been their lot. Tinubu and Obi further split the Left down the middle. It should not have happened. The only condition two members of the power elite should have split the Left down the line after what happened in June 12 should have been in the event of an open negotiation between the Left and the forces of any of the candidates. In this case, nothing like that happened. Tinubu who had always kept close to activists had his own supporters in the fold. Peter Obi who did not have that advantage made up for it by inserting his candidature in the Labour Party and, instantly, carved a share of radicals for his presidential project since the Labour Party is, in theory, a party for Left intervention in politics.
Peter Obi had a massive ensemble of groups behind him who were united by the desire for a break with kleptocracy which they thought Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu represented but they assumed the adequacy of the moral and theological binoculars they were using and did not prepare for electoral contest from the point of its historicity in Nigeria. In other words, that coalition is nothing typical of what is playing out in most cases in Latin America where no one ever contemplates toying with the electoral outcome of elections involving candidates of the radicals. Yet, there is more at stake across much of Latin America because, in most cases, well located multinational corporations are threatened by the coming to power of a radical. In fact, Evo Morales said a few days after taking over power in Bolivia that it was from reading one of the terms of privatisation that he understood what is called imperialism. So, more is at stake over there than here because, up to a point, the Nigerian elite has resisted intrusive imperialism.
Forming a coalition is a task that must be done because that is what can resolve the profound paradox Prof Adele Jenaidu has brought out. The paradox is this: there was a time Nigerians did not quite understand what the radical coalition was doing. Some Nigerians thought they were just trouble makers or people who thrived in causing confusion and disobeying constituted authority. Now, the tide has turned. People have fully understood that governance in Nigeria is not about putting the people first. And they are out protesting hardship associated with an unbearable cost of living crisis. But the realisation is coming when there are no radicals of the quality and capacity signified by the samplers above. What a pity!
Somehow, the coalition has to be brought back. But how might it be a politically self-aware coalition that will transcend a divided Left on the one hand as well as transcend the limitations of the latest attempt at coalition. As a perceptive observer told a group of grumblers over the result of the February 2023 presidential election, the coalition prayed so hard but had too much faith in facts and figures. It was from there Intervention labelled President Tinubu as the arrival of a constructivist. It was not expected that people whose sense of meaning is never beyond the signifier – signified would understand that. But that is their problem.
