Nov 2006 paper on NEPAD

SOCIO-ECONOMIC DYNAMICS OF NIGERIA AND NEPAD

The Challenge of Social Transformation

“Regime change is our stand; mass resistance is our vehicle; and system change is our goal”

---Chima Ubani: August 31, 2005

1. INTRODUCTION

We have taken the liberty to re-phrase the topic we have been asked to address which was couched as socio-economic peculiarities of Nigeria and NEPAD, for the following reasons:

While we do not doubt that certain “peculiarities” exist in the socio-economic realities of every society (read nation, community, religion, sub-region, etc) at each stage in the historical evolution of the human race, we daresay that globalization is challenging us with “universalisation” in a sense. It is also important to avoid falling into the pit-falls of a distinct “Nigerian personality” or “reality”, akin to the befuddled premises of such theorizing as those of “African socialism”

I am of the opinion that we might be more concerned with the dynamics of our socio-economic realities as working people in Nigeria and the inter-phase of these with NEPAD.

A better understanding of NEPAD presupposes a more rigorous grasp of the socio-economic “peculiarities” of Africa (which alone could have inspired a pan-African socio-economic agenda which NEPAD is) beyond those of Nigeria, only. This in a general sense would help us better focus the “peculiarities” of Nigeria within the bigger picture of the NEPAD vision; what it is and what it could (?) be.

Socio-economic peculiarities could be more based on fixations of what the socio-economic realities are. I believe though that we would be more concerned with the dynamics of the where we are, where we were and why?

The sub-title of “the challenge of social transformation” is based on our honest belief that the quest for a better understanding of Nigeria’s socio-economic realities, and NEPAD as a development strategy is with the intent of transforming our African and our Nigerian society.

We thus crave the indulgence of the conference organizers and participants with the belief that the aim of the paper rather than being lost would have been sharpened with my “restructuring” of the topic title. In this essay we shall try to come to grasp with socio-economic dynamics in general relating this to modern industrial society and development. We shall then seek to put in perspective the long quest for Africa’s transformation and its (present) final bus stop, which is NEPAD. A critical assessment of the vision and working of NEPAD would be attempted. From the general we then shall come to the particular, which in this instance is the socio-economic reality of Nigeria, relating this to NEPAD. We would sum up with what we hope could be a useful perspective on the prospects and problems of NEPAD and the vision behind it in addressing the challenge of Nigeria’s development with a possible strategic approach for civil society’s engagement of the development process with the intent of social transformation.

2.0 SOCIO-ECONOMIC DYNAMICS AND HUMAN HISTORY

Socio-economics is a recent multidisciplinary field that utilizes the theoretical instruments of economics, sociology, philosophy and political science in understanding the effect of economic activities on social life and the impact of the structures, mechanisms and processes of social life on economic activities. It could be said to be a developmental science and has established a universally accepted set of human development indices as parameters for measuring the socio-economic development of societies.

It could thus be stated that socio-economics grapples with the dynamics, the dialectical relations, between the production of goods and services on one hand and the socio-cultural / politico-legal structures, values and processes of any society, at different points in time. This helps us to appreciate if such a society is developed, developing, underdeveloped or “underdeveloping”. Beyond the indices of such human development we come to face the component of economic and social life in contention and in a contextual concert and how their interactions drive the developmental process.

A perspective on socio-economic peculiarities or dynamics thus cannot but address the issue of development. We shall look at this more in depth in the next section. At this point though, we will be content with stating that socio-economic analyses are necessarily comparative, both spatially and temporally. They cannot but assess the socio-political and economic development of a country and the relationship of the socio-economic realities of a country with other countries at any given point in time. Socio-economic or human development indices in themselves inherently express comparison between different countries or societies.

Human development indices such as life expectancy rates, maternal and child mortality rates, level of literacy, health care, e.t.c. put the human being as the focus of socio-economic development. Economic indicators such as, the level of industrialization, GDP, GNP PCI, unemployment rates, balance of payment, exchange rates, transportation and communication, e.t.c. are also important parameters for measuring the extent of socio-economic development. Political stability and extent of democratization could also be considered as very important in defining the socio-economic dynamics of a given society.

The component players in the economic and socio-political spheres of a society are critical as the agents of change or reaction in the dynamics of socio-economic development. These of cause include the state, classes, and social movements.

The world view of these structures and groups, their historically established peculiarities and the equilibrium of power in their contention and contextual unity and how these in a given country interacts with the “trends and development in the international economy and politics” as Iyayi (2006) put it constitute the, at times centripetal, at times centrifugal driving forces of a country’s socio-economic development.

3.0 MODERN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND DEVELOPMENT

World history according to Iyayi (2006) “demonstrates how places that previously considered themselves isolated or were in actual fact, isolated from other parts become drawn into a system of expanding relationships with these other parts that then determine the pace and level of development of events in the local, previously isolated situations”. Sociologists like Spencer and Durkheim see history as a process of “social evolution” involving “social differentiation” resulting in societies becoming structurally more complex. Other thinkers particularly though not limited to those with Marxian biases do not dispute that social evolution involves social differentiation. They however situate the raison d’etre of that “evolution” in the development of productive forces of society and the dynamics between this and social relations of production which together constitute modes of production. Critical to this perspective is the struggle of classes bound in the subsisting economic relations of a particular mode of production. This is why proponents of this world view agree with Marx that the class struggle is the driving force of history. It is important to point out that this world view considers revolution as the midwife of social transformation in the evolutionary process of world history.

3.1 Contemporary Socio-economic formations and “modernization”

The history of the human race definitely has witnessed several social-economic formations. These social-economic formations have been largely based on the slave owning, land owning (or feudal) and capitalist modes of production. There is a tendency amongst some critical thinkers to see social-economic formations and modes of productions as synonymous. Social-economic formations are however more complex constructs shaped by the dominant modes of production and could as well express a form of transition from one mode of production to another, wherein the “social evolution” of society takes a revolutionary leap involving structural changes in the economy, polity and social life of such societies. The eighteenth century industrial revolution marked such a leap from the mediaeval feudal society in Europe resulting in the entrenchment of capitalist economic relations that have sucked in the entire globe. Iyayi notes that “the modern period” in human history can be located in “the emergence of mercantile and later industrial, financial and informational capitalism”. Samir Amin (1976) describes the three hundred years from the European enlightenment to the industrial revolution as the “period of incubation” of capitalism.

Hoogvelt further noted that these centuries i.e. 1500-1800 marked the mercantile pre-competitive phase of capitalism involving “transfer of economic surplus through looting, plunder disguised as trade and direct slave trade”. He further periodised subsequent phase of capitalist development as: 1800-1960, colonial phase; 1960-1977, early post-colonial phase; 1977-1990, late post-colonial phase; 1990 to the present time, globalisation phase. Each of these phases, if we agree with Hoogvelt, which to a great extent we do, is characterized by, crucial developments in the socio-economic dynamics within and between countries, which have fostered the dependency of peripheral societies to the core or metropolitan states of capitalism.

We should note though before looking at “dependency “ or the “development of underdevelopment” as Gunder Frank, Kay, Amin, Wallerstein and a host of others would put, it we need to consider challenges to the perspectives of the modern industrial society as transient. These have been basically from two approaches.

First is that aptly reflected by Fukuyama (1989, 1992), which sees liberal democracy (the ideological world view of the dominant forces in modern industrial society) as the “end point” or “final form of government”. This teleological approach sees democratization and liberalization as Siamese twins and an eternal truth. For Fukuyama “consciousness is cause and not effect and can develop autonomously from the material world: hence the apparent jumble of current events is the history of ideology”. Thus for this arch-proponent of what we could call neo-idealism the justification of neo-liberalism entails not just an eternal truth but a return to Hegel’s development of the spirit, which has reached its crescendo in the liberal-democratic state of capital’s glory.

Second is that of “modernization” theory which the new democratization proponents might be said to be making a rehash of. It is noteworthy that with decolonisation in the 1960, theorists and policy-makers of the capitalist world tried to situate the emerging “sovereignties” of the “third world” and their socio-economic dynamics within a framework that justified a Euro-centric, western or most properly put, (dependant) capitalist road of development. According to Randall and Theobald (1998) “…. From the 1960s international agencies such as the World Bank placed increasing reliance on purely economic or quantitative indicators of underdevelopment. They used criteria such as population, size and density, ratio of manufacturing to total output, average life expectancy and infant mortality rates, but above all GNP per head”.

Rostow (1962), in his The stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto, proposed a five stage theory of economic growth. These are:

a. The traditional stage where agrarian conditions are dominant. And “long-run fatalism” subsists due to the limitations of pre-Newtonian science and technology i.e. knowledge.

b. The “pre-condition for take-off” stage when modern science emerges and is brought to bear on agricultural and industrial production. Economic progress is seen as desirable and possible. The quest for profits and national pride become entrenched.

c. The “take –off stage”, new industries expand, manufacture becomes crucial and the profit motive – force strong. It is the threshold point for modernization. For Britain this was in 1783-1803, for Germany in 1850-1875, for Japan in 1875-1900 for Russia and Canada in 1889-1914 and for China and India in the 1950s.

d. The “drive to maturity” stage which lasts for some 60 years after “take - off”. Technical and technological development becomes dominant resulting in ever more complex economic processes and a buoyant social life.

e. The “age of mass consumption” stage, the manufacture of consumer durables and provision of services where the fullest of satisfaction of human needs reigns supreme

The much touted “post-industrial” economy of a “modern information society” which some center of left theorists posit against the existence of a modern industrial society seems to validate Rostow. The important question to us though is how this relates to our African, our Nigerian reality of socio-economic development. Rostow himself quite cleverly we must say appreciated that “modernization” was introduced to “non-industrialized” or underdeveloped countries from outside. He thus situates the stimulus for their “take–off” within the dynamics of their internal economies. This however primarily is about human resources capacity building especially with an assumption that this could be transferred with universal learning.

This “evolutionary optimism” is to be found in the perspectives of modernization theorists in general. It subtly runs as a thread through NEPAD and NEEDS. The advanced capitalist countries or the” post-industrial society” as some bourgeois sociologists put it, represents “the end – state’ the models of which they are evolving towards being.

3.2 Capitalist imperialism and “dependency”

This rosy picture of the possibilities of development for third world countries along “western” lines have been challenged severally and adequately. V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (1916) analyses the relationship between the metropoles of capital and its colonial, semi – colonial and neo-colonial dominions. Claude Ake in his Revolutionary Pressures in Africa (1977) tried to build on the conceptualization of imperialism as capitalism. In analyzing the “global context” of modern industrial society he took “concepts” such as bourgeois outside their original context to designate the advanced capitalist countries while Nigeria and other African entities are described as proletarian countries. He however further said “the application of class analysis to international relations is not a substitute for the class analysis of particular countries but a complement to it”. The development of what is known as the “dependency school” (“dependentistas” in Latin American) owes a great deal to critical thinking in Latin America. Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth, first published in 1957 is considered a pioneering work in this regard. The radical Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS) with its reconstruction of perspectives on the “National Democratic Revolution” in 1967 wherein it formally accepted the gross inadequacy of the national bourgeoisie as a progressive social change agent in the regions socio-economic and political development, was to play a critical role in the development of dependency theory literature. Intellectuals in the organization amongst whom André Gunder Frank is quite prominent critiqued the modernist beliefs of possible teleological development of third world states into industrialized societies.

Gunder tore Rostow’s knock-kneed, so-called alternative manifesto to shreds, proving that it is an abstraction that lacks inherent historical or contemporary congruence with socio-economic realities of human development. He noted the incorporation of the so-called “traditional stage” societies into the world capitalist economy.

Dependency theorists analyze the law of “unequal development” in modern industrial society aptly showing that the world capitalist economy really is a relationship between core or metropolitan (which Ake considers the bourgeois) and peripheral (according to Ake, proletarian) states. The peripheral states are enclave economies that are dependent on the core or metropole states. The details of this dependency i.e. the servicing of metropole states by the peripheral states might be deemed to have changed with political de-colonization. Its essence however not only remains but through various socio-economic ties and multi-lateral stratagems are reinforced in neo-colonial imperialism. Dependency theory thus, lays bare imperialism and not “scarcity of capital” and human resource or the weight of traditional institutions as the basis for the third world’s underdevelopment. Underdevelopment is seen as a structural and self-reinforcing relationship of countries like Nigeria to developed countries. A seminal work from this perspective on Africa is Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Rodney whose landmark work was first published in 1972, in its “search for an understanding of what is now called “underdevelopment” in Africa” had “the end of the colonial period” as “the limit(s) of (its) enquiry”. He however issued the clarion call which today’s leaders of Africa’s “new partnership “might just not have paid adequate attention to. This was that “the phenomenon of neo-colonialism cries for an extensive investigation in order to formulate the strategy and tactics of African emancipation and development”

Samir Amin’s works go a long way for us to understand “the origin and development of underdevelopment”. It would also lead us in a sense to the subsequent critique of the dependency theory from both the left and the right.

Samir posits nine theses “as regards the theory of the transition to peripheral capitalist economy after pointing out the “glimpse” of Marx in the poverty of philosophy on dependency of the Asiatic society where he quoted Marx as stating that there were “millions of workers who had to perish in the East Indies so as to procure for the million and a half workers employed in England in the same industry, three years prosperity out of ten” (this glimpse goes,a long way in throwing light on how the metropoles of capital utilize the dependency of the south as a shock absorber against socio-economic crises steaming from the exploitation of “its” proletariat)

We might not be able to go into these theses in depth for want of space and time on this occasion. They are however summarized as follows:

i. A difference in the pattern of transition from pre-capitalist formations to “central capitalism” marked by retrogression emerging from the “extraverted orientation of the industries” that “foreign capital” establishes.

ii. Unequal international specialization manifested in the superior productivity of the center and not inadequacy of the home market; confinement of the periphery to complementary supplier of products for the production of which it is deemed to posses a natural advantage; exotic agricultural produce and mineral.

iii. Hypertrophy of the tertiary sector in the periphery, which neither the evolution of the structure of demand nor that of productivities can explain.

iv. “The distortion in the periphery toward light branches of activity”.

v. Transference of the Keynesian “accelerator” of investments multiplier effect from the periphery to the metropoles through capital flight as “the exporting of the profits of foreign capital’.

vi. Incorporation and integration ideologically as well as materially of the periphery to the center.

“Structural features” including “extreme unevenness… of the distribution of productivities in the periphery” and “disarticulation due to the adjustment of the orientation of production in the periphery” that shut the possibilities of advancement, which the semi-periphery (approximately the NICs i.e. Newly industrialized countries) had, to the present periphery.

Continued and indeed accelerating “accentuation of the features of underdevelopment”

While capitalism at the center tends to get more exclusive at the centre “this is not true of the periphery”. He further pointed out here that “the forms assumed by these peripheral formations depend on the one hand, upon the nature of socio-economic formations there previously, and, on the other upon the forms and epochs in which they were integrated into the world system”.

Amin goes ahead to identify “the general characteristics of the peripheral formation as being”

1. The predominance of agrarian capitalism

2. The limits imposed by foreign capital.

3. Contemporary tendencies toward the development of natural bureaucracies.

We have tried summarily to put the dependency theory in perspective because of its influence on pre-NEPAD efforts at leading Africa out of the murky morass of underdevelopment which we shall look at in the next section. The theory which was very dominant when the Lagos plan of Action of 1980 was being conceptualized has however been severely critiqued in the 80s. These critiques have been from both the neo-Marxian left and the neo-classical right.

The neo-Marxian critique actually assimilates essential features of dependentista and could be considered more of a development of the dependency theory in opposition to the modernizationists. Randall and Theobald (1998) thus see their arguments as what “to a greater or less extent… could be called dependency revisionism’. The major point of departure could be said to be a focus on the possible “relative autonomy” of the state. This actually stems from a more rigorous examination of “the indigenous social structures… the nature and extent of social class formations, upon the ‘projects’ of different social classes, their conflicts and alliances”. It thus seeks to supercede what it considers the rather simplistic perspective of typical dependency theory which sees the “post-colonial” state (we shall for now skip the debate on post-colonialism, neo-colonialism and underdevelopment) as basically a conveyor belt of some comprador bourgeois class holding forth for the absentee metropole bourgeoisie.

The critique however is not a reversion to the pre-1967 perspective of OLAS for example, that seeks a radical, patriotic bourgeois class even where such does not exist that could lead a popular – democratic struggle for social transformation. Peculiarities of countries and nations and the fluidity of emergent “urban and rural social structures” are rigorously analyzed from the viewpoint of contention for state power (and civil society’s impact on state policy formulation and implementation) and are seen as critical in the dynamics of socio-political development.

Some suppossedly left-tending critics of dependency theory in arguing for a closer look at the (possible) roles of the state for some form of independent development of LDCs, assert that “associated or even autonomous capitalist development” is feasible. This position (i.e. of the possibilities of “associated capitalist development” which is not dependent) is implicit in the NEPAD programme.

Without delving further for now into the “dependency revisionist” theory (and its not too critical cousin of possible “associated or autonomous” but non-dependent capitalist development) we dare say here that it as well upholds the conclusion of the dependentista that an auto-centric pattern of socio-economic development, remains crucial for the third world’s (and for this essay’s focus, particularly, Africa’s) social transformation. We now turn to the conservative critique which is from the neo-liberal right. We shall look at this more rigorously in the next section of this essay.

3.3 Neo-liberalism and “globalization”

It is almost impossible to understand today’s neo-liberalism from its typical classical laissez-faire or neo-classical origin outside globalisation. This is not because it is any more than “old wine in new skin”, as we shall subsequently show, but because of the molecular interactions of the “old wine” with the pores of the new skin. The Public Services International in seeking an alternative strategy of workers for engaging neo-liberalism sums up the whole gamut of neo-liberalist ideas and those akin to it as the “conservative ideology”. One could consider the “conservative ideology” of neo-liberalism as liberalism of the “new” capitalist “era” of (US,EU &Japan’s) globalism, conceptualized by Friedman and his cohorts in the 70s, tended and nurtured by Reagan as father and Thatcher as mother in the 80s and now with the heady rashness of an ageing youth, fully on the rampage buoyed by capitalism’s triumphalism of the 90s

The resurgence of conservative ideology could be more properly rooted in the crisis of traditional bourgeois political-economy models and economic theory in the post-WW II world than as an attack on the dependency theory, which it also was (and still is) While neo-liberalism’s ascendancy and the disputed hegemony of globalization which it drives becomes more obvious to all and sundry, theorists and lay citizens alike in the 90s, (with the establishment of a unipolar world in the wake of the cold war’s end), its “authority”, so to speak, goes back to the 70s. The cyclical crisis of capitalist production of 1974-75 which according to A.G Mileikovsky (1975) “was interwoven with monetary, energy, raw material, food, and ecological crisis” put paid to the magic wand that Keynesianism was supposed to have waved after the 1929-33 great depression. The “temporary and relative stabilization of capitalism” in the 1920s, akin to what neo-liberalism today ‘decrees’ as capital’s triumph, lulled bourgeois economic theorists into complacency. “Boasts about US economic “prosperity” and claims that the mass production and availability to some working people of relatively cheap cars and other consumer durables showed that the capitalist system was viable, sound and enduring” according to neo-classical economists and political-economy theorists. The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia was seen as a flash in the pan to be contained, and bourgeois economists were jubilant that “Ford beat Marx”. The USA and New Zealand according to the Public Services International, conducted “slash and burn” campaigns on the public sector and investment in infrastructure in the 1920s. However “when the real crisis hit the private sector there was simply no public sector alternative, to cushion its effects”. The big depression in Mileikovsky’s words “marked the demise of the bourgeois neoclassical school”.

John Maynard Keynes gospel explicitly stated in his The General Theory of, Employment, Interest and Money first published in 1936 became the credo for state- monopoly capitalism through “the stimulation of finance of public works, inducement of private capital investment, and an insignificant redistribution of the national income through the budget in favour of the have-nots: the main instrument of regulation were to be the state budget, deficit financing of the economy and manipulation of interest rates”.

The Keynesian model which was initially with the intent of “evening out the phases of the cycle” of crisis structurally embedded in the labour process of social production, on a capitalist basis of appropriation gave way to neo-Keynesian “dynamic models” in the 1950s and 1960s. It sought long-term sustained economic growth and social well-being of citizens within the capitalist frame-work. It was the economic formula that social-democratic ideology and bourgeois government’s policy makers needed for establishing the interventionist welfare state.

In passing we think something hardly stated needs to be pointed out here. Keynes who was a critical member of the British government’s committee on finance and industry in 1929 when the collapse of the United State of North America’s stock markets signaled the beginning of the great depression had earlier spent some time, in 1925 to be precise, in the Soviet Union on a study of the activities of the USSR’s economic planning organs. This definitely would have played a role in his arguably excellent utilization of what Engels had earlier referred to in his Anti-during polemic as “invading socialism”, as a steward for socio-economic development in the coven of capitalism.

The 60s was a decade of contradictions that deepened and indeed imploded in the bourgeois world, by the following decade. The longest economic boom in the history of the USA lasting some eight years signaled the transformation of “regulated inflation” which Keynes had recommended into “galloping inflation” and subsequently a state of stagflation! While unemployment was considered the main problem of capitalism during Keynes period, inflation pushed it to a second position. Neo-classics emerged demanding that the role of the state be limited to credit and monetary regulation. An attempt to forge a middle of the road alternative for socio-economic development on the basis of capitalism resulted in the form of “neo-classical synthesis”, represented by the likes of Paul A. Sammuelson.

This synthesis challenged the approach of its forebears to the analysis of socio-economic problems. It was in itself “revised” in a sense by the “socio-institutionalists” who amongst other things called for state intervention in the market with the use of price control mechanisms. The most prominent theorist of this trend which critiqued the “structuralist” approach of Keynesians and the neo-classics was Galbraith a former President of the American Economic Association.

Not to take two much of our time we might avoid going into the details of these trends. The important thing to note here, relating the foregoing to the objective of this essay is that the “neo-classical synthesis” and “socio-institutional” schools gave the necessary theoretical justification for the “mixed economy”, which they described as “a gigantic system of mutual insurance against the worst economic disasters of life”. Their “proposal for the state in the” mixed economy” however, “is not at all aimed to weaken the positions of big business”.

The sphere of theory in all disciplines just like praxis is one of contention. The “great debate” between “neo-Keynesians” and “neo-classics” of the 50s and the 60s led to the capitalist free market ideological resurgence of neo-liberalism in the 70s. Neo-liberalism is the ideology of globalization and the globalism of US, EU &Japan. While radical neo-keynesians like Joan Robinson criticized inadequate concern for issues of wages, conditions of work and social services like health and education by Keynes and his earlier disciples for what she called, the “second crisis” of (bourgeois) economic theory, neo-liberals like W. Simons and H. Hazlitt in the US had challenged Keynes as propagating “camouflaged socialism” based on his honest acceptance of “inherent instability” in capitalism (it is noteworthy in passing to note that Keynesians defended his loyalty to capitalism. Henry C. Wallich for example pointed out that “Keynes was capitalism’s defender against Marxism…He kept an intellectual generation from going Communist”!). At the helm of this neo-classical renaissance was the Chicago school led by Professor Milton Freidman, with the motto “money matters”. They skipped five decades to the works of Irving Fischer, shaking off dust from the University of Chicago’s Economics department’s handouts of the 20s to 40s to justify the so-called monetarist “oral tradition” of the department. Friedman’s The Doctrine of Monetarism, first published in 1956, signaled the bold beginning of monetarist critique of Keynesianism and the welfare state.

The “monetarist view” upholds that with capitalism “the economy is basically stable and necessarily subject to recurring periods of recession and inflation. Major business cycles movements that have occurred in the past are attributed primarily to large swings in the rate of growth in the money stock” (Leonall C. Andersen & Keith M. Carlson, 1970). The essence of the monetarists position as the bulwark of neo-liberalism is according to Freidman of that “the major direction of influence is from money to business” (his typical position which made the Nobel laureate James Tobin, to point out that the monetarists seem to think that “money is all that matters”!). This seemingly justifies the free rampage of “market-forces” driven by the “profit-motive” supposedly leading to social and economic equilibrium, but as U. S. Usoskin (1975) notes “actually as soon as bourgeois economists get down to analyzing real economic situations, they at once have to face the incontrovertible truth that equilibrium is only an accidental and transient moment in the process of capitalist reproduction”. This “incontrovertible truth” which the socio-economic realities of the world today still presents is roundly denied by bourgeois theorists and not adequately grasped by policy-makers in Africa and particularly Nigeria.

In reality through as Bobby Marie (2002) notes, the market system: “promotes greed”; enthrones an “everything is for sale” mentality; “reinforces inequality and creates poverty”; results in a “manipulation of needs” sees “innovation as the last option” of foreign direct investment; “destroys public goods” and services; “undermines participatory democracy” and; merely pays lip service to the protection of the environment.

We now turn to globalisation, albeit briefly before coming to the more specific issues of Africa and particularly Nigeria’s development.

A great deal of critical work has been done on globalization, partly because as the Labour Resource and Research Institute of the National Union of Namibian Workers puts it: “globalisation” has become one of the buzzwords of the 1990s” and the 2000s! It further states however: “governments, business, unions and community activists talk about it, but often attach very different meanings to the term”. Professor Akin Fadahunsi (2002) in looking at the African dimension of the process of market-driven globalisation referred to the 1997 UN Agenda for development that states:

Globalisation encompasses the varying degrees of increasing integration of world markets of goods, services, capital, technology and labour. This has generated greater openness, free movement of factors of production and created greater opportunities for international cooperation. Greatly increased trade and capital flows and technological developments, open new opportunities for growth of the world economy, particularly in developing countries.

In analyzing this “meaning” of globalisation which NEPAD seems to hold, Fadahunsi pointed out that “this rather general optimistic assessment of globalisation in apparently all regions of the “globe” in the document from the working group of the UN General Assembly which was adopted in June 1997 could then not apply and still does not apply in developing countries”.

Several authors have argued that globalisation is not a new phenomenon, pointing out the triangular globalisation of the slave trade, Baba Ayelabola (2004) and the essence of globalisation being a reinforcement of the hegemony of capitalist states while replicating under-development, marginalisation and dependence in the neo-colonies Momoh & Siteolu (2001) (a position from the dependency school). Odion-Akhaine further notes that “much of the literature on globalisation tries to do what Marx and Engels (ibid.) had put behind them before the second half of the 19th century. This was after his quotation from the Communist Manifesto of a section that could be said to capture what we now call “globalisation”, as only few contemporary literature do in as few words”.

It is however legitimate to argue that, while globalisation does not represent a qualitative transformation of existing socio-economic dynamics, the form and content of this “façade of genus which capitalism wears in its current manifestation” which reinforces the absurdity of mass immiseration in the face of super-abundance is a critical phenomenon in the historical development of modern industrial society which requires theoretical & practical critique. These though as Madunagu (2006) noted without forgetting that we are talking of globalisation of capitalism, and that in challenging neo-liberalism, the perspective must not be lost of it being a struggle against neo-liberal capitalism.

It is important to note though that while neo-liberalist ideology is the driving force behind globalization; “post–industrial society” theorists prominent amongst whom is Professor Daniel Bell of Harvard University have given it a sociological basis in their “forecasts” of the possible social transformation of capitalism within the fetters of capitalist economic relations. The importance of this for us lies in an attempt to wish away the underlying socio-economic dynamics of development as being in the

antagonistic contradiction between classes. In his The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell argues, “If the struggle between capitalist and worker in the locus of the factory was the hallmark of industrial society, the clash between the professional and the populace in the organization and in the community, is the hall-mark of conflict in the post –industrial society”.

Globalisation thus being seen as an age of the “information” or “post-industrial society” is to inspire “professionals” and policy-makers in the third world, who aspire to industrialize with the intent of leaping into the post-industrial league of advanced capitalist countries, to view the contradictions wreaking socio-economic havoc in their countries as being anything but the antagonism between “for profit” ends and “for human needs”.

The picture of globalisation is not solely of gloom though, as Shafika Isaacs of the South African Trade Union Research Project (2002) pointed out. Globalisation involves changes “which are as significant as the industrial revolution”. While this might be arguable, we could note that the industrial revolution, in spite of, and indeed through its pauperization and enslavement of the “immense majority” of the citizenry, was crucial for the development of the human race as a whole. As Bobby Marié put it, “globalization has definite benefits” which include: enhanced “efficiency through specialization”; “greater opportunities in larger markets”; “availability of technology to all” (to some extent we could agree); “greater generation and exchange of information”; “lower costs and better delivery of products” (i.e. comparatively speaking). And the fact that “the world communicates faster”; “governments co-operate more”, “more international links at grassroots level” are being developed and “more worldwide social activities” exist provide room within the neo-liberal fetters of globalism for social transformation than ever before in the half a millennium of capitalism’s life within the three millennia of’ human civilization.

In addressing the possible space for auto-centric development of peripheral societies like Africa, in an era of globalization (which is what NEPAD claims to be filling for example), we would need to once again turn to a consideration of the state and civil society.

3.4 The State and Civil Society

Earlier in this section we had pointed contention on the possible “relative autonomy” of the state as being central to the neo-Marxian critique of dependency theory. The “globalization of governance” posits the argument afresh of possible “powerlessness” of the state or more aptly of the possible (and to some extent, necessary or desirable) role, of the state.

As Professor Dafe Otobo (2000) put it: “it would appear that one of the things that globalization seems to accentuate is the primacy of the world economy, not the sovereignty of the state, not the importance of private employers within the context of “free enterprise”…the important actor and the main beneficiary in this new borderless economy is the faceless investor, whose funds or capital can be moved everywhere, anywhere and anytime in search of the best ‘returns’ as information on political, social and agricultural developments, movement in prices of shares and speculation on likely monetary policies of governments are rapidly transmitted by and through computers between and among fund managers of corporate and financial organizations, and stock exchanges in major capital cities”.

As the activities of transnational corporation best described as that seemingly “faceless investor” limits the actual sovereignty of states, on one hand, so does multilateral economic institutions, particularly the Breton Words Institutions and the World Trade Organisation de-limit the options open for states socio-economic policies.

The multilateral economic institutions and transnational corporations comprise the two pillars of globalism (Ayelabola, 2005). A new form of global governance is emerging outside the UN. It is being constituted by the MEIs. The undemocratic character of these MEIs is a mechanism of global capital’s dominance of third world economies and the perpetuation of the subordinate role of the LDCs (less developed countries).

This skewed power relationship is made clear in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This two bodies created at the United Nations Monetary and Finance Conference at Bretton Woods, USA in 1994, make no pretences about where power lies. The votes of member states are based on the amount of their subscriptions. Thus while the World Bank has 177 member states, the US alone has 17.9% votes, Japan, 7.43%; Germany, 5.74%; France, 5.5% and; Britain, 5.5%. This adds up to 42.07% of the World Bank’s votes in the hands of five (all of whom are ‘G8’ countries) out of 177 members. It is hardly better with the 183 member-states IMF where the US controls 17.6% of the votes with the UK, Germany, France, Japan and Saudi Arabia sharing 43.74% votes between them. How on earth could African countries find succor therein, where they are so helplessly ‘outgunned’?

The World Trade Organisation which emerged in April 1994 out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that had earlier subsisted from January 1948 does seem on the face of it a more democratic institution of world governance with its one member-state one vote structure. The reality of its GATS and TRIPS though, has overbearing negativities for Africa. This is not surprising. The ‘G8’ “which began their annual meetings in 1975 at the instance of the then French President, Giscard d’Estaing as ‘G6’ (Ayelabola, 2005), is the executive committee of the new global state. It’s dictatorial rough-shod riding on the “parliament” it has created is food for thought on the real commitment of the bourgeoisie to democracy on a world scale.

It is also important to show the neo-liberal view that globalization promotes democracy (within nation-states), which is supposed to entail accountability of state office bearers for the lie it is. As Mittleman (1997) rightly points out “whereas in theory democracy means accountability to the governed, in practice leaders are accountable to market forces, most notably debt structures and structural adjustment programs”. This is very important to note in situating NEPAD. Related to this as well is the sham put forward of the South East Asian tigers as miracles of Newly Industrialized Countries by neo-liberals. As Mittleman further noted, Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese bureaucracy justified their crushing of the Tiananmen square revolts with similar militarist strong-arm control of both the economy and social life by these so-called “tigers” in achieving their economic “miracles”. In Japan as well, the government subsidizes favored industries and shields then from market forces, especially imports”. LaRRI buttresses this view noting that “contrary to the ideology of neo-liberalism, the growth of some of the East, Asian countries was brought about by several factors, one of these being a strongly interventionist state which deviated from the market principle”.

LaRRI drawing from Gallin, goes ahead to show that developing countries state surrendering to the “there is no alternative” (TINA) perspective inspired by neo-liberal globalisation’s capitalist triumphalism “are entering a race to the bottom which leads to the exploitation of human and natural resources and ultimately leads to economic stagnation”.

Amongst bourgeois theorists of a “developmental state” of a social – democratic hue, the death of Keynesianism has led to a‘re-evaluation’ of the role of the state. Western social-democracy’s as “the third way” has moved from the perspective of an “enabling state” to that of an “ensuring state” in its first wave described the ‘New Public Management’ or “reinventing government”. The ensuring state according to Anthony Giddens (2003) “is a regulatory state”. It “does not mean direct control but standard setting and the offering of incentives for behavior relevant to public purposes”. John Kay (2003) further laments “the experience of the deliberate coordination of economic systems and of economic development by the state” postulating “the necessity of the interaction of rules and values or ‘regulated self-regulation’ in the control of economic activity”. Global Union Federations such as the Public Services International, while agreeing on the need for re-engineering the state and its role in the delivery of public services more especially, affirms that for regulation to be democratic, they most involve social dialogue (PSI, 2003). It showed examples of the failures of “regulated self-regulation” with the “British rail experience”, “California’s experiment with electricity reform” and “the failures of US Airport security” as case studies.

If needs be stated at this point in addressing the role of the state that we are referring to its socio-economic developmental role. The state as succinctly analysed by Engels in The Origin of the family, Private Property, and the State, states emerged with the herald of class rule with the sharpening of the division of labour. It has and will always – no matter how democratic it is deemed to be – be an instrument, an institutionalised expression in motion of the political will of the dominant class(es). Of course its intricacies involve intra-class class conflicts as well as a broad spectrum of inter-class contentions within social-economic formations defined by the dominant mode of production.

The coercive role of the state even with “the rolling back of the state” still in essence remains inspite of the spate of Integrated Security Sector Reform (ISSR) which formally places issues of ‘justice and reconciliation’ and the “social and economic well being of the people” in the realms of security issues. As Okechukwu Ibeanu (2004) put it when asserting that “security establishments in Africa are to be understood as part of the institutionally weak states that they serve, which are grafted on even weaker economies”, “the economic and political impotence of African states co-exists with a bloated, awesome and politically interventionist security system”.

In summing up on the state and its developmental role, it needs be pointed out that “external pressures” with the globalization of governance is not necessarily a catalogue of negativities. Several international resolutions (where they are domesticated and utilized) which include the Beijeing Platform of Action, the Rio declaration and resolutions of the World summit on Sustainable Development have led to some positive commitments on mainstreaming gender (read as women empowerment, without any apology) and concern for the environment. The ILO conventions and its supervisory mechanism also promote necessary steps to address the “deprivations and handclap of labour”.

The issue of regional integration which is quite important for a discussion on NEPAD also need to be taken into consideration as influences for (and indeed practical challenges to the place in today’s world) of the nation – state.

On a final note, with regards to the state in our discuss I would critically align with Evans (1992) that Africa needs states with what he termed “embedded antinomy”. As he states; it is an antonomy embedded in a concrete set of social ties which bind the state to society and provide institutionalized channels for the continued negotiation and renegotiation of goals and policies.

The definition of such a concrete set of social ties can only aptly emerge in contention and critical collaboration (definitely not “incorporation”!) between the state and radical civil society.

This brings us to the task of tackling the often bandied phrase “civil society” which according to Charles Hauss (2003) “is one of the political life”. As Randall and Theobald put it “the concept of civil society the “hottest“ concepts in all of special sciences that touch on is not synonymous with society, rather it has developed in contrast to and within the context of the modern state”.

In his Philosophical History of the Idea of Civil Society shows the evolution of thoughts on civil society from Socrates to the present age. He divided periods in the development of the civil society idea into: the classical period; the Middle Ages; the age of reasoning; the age of enlightenment; the nineteenth century and; the twentieth century (which you would agree could be extended to 2006!). From the Socratic perspective which “according to Plato advocated that issues be resolved via public argument using the dialectic”, to the age of reasoning, such thoughts were not really given rigorous theoretical flesh. Theorizing on civil society could be traced to the European enlightenment with Adam Ferguson as its leading light.

We should not be delayed here by an historical analysis of the development of the civil society concept. We would only pay respect to the creatively rigorous Marxian analysis of Gramsci in his prison notes who counterpoised civil society to the “political society” (the state). The importance of this sphere of life as a theatre of the straggle for “hegemony” went a long way in challenging the vulgar “economic determinism” of some schools of 20th century critical thinking.

Today, five hundred years after the origins of civil society theorizing, its definition is still in contention. Edward boiled the diverse perspectives on the term to three broad views. These are “civil society as associational”; “civil society as the good society” and; “civil society as the public sphere”. Charles “Chip” (2003) noted that interest in understanding civil society stems to a great extent from the fact that “so many countries have established more democratic regimes in recent years”. He further went on to point out that;.

“For some observers … it only includes political activity engaged in though non-profit organizations such as NGOs, at the other and of the spectrum ….all forms of voluntary participation whether in the public or private sector, political or apolitical”.

In relating civil society to Africa, we feel comfortable with the perspective of (Clapham (1993);.

Viewed as a set of social organizations outside the state which could be used to underpin an effective democratic order. The characteristic institutions of civil society in this sense are trade unions, professional associations, the independent media and other information sources, and other social and economic groupings which help to integrate different sections of the community with one another. In societies with a dominant religions tradition, churches, Islamic fraternities and other religious authorities may form a vital element in civil society, protected by their guardianship of universally acknowledged values from the state control which is often imposed on weaker groups. (p 435).

It is important to note before going forward that this characterization does have its draw-back, Rueschemeyer et al (1992) in their Capitalist Development and Democracy do not consider trade unions and professional associations for example, as part of civil society. Global Union Federations who hitherto saw civil society as more of allies then a spectrum trade unions belong to are confronted with such questions as that posed by PSI’s Mike Waghorne (2006) Are NGOs friends, foes or members”?. In Nigeria, the existence of a Labour Civil Society Coalition (LASCO) as against the earlier Civil Society Pro-democracy network which organize labour was not only part of but indeed the main organizer of (and which unfortunately mid-wifed what was made a still-born working People’s Party) might also reflect a shift of position on determining the components of civil society. Conversely, we actually might not have given the formulation of a position on it much thought!.

Not to hold us back though, we would be more concerned here with civil society or what we could call critical civil society or what might regularly approximate it but definitely would not be synonymous; radical civil society. That for me is that amalgam of forces and structures within the amorphous, heterogeneous mix of civil society which seeks social change and places transformation on its agenda as the object of development. Trade unions in Africa definitely, (in spite of arguable limitations of policies and actions) would be part of this. On the other hand while the new imperialism inspired ‘ngoism’ (and ‘ngism’) with its proposal – driven thrust and careerist inebriated motion May fit into Petras & Veltmeyers characteristion of “NGOs in the service of imperialism in the Globalisation unmasked: Imperialism in the 21^st Century, some definitely could be considered as part of critical civil society. Of importance to us here with regards to civil society is the issue of “social movements” and “global movements.

During preparatory work for the 1st Nigeria Social Forum (2003), a debate ensured on movements in Nigeria. We would not want to go into this at this point in time. We however need to point out that at times new concepts hide old truths. Social movements in a general sense covers traditional Social movements (e.g organized labour, the studentry) and the New Social Movement which in Nigeria might be more difficult to define. Do the militant self-determination groups and their “critique of arms” fall under the scope of new social movements? Could we consider NGOs that more often than not could be networks of non-governmental individuals or associates as (part of?) movements in any form (new, old or transitional)?.

In understanding the critical civil society and social movements though the place of the national, regional and world social forums is very important and while there have been works on these, more work (in Nigeria, especially) need to be done. The world social form’s definition of civil society as “the single most viable alternative to the authoritarian state and the tyrannical market” actually approximates our view of the radical (nb: not necessarily revolutionary) civil society on a global scale. Peter Waterman (2003) points at “the internal call of social movements” and its emergent “Global Justice and solidarity movement” as a possible fifth international’ in the making. The fact though that the GJ & SM and the WSF which it is “behind” seems to “characterize” itself more by “what it is not than by what it is” poses the “danger” inherent in “a movement that is not aware of its future to “reproduce the errors and failures of previous” efforts, even if in different ways.

In engaging (to once again use a favourite word of today’s civil society), NEPAD on the regional basis and NEEDS in Nigerian, this should be one major concern of critical civil society.

4.0 AFRICA’S QUEST FOR TRANSFORMATION AND NEPAD:

“Africa has a long history of external intervention: from the slave trade to colonialist plunder to the covert and overt military intervention of the cold war to the yoke of debt and World Bank/IMF imposed structural adjustment. Yet despite all this, Africa remains a region rich in natural resources, talent and development potential. Finding a way out of this malaise of under-development, exploitation and external intervention is the critical challenge facing the region” (emphasis mine, B.A).

- Ravi Naidoo, Director of the National Labour and Economic Development Institute (NALEDI), 5/7/2003.

We have started this section of the essay with a quotation from Ravi Naidoo of NALEDI South Africa in his introduction to NALEDI’s publication of Building Alternatives to neo-liberal globalization: the challenges facing NEPAD, which documents a regional workshop in NEPAD by the African labour Researchers’ Network (ALRN) held at Johennesbring between the 22nd and 23rd May 2003. His position and indeed several contribution at the workshop tally to some extent or the other with our views on NEPAD and the challenge of Africa’s transformation.

We would wish to appeal to those that might be at a loss with regards to the earlier sections which might seem to be at best tangential to the task we have been saddled with by the organisers of this very important conference. Do permit us to simply point out that on critical issues as those we are to address herein which might be said to be an on-going debate somewhat, the context is about as important, as the contents of our ordainment. We might not share the optimism of Keynes of capitalism’s capacity to resolve its “internal instability”. Few reasonable men and women however would dispute the kernel. This position inspite of its gender insensitivity that “practical men in authority who think themselves immune from theoretical influences are unusually the slaves of some defunct economist”. What we could add to this is that such persons in authority would be slaves of “defunct” sociologists, philosophers, organizational systems theorists etc. On the other simply that the position applies as well to men and women with responsibility in critical civil society as to men and women “in authority”. The past sections could thus be considered as an attempt to set a theoretical framework of sorts for addressing the issues of Africa’s transformation and NEPAD as well as the dynamics of Nigerias socio-economic “peculiarities” which we shall be concerned with in the next and penultimate section.

The position of Ravi Naidoo quoted above summarises our historical reality as Africans duly captured in paragraph 29 of the NEPAD base document which clearly states that: for centuries, Africa had been integrated into the world economy mainly as a supplier of cheap labour and raw materials. Of necessity, this has meant the draining of Africa’s development.

It is quite unfortunate however that inspite of this seeming understanding of the origins of Africa’s underdevelopment, the diagnosis of why Africa still remains underdeveloped and the prognosis of how Africa can overcome this underdevelopment and be transformed is to say the least not clear in the positions of NEPAD and to put it more aptly is knock-kneed portraying NEPAD’s position more as one of a “KNEEPAD” for genuflection at the shrine of the very Mammon (at its Euo-American altar) of Africa’s continued and (self) reinforcing underdevelopment.

It is important however in appraising NEPAD as the African Union’s socio-economic development programme for the region, to challenge what Professor Jimi Adesina (200) aptly describes as the prevailing amnesia surrounding Africa’s efforts at regional development programmes”, preceding NEPAD. This is very much so considering NEPAD’s assertion in paragraph 42 that “attempts in the past to set out continent wide development programmes” have been “less than successful” without any view expressed on the reasons why they failed.

In Yorubaland where I hail from here in Nigeria there is a proverb that translated states; “when a child trips he looks forward, when an elder trips he/she looks back”. The essences of this is that drawing from experience, the elder would want to know why s/he tripped and how to avoid an identical or similar happenstance. As Adesina puts it “memories that shed no light on the journey ahead may be of little relevance”.

It is in the light of the foregoing that we would need to critically look at the journey (or struggle?) of Africa for its transformation before NEPAD.

4.1 The Journey before NEPAD

Africa and Africans, both in the motherland or “ahaphora” and the “diaspora” have indeed had a raw deal in the past half a millennium. It is also noteworthy to proudly state that African men, women and nations criminally unjustifiable position of “suffering and smiling” a la Abami Eda Baba. Of course at each point in this history of ceaseless struggle in the face of excruciating exploitation and oppression we have had both the “house slaves” and the “field slaves” as malcdm x put it or the Aristotelian slaves by nature and slaves by circumstance.

Joanne Grant (1967) in her Black Protest richly put in perspective the struggles in the diaspora (particularly America) with a plethora of documentation of black protest perspectives and actions. Several authors, including cheikh Anta Dip, Ali Mazrui, Chinweizu, Ade – Ajayi, Chancellor Williams, Basil Davidson, and Samir Amin have documented the responses of Africans to the debilitating evils of the trans-Saharan/trans-Atlantic slave-trades, and colonialism. They have also sought to re-affirm the pride of the African man and woman in the past (and thus impliedly possible) greatness. They have with facts and figures disputed the insulting “heart of darkness” view of Africa that the conrads, Trevor-Ropers and their likes of the Euro-centric would which was captured by Hegel whom with his intellectual depth could unfortunately to say the least say “African is no historical part of the world; it has no movement to exhibit. Historical movement in Africa that is in its northern part belongs to the Asiatic or European world…what we understand as African is the unhistorical, underdeveloped spirit, still involved in the state of nature… the history of the world travels from East to west, for European is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning” what can we say to this but “tufiakwa” as my Igbo brothers and sisters would say.

We however at this junction have to start this journey of Africa at its bus-stop of colonization, ie., the decade of the 60s.

The road forward for Africa’s transformation as always been in contention. At the period of decolonization, this contention was to be seen and felt in the divergent positions of its ruling elites (quite unlike their NEPAD is (unanimity of today. As Rachel Murray (2006) put it the emerging “states did not… agree on the nature of the regional organizations” and processes of transforming the newly independent Africa. Blocs emerged based on this disagreement between 1960 and 1961. Akakpai (1999) referring to Tordoff noted that three blocs subsisted i.e., the conservative Monrovia bloc, the radical Casablanca bloc and the “ambivalent” Brazaville group. Ross Herbert (2002) asserted a similar position on the authority of Monita Patel. The Casablanca bloc comprising Ghana, Guinea, Mali, the United Arab Republic and morocco, which had emerged in 1961 at a conference hosted in Casablanca Morocco by king Mohammed 1, was radical. It called for close economic co-operation and a united approach to issues of defense and security. In its federalist Casablanca charter, it echoed Nkurumah’s, call for a United States of Africa with its own Central Bank and Army High Command.

We would wish to align with the like’s of Mirrary in however seeing the blocs as two. This is based on the reason that the Brazzaville group comprising former French colonies that had met in Brazaville a month before the Casablanca conference, pushing for a “gradualist” approach to de-colonization (this was most likely influenced at the very least by French colonization’s policy of assimilation) could be said to have joined forces with other conservative states in forging the Monrovia bloc.

In May 1961, twenty two out of the then twenty seven independent states in Africa (none of the Casablanca 5 was there) met at Monrovia, Liberia. The Brazavillists were at there. The bloc called for a “confederal” approach in the pursuit of Africa’s unity and transformation. If waited the “sovereignty” of each state to be “preserved in the framework of a looser arrangement” to that proposed by the Casablancists. The Monrovists according to Elias “generally felt that economic and technological development … should take precedence over political union at least at this stage of the evolution of the newly independent states”. In this light, a critical recommendation from the meeting “was that a charter should be drawn, up for an organization of African and Malagasy states”. In January 1962 based on this resolution a meeting of Heads of States and Governments in the bloc met in Lagos. This meeting mandated a council of the States’ foreign Affairs Minister that met in Lagos in June 1962 to draft the charter. And by December 1962, seventeen of the twenty states signed the Charter of Africa and Malagasy States after a great deal of consultations, compromises here and there the council of ministers harnessed provisions of the Casablanca charter, the Lagos charter and an Ethiopian draft by Haille sclassre which was little if any different from the Lagos charter. The adoption of the declaration emerging from this process was the constitution on May 25, 1963 at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia of the Organization of Africa Unity OAU.

The OAU had four basic institutions. These were the: Assembly of Heads of States and Governments; Council of (Foreign) Ministers; General Secretariat and; Commission of Mediation, Conciliation and Arbitration. The last structure which was left for a separate protocol to give life to, was never established. The OAU also had specialized commissions. These were the Economic and Social Commission; Education, Scientific, Cultural & Health Commission; Defense Commission and in July 1964; the transport and communications commission and a commission of African Jurists were established.

Georges Nzangalo – Ntalaja of the UNDP, Oslo on the OAU’s formation had rightly stated that “however tentative this might be as a step towards African integration, it is a major development in the unification project” He further notes that “the pan-African ideal fell victim to both the neo-colonial interests of the colonial powers … and the narrow class interests of the African nationalist leaders who stood a better chance to gain presidential and ministerial positions in smaller entities”.

While historians could differ on the role of the OAU, it is hardly debatable that it was little if any better for Africa than the League of Nations had been for the world. As Nzanga-Ntalaja points out “Governments were free to massacre their citizens without interference from OAU member-states let alone public denuncination of crimes against humanity by other governments or the OAU secretariat. It is as well pathetic that little could be shown as its achievements in transforming the socio-economic realities of Africans. We agree unreservedly with Nzanjlo – Ntalayu that two mutually reinforcing processes were accountable for this. “On the one hand the lack of development has to do with an internal environment in which the state was more likely to function as an obstruction to development than as an agency of economic and social transformation ... the states and resources under its control were for the most part privatized by the ruler and his entourage”. And on the other was an “external development strategy whose main achievement has been to further integrate African rulers into the international networks of wealth and privilege rather than to promote development and democracy”. Thus “the eventual breakdown of the united front of all classes against colonialism was inevitable because the nationalist leaders and the masses did not share the same vision of the post – colonial society”. While most African states, rulers saw themselves as “modernizing elites”. Buying hook, line and sinker the modernising theory described earlier with “only a handful” of them being “born again” as defenders of their people’s interest. “Revolutionary pressures” as Ake put it in 1977 fired the souls of the rousing masses who sought a break away of Africa from its status of degenerate dependency to central capitalism for the continent’s transformation to become a reality. Ake “the very survival of the African bourgeoisie” noted then that “there are strong revolutionary of the existing exploitative class relations and hence”.

The African bourgeoisie responded to this within the boundaries of their nation states in two ways. One was by strengthing its material base. This was done through: “the direct use of coercive power of expropriation” in facilitating the crudest of primitive accumulation; indigenisation processes often cloaked in “populist – nationalist” sloganeering; “the application of political pressure on the imperialist agents operating in Africa for a greater share of the surplus.

The second way according to Ake involved “ideological containment” through “depoliticization”. This entailed “massive repression” which saw to an enthronement of military juntas and one – party regimes as the norm in the late 60s to the 80s.

The regional response to the “revolutionary pressures” took the form of what could be said to be the first serious effort at establishing a continent – wide programme or framework for Africa’s transformation. It was largely influenced by the perspectives of the “dependency school” according to Jimi Adesina (2003). This was the Lagos plan of Action.

Adesina on the Lagos plan of Action quoteted Adedeji as pointing out that the LPA “was the culmination of a four-year long effort”. This had stermed from “an evaluation of Africa’s macro economic performance over the period 1960 to 1975” by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). It “had been alarmed at its finding” the commission and OAU thus dedicated themselves to “producing a regional development framework to chart a new course for the region. It was in this light that the OAU Heads of states and Governments adopted the Monrovia strategy in 1979, the Lagos plan of Action and the final act of Lagos in 1980 were the results of this.

The LPA document in a manner echoed over two decades later in the NEPAD document asserted that “the effect of unfulfilled premiering of global development strategies has been more sharply felt in Africa then in other continents of the world” Africa had become “more susceptible then any other regions to the economic and social crises suffered by the industrialized countries”, due to the development parading parroted as the gospel truth for us by Euo – American powers (and we most say, wholly accepted as by proselytes of such gospel truism by rulers of African states).

The LPA identified “the central causes of the crisis” of Africa’s underdevelopment as Economies that are structurally weak with rudimentary production techniques, low output and significant post – harvest losses in its agricultural sector; over – dependence on premièring products export in its international trade. Extraversion of its economies in line with colonial economic structures inherited at independence, ”Lack of intersect oral lickages in the economy’’(Adesina 2003) gross human resource, technological, Research and Development lack of capacity and inadequacy of entrepreneurial skills. The deficiencies of African states educational system were also noted; hostile responses by developed countries to the “legitimate demand for a just and equitable new international economic order and the aspiration for “accelerated industrialization in the region”.

The “prognoses and core policy thrusts” of the LPA as Adesina quite aptly put it lay in formulating a “strategy for shifting Africa to a sustainable development path” which “involved an inversion of the experience since the 1960s”. in 1980, the plan involved four levels of implementation. These were the national, sub-regional, regional and international.

According to Adesina “the sub-regional and regional dimensions involved a phased Integration of the economies, while the international dimension involved enhanced cooperation with other “developing regions” of the world”. The nation state level of this strategy for “collective self-reliance” policies would further sub-regional (and regional) economic integration. Resources were as well to be pooled together in building institutions that might not be viable within nation –state frameworks.

Building collective capacity was to involve building bridges of human resources and knowledge for research and development and international trade negotiations.

Agricultural self sufficiency was given a critical position and “a strong political will to channel a greatly increased volume of resources to agriculture, to carry through essential reorientations of social systems” was considered very important. Agrarian policies of African states were to “induce small farmers and members of agricultural cooperatives to achieve higher levels of productivity”.

Industrialization was considered as crucial and was to be geared towards “meeting the basic needs of the population, ensuring the integration of the economy, and the modernization of the society”. The aim of the industrialization of Africa in the LPA was “freeing Africa from underdevelopment and dependence” Power and energy are of course crucial for industrialization The LPA thus “emphasized the coordination of energy policy and industrial policies at sub-regional and regional levels. Universal access to electricity was a goal that would lift the rural areas in African into civilization. Research centres on energy and power were proposed with an African Energy Commission as the regional organ for power and energy policy.

The LPA’s approach to human resources development was to be based on a large – scale curriculum revision.. to render all levels of education and training move relevant to the development needs of the local Africa environment” as well as a “mentor of socio-economic development”. Cooperation at regional and sub-regional levels was to be forged for education, research and training. This was to include the establishment of research and training institutions that would be multinational.

Transport and communication were to be veritable infrastructures in engendering the growth and development of “industry, agriculture forestry and mining” at both national and supra-national levels. Transport and communication development were to be integral components of research and development work with the intent of “stimulating the use of local, human and material resources, the standardization of networks and of equipment, research and dissemination of techniques adapted to the Africa context in the building of transport and communications infrastructure”.

Intra-regional trade was expected to be the back bone of the LPA. This was supposed to result in the establishment of an African Common Market and on the basis of this an African Economic Community. The LPA’s perspective on building a tri-continental solidarity a third worldist position upheld (at least on paper) in the days of “non-alignment” saw it proposing an “ACP Bank for foreign Trade and Investments”. National and sub-regional central banks were to forge closer ties on the continent Realizing that for the sustainability of the development process it was initiating and strategic planning towards its objectives, member states were to fashion out implementation plans for their national development on both short and long term basis within the framework of the plan.

The LPA did also have provisions on mainstreaming gender in its section on women and development even if as argued by some authors, these were inadequate It stated that “free legal aid centres, staffed by lawyers who are committed to the principle of equality between the sexes should be established in low income urban and rural areas”.

According to Ross Herbert, “:in 1991 OAU Heads of States formalized the Lagos Plain in a tready to form the African Economic Commission, which was finally ratified by a sufficient number of states in 1994”.

This involved the formulation of “a six-stage integration process” that was to take thirty four years from the period as the ECOWAS were to drive this integration process and not “an activist central organization”. This could be said to have influenced; the establishment of the South African Development Council” in 2000 by 14 member – states of the OAU in the sub-region and; the twenty member states Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) which had evolved out of the preferential trade area of Eastern and Southern Africa countries that was ratified in 1994.

Meanwhile, in 1981, the annual summit of OAU member – States, Heads of states and Governments had taken a bold step by adopting Africa’s Priority Programme for Economic Recovery APPER 1986 – 1990. The United Nations not only endorsed APPER, it did convert it into the United Nations Programme of Action for African Economic Recovery and Development (UN – PAAERD), 1986. There was however not the slightest of economic recovery for Africa on the basis of this programme and rather then ‘development’ becoming a reality and not a mere dream for Africa, its nightmare of underdevelopment worsened. The 1990 Africa Charter for popular participation of 1990 also seemed to hold out hope for the African masses. The UN once again the following year drew up another partnership of Africa and global capitalism that was supposed to lift Africa out of the doldrums of its backwardness on the basis of neo-liberal policies. This was the UN New Agenda for the Development of Africa (UN – NADAF). It was to ensure the development and transformation of Africa within ten years and was established by a UN General Assembly’s resolution in 1991. UN – NADAF was supposed to be “a compact of mutual commitment by African countries and the international community”.

Perez de Culler the then UN Secretary – General had enthused that it was “a timely opportunity for action”. The UN – PAAERD was built on two “central elements” i.e. Africa’s determination and commitment to national and regional economic development programmes and the international community’s commitment to provide necessary support for Africa’s development”. These were to guarantee Africa’s economic recovery and development

The Reality of that commitment is however a farce. Oversears Development Assistance from OECD countries to Africa did actually rise from $28.62 bn in 1990 to $34 bn by 1992 in the immediate wake of UN – NADAF (that same year it was $45 bn for Eastern Europe). It had however plummeted to $16.38 bn by 2000 (ie by 43%). While global flow of foreign direct investment rose by 40% between 1994 and 1995 to $315b, those for sub-saharan Africa fell from $5b to &407b which is just about 1.5% of the 1995 total FDI inspite of the “compact” or “New Agenda” then, as it were. Average annual growth rates that were supposed to average 6% for poverty reduction to be possible in the ten years of UN – NADAF hardly rose beyond 3%.

Th UNADAF was to be reviewed after ten years of its implementation. A 12- member panel – commission of eminent independent evaluators was constituted. Their verdict was that UN-NADAF provided “a very disappointing result”. The report further categorically stated that “inspite of the liberalization, the promised benefits failed to materialize. The rate of investments remained low, capital flight was significant, foreign direct investment was only negligible and concentrated in a few countries and mainly in the extractive industries”.

It was thus considered apt to discontime the UN-NADAF and rather support the then emerging AU’s NEPAD. Before going into NEPAD itself we shall take a last look at attempts by Africa to forge its own development for socio-economic transformation. This is in the shape of Africa’s Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programme (AAF – SAP).

In 1981 the World Bank published the report of its commission chaired by Elliot Berg: Towards Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: “development failure” squarely at the feet of Africa. It held the African State responsible for bad policies, poor room for the private rampage of capital and rabid patrimonialism. Its prognosis was based on the Reaganist and Thatcherite neo-liberal positions, liberalization policies and cuts in budgetary deficit funding for trade and monetary policies, respectively. It proposed “a model that assumes perfectly competitive markets, it imposed a policy framework that put market at the hert of resource allocation: from trade to social policy “(Adesina, 2003). “Access to a wide range of international finds was made conditional on reaching an agreement with the IMF and the world Bank to implement the package of policies refered to as Structural Adjustment Programme”. (It needs be stated here that even the UN-PAAERD, in contradistinction to the APPER it took over in 1986 was influenced by this draconian report).

The implementation of SAP which even its World Bank architects have admitted to being a failure arguably brought African leaders to face the fact that it was impossible for it to positively address “Africa’s efforts to bring about fundamental socio-economic structural changes”. AAF – SAP was an attempt at finding a workable alternative.

AAF – SAP was considered a building on the LPA. It noted that Africa’s Socio-economic crisis was “…the direct results of the lack of structural transformation, the rather unaffordable physical and socio-political environment of the African economies and their excessive outward orientation and dependence” It thus sought “adjustment with transformation”.

AAF SAP which unlike the LPA was formulated at a period of dismay for Africa’s ruling elites who found it more difficult to negotiate with metropolitan representatives of capital lamented that “Policy – making in most of Africa today is essentially on a short leash”. It complained about “short – term crisis management” pushing “long – term economic planning” to the shadows. It further noted that countries in sub-Saharan Africa implementing SAPs had witnessed “GDP growth decent from 2.7 percent to 1.8 per cent, a deliver in the investment/GDP ration from 20.6% to 17.1%; a rise in budget deficit from 6.5 percent to – 7.5 percent of GDP; a rise in debt service/export early ratio from 17.5 percent to 23.4”.

The AAF – SAP as “a modified version of the nationalist development model” (Adesina, 2003)” utilised policy instruments that include reduction in defense spending, expenditure – switching to ensure that an average of 30% of total government expenditure goes to the social sector, selective use of subsidies to ensure availability of essential commodities, selective use of trade and fiscal policies including high taxes on conspicuous consumption and “minimum price for food crops managed through strategic food reserves”.

The lessons of our route through the pre-NEPAD journey are this; “partnership” “new agenda”, “commitments”, “mutual packs” between African states and more importantly, between Africa and the advanced capitalist world (now scrumptiously called the “international community”) is not “new”. Only are they not “new”, they have never where like Un-PAAFERD and Pre-NEPAD efforts such as the LPA and AAF – SAP have (unlike that of NEPAD) been based on nationalist developmental, well – thought our appreciation of the dependency capitalist status of the continent in understanding the crisis that Africa’s socio-economic reality has become. While challenging the world Bank and the “New political Economy” on their ridiculously reductionist approach in seeking to find the causes of Africa’s dilemma in endogenous factors of “poor governance” and “bad policies”, critical civil society must make bold to state that African rulers with their comprador bourgeous souls are “fundamentally liable” for the pathways taken by Africa. To quantitatively change the fortune of Africa and transform the continent, we cannot run away from the challenges of changing the system and class forces they represent.

NEPAD; BETWEEN GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

The question “what is NEPAD?” is one that several African intellectuals, policy makers and thinkers concerned (for good or for bad) about Africa have had to ask (and attempt to answer) in the past five years. It has severally been described as; “KNEEPAD”(to enable Africa to crawl faster), “a new partnership between rider and horse” “a process of enslavement”, “second slavery”, “Africa’s “New Deal”, “old wine in new African bottles” and rather humorously without mirth by our own farmer-general president, baba Iyabo as Africa’s “newest wife” and thus deserving attention!

A proper understanding of what NEPAD is (and probably what it is not) could be helped by coming to grasp with how it emerged.

The OAU at its July 1999 summit in Algeria and its Extraordinary summit in Sirte, Libya two months later mandated “Algeria in its capacity as chair of the OAU, South Africa in its capacity as chair of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM), and Nigeria in its capacity as the chair the Group of 77 within the UN to engage developed capitalist countries on the “total cancellation of Africa’s debt”, and ‘to promote efforts to close the digital divide between the continent and those industrialized countries” (Landsberg, 2003). This mandate was broadened the following year at the Togo summit of the Organisation for the engagement with the North of the world to involve the formulation of a partnership that could foster the “African Renaissance” as Thabo Mbeki was wont to put it. It was based on the forgoing that the three Heads of States mentioned hitherto met with the G8 leaders at their Japan summit in July 2000 and canvassed for partnership. This led to the development of a Millennium Africa Recovery Plan (MAP) .MAP was presented to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2001.

While the work on MAP driven mainly by South Africa’s Mbeki and Nigeria’s Obasanjo, progressed, French speaking Africa (with a longer history of collaboration, stemming from French colonialism’s assimilationist policy) were developing an OMEGA plan with President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal at its helm. It was “essentially an infrastructural development plan” (Lansberg), 2003). This plan was first considered at the January 2001 Franco-Africa summit in Yaounde, Cameroon. It was subsequently presented to the OAU two months later at its Extra-ordinary summit in Sirte, Libya. The OAU called for a merger of MAP and OMEGA. This was also in line with the September 2000 resolution on Africa of the United Nations based on the UNECA formulated “compact for Africa’s recovery”. An integrated Pan-Africanist plan was considered more appropriate to divergent pathways on the same road.

The two plans merger largely emerged from the May 2001 conference of African Ministers of Finance and Ministers of Development and Planning at Algeirs, Algeria. The integrated plan was dubbed the New African Initiative (NAI). This was presented to the Assembly of Heads of States and Government of the OAU at Lusaka in July 2001.

The NAI was endorsed by the Lusaka summit and its architects mandated to build on it towards establishing a “new partnership between Africa and the North”. These architects then sold the plan to the G8 on July 20, 2001.

NEPAD was officially given birth to on October 23, 2001 at Abuja, Nigeria, with accusations that have persisted till today by critical civil society that the body suffers congenital ailments from its embryonic development. Its four cardinal objectives at birth were to eradicate poverty in Africa; promote sustainable growth and development; for the integration of Africa in the world economy and; accelerate the empowerment of the Africa women.

We shall now seek to answer the question “what is NEPAD?”

NEPAD is supposed to be the A.U’s socio-economic programme. It correctly identifies the integration of Africa “into the world economy as a supplier of cheap labour and raw materials” as a drain “of Africa’s resources rather than their use for the continent’s development”, the consequences of which is that “Africa remains the poorest continent despite being one of the most richly endowed regions of the world”. It acknowledges that “in Africa, 340 million people or half the population live on less than 1US dollar per day”, noting the high incidence of child mortality, access to safe water, illiteracy, e.t.c.

It bemoans the fact that “the impoverishment of the African continent was accentuated primarily by the legacy of colonialism, the cold war, the workings of the international economic systems and the inadequacies of and shortcomings in the post-independence era”.

It is interesting though that the quest for “total cancellation of Africa’s debt” which was explicit at Sirte in 1999 and which as LARRI put it three years back “is no longer revolutionary” was replaced with a pliant appeal for debts reduction. History (even if in a clumsy way), as proven LARRI’s position for example, has more correct. It’s position on SAP whose architects themselves now considers a colossal failure and against which Africa had drawn up the AAF-SAP is that it brought about “partial solutions” to Africa’s socio-economic imbroglio.

The main argument against NEPAD in short is that while it’s diagnosis is to some extent arguably correct, its prognoses as a development strategy to a great extent is not.

The main proposal of NEPAD is aptly summed up thus

1. Africa needs a growth of 7 percent a year, combined with targeted measures to extend infrastructure and social services, to ensure sustainable development (para 64)

2. To achieve that growth rate, Africa needs USD64 billion more in investment every year (para144)

3. The bulk of these funds must be obtained from oversees (para144)

4. The main obstacle to overseas donors and investors remain weak states, which are unstable and conflict-ridden due to

(a) Undemocratic systems

(b) Weak administration and management

(c) Inadequate poverty-relief programmes, leading to persistent unrest.

Its three key strategies flow from this analysis. These basically are; improvement of governance, involving democratization and conflict-resolution;, enabling role of the state in the provision of “public goods” such as infrastructure, health, education and food and; mobilization of resources with emphasis on foreign investments and aid, debt relief and endogenous development of private interest.

NEPAD’S unquestioning acceptance of the “modernization” cock and bull perspective of central capitalism’s evangelism is a sore nexus of its diagnosis and prognosis of the “marginalisation of Africa”. From the left direction, a similar view that “in most of Africa, capitalism does not exist” expressed by Oupa Bodibe of COSATU and that of COSATU itself that “the predominant social relations are still not capitalist” in Africa could be quite deceptive. Dot Keet of the Africa Social Forum rightly grasps the crux of it in pointing out that “the most fundamental problem for Africa is not its exclusive but rather the longstanding subordinate and exploited nature of its inclusion in an asymmetrical international economy”. She buttresses this view with Samir Amin’s position that “the concept of marginalisation is a false one which hides the real questions, which are not ‘to which degree the various regions are integrated’ but rather the ways in which they are integrated”.

We thus cannot but ask does, or can NEPAD change how Africa is integrated into the world economy with the short end of the stick”?

The critical civil society in Africa has in different ways answered in the negative. This spans a spectrum stretching from critical engagement to outright rejection. The group of forty C.S.Os “Africa is not for sale” declaration out rightly rejected NEPAD, as did the third world Network/CODESRIA

For those who see hope in critical engagement, the opportunity for NEPAD’s review some five years from now and the APRM that emerged from the AU’s Durban declaration of 2002 give hope.

We do not see the two approaches as being mutually exclusive. We view a necessary strategy for critical civil society as one of two tactics. Africa’s civil society should formulate an African Civil Society Alternative Framework for Development and Social Transformation. We could while mobilizing around this engage the NEPAD review process and the APRM process. This would be a strategy of critical engagement and revolutionary transcendence.

We must point out though that the non-submission for peer review by the key personae dramatis of NEPAD thus far is shameful. The same goes for the absence till date of the APRM’s charter. This rather than dissuade change-seeking elements should be ammunition for a campaign of transcendence.

5.0 NIGERIA, THE GIANT WITH CLAY FEET

Baba Oluwide in his Imoudu, A Biography: Political History of Nigeria, 1939 – 150, first published in 1993 noted that “the immediate period before colonialists found Nigerians in various states of social formations. City States in the Niger Delta, run forest kingdoms in the West, republican clans in the east and kingdoms in the saharah traded and were involved in diverse socio-economic interactions The modern Nigeria economy however, could be said, to have been forged by British colonial interest in the late nineteenth century. Europe was industrializing and seeking new markets. Oil was very important for lubricating blasting away “machinofacture”. That was palm-oil which English trading firms bought from chiefs and emerging entrepreneurs on the south -coast of Nigeria. Other cash crops were needed and eventually extraction of minerals; tin in jos and coal in Enugu. The colonial state was constructed to protect the business interests of seeming laissez-faire private enterprise. The union jack was the color of the royal Niger Company’s charter. The Royal Niger company had establish ‘’trade controls on the multifarious companies which had been exploiting the rich natural resource of the country. The Lagos colony, southern and Northern protectorates amalgamation culminating in 1914 were administrative steps of British colonialism to further the exploitation of cash crops and the emerging extractive industry. Rail lines were laid, as the backbone of a transport system, geared to enclave capitalist development. Oil from the Niger Delta, the southern coast of Jaja Opoba, of Nana of Itsekiri, still plays a crucial role in the socio-economic calculus of Nigeria’s development. This time it is as the “block gold”, crude oil.

It was not so at independence, though oil had been struck at oloibiri, ogbia land in commercial quantities by 1956. The twilight of colonial imperialism had set and the de-columniation process far-gone. It however must have been a signal to the avatars of imperialism to keep an eye on this giant with its awesome size and great geo-strategic significance sitting on such oil. The docile giant still remains fixed, with its clay feet.

An agrarian economy with 60% of the country’s GDP being accounted for with agricultural produce was the basis of the first republic. With this, infrastructure was developed buoyed by the euphoria of “sovereignty”. GDP growth in the 60s averaged 8.7% with almost two thirds of the labour force engaged in agricultural activities.

The rising importance of oil in the world market at the turn of the 70s saw the petroleum industry acquiring prominence in the country’s economy. By the mid-1970s revenue generated from crude oil accounted for approximately “25% of GDP, 90% of foreign exchange receipts and about 70% government revenue (NLC local schools 2005; participant’s resource book). The contribution of revenue from agriculture dropped to barely 35% by 1975.

The “oil boom” with “petro-dollars” that made spending it our problem was the basis of rapid expansion of expenditure by government. Between 1975 and 1995 about $10bn was spent on public enterprises. This of course was the basis on which the comprador bourgeois in Nigeria, “strengthened its material base” (Ake, 1977). This was in the form of indigenization. The Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree was promulgated in March 1972 and became operational on 1st April, 1974. It was further amended in 1976. The decree specified enterprises in Nigeria as being of two categories. The first of these categories was to be excursively for Nigerian entrepreneurs. As Ake put it however, “apart from the retail trade and road transport, the category of enterprises reserved exclusively for Nigerians relates to almost entirely marginalized sectors of the economy” the second category of enterprises comprised those which foreign capitalist interests could operate in. It embraced “far more vital sectors of the economy”. There were thirty – three enterprise in this list. Two conditions for foreign participation in these enterprises were given. First the enterprise must be reasonably large, involving not less than $500,000.00 capital base, second, at least 40% equity must be Nigerian owned.

The Nigeria Bank of industry and Commence was established by Decree No 22 of 1973. this was after the indigenization of banks in the finance sector up to the extent of 40% Nigerian ownership with banks loan being set aside to provide credit debilities to Nigerian businessman.

The indigenization “radical” as it might seen (and more out of desperation to build a bourgeons class some what on the oil rumbling belly of wealth with the doom) made not even a dent on the dependent and the underdevelopment that the boom’s growth, seemed to hide. The biggest and most strategic enterprises. These included transnational corporations in trade such as UAC, Patterson zochoms, United Trading Company, Blojsons, G.B. Ollivant, K. Chellerars, SCAO and banks like Berdays Bank and slandered Bank. Indignation this was about liberating the Nigerian economy, but for consolidating the hold of the local ruling class on Nigeria. And further s Ake put it. “one effect of the indigenization decree is to rationalize the relationship between the Nigeria bourgeoisie and its patron, international capitalism, in such a manne as to decrease the chance of serious conflict between the,. The decree limits the chance of serious conflict between them. The decree limits the chance of conflict by a clearer demarcation of spheres. It reserves a sphere international capitalism is to refrain from interfering in this sphere.

In 1974, the Federal Military Government in Nigeria took what on the face of it would have seem a very bold step in the oil and gas sector when it decreed up to 55% participation of the FGN. Oil had accounted for 27.4% of the FG’s revenue generation in the 1970/71 fiscal year with non-oil revenue generation being 72%. By 1974/75 oil accounted for 84.4% while non-oil sources could only gross a bare 15.6%. This as Ake put it “given the fact that the Nigeria economy is now for all practical purposes a petroleum economy, this 55% indigenization is … rather like a Government deciding to control (only) half of its economy. The spinelessness of the indigenization scheme is further revealed by the fact that the Federal Military Government acquired this 55% with $780m of tax-payers money.

As the doom of the boom began creeping in at the end of the 1970s, the Nigerian economy began to decline. Between 1978 and 1985 real GDP growth had slowed to an average of 2.2%. The busting of the oil market bubble in the 1980s with consequent fall in world prices of crude oil, export revenue collapsed and budget deficits began. The Government resorted to hanging the neck of poor old Nigeria in the noose of the debt trap.

The second republic passed its Economic Stabilization Act; better known as “austerity measures in 1981. Several wild goose – chasing efforts at revamping the economy and lifting it from its quagmire as could be supposed have been made by several Governments, following recipes of Breton woods institutions cook-books. These have however not only been wild goose - chasing, they have reinforced the gnashing poverty and blinding hopelessness of Nigerians.

These reforms which stretch from the infamous “SAP” that there was no alternative to, to the current neo-liberal “Reform Agenda” that there can be of wisdom greater than in the sight on Nigeria’s elites even with the heightening immiseration and worsening pauperization of Nigerians that they can see. These reforms at various times have covered area such as foreign trade, exchange rate, banking and finance, commercialization and privatization of state owned enterprises. The Nigeria state agrees with the picture of decline of Nigeria’s economy presented above. In its NEEDS (2004) document, which we shall look at more later, it states inter alia that. “per capital GDP in Nigeria was among the lowest in the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Annual per capital GDP remained stagnant in the 1990s, and it grew just 2.2% between 1999 and 2003, far lower than the 4.2% needed to significantly induce poverty” Quite painful too is it noting that though by 2000 Nigeria “had earned about $300billion from oil exports since the mid-70s…its per capital income was 20 percent lower than in 1975”.

What the awful in itself decline in GDP and per capital income which even the FGN accepts does not show is the sharpening inequalities and class contradictions within this plummeting decline. A former General Manager of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Matthew Ajayi Adejoro (2001) exposes this. He states that “real GDP started to decline in 1981 and if personal income also fell as a result, that fall should have stopped and be reversed from, 1985, when the GDP started to rise again. But the per capital income did not cease to fall from 1985 but, rather, it has continued to fall and today it is estimated at only US$250, down from the US1000 that it was in 1980”.

Per capital income itself is a mask of inequalities between classes to resources in the modern industrial society. It evens the hellish penury of the underclass with the rose buds scenting currency of the salaried CEOs. By comparing the percentage of the GDP consumed as “compensation of employees in the economy,” we see grossly widened and widening gaps between the haves and have-notes in Nigeria. In the 1973/74 fiscal year this was 25.4%; 25.8% in 1977 / 78; 24.3% in 1981; 23% in 1984; 23% in 1987 and with the commencement of SAP, 19% in 1987. It has kept declining since then and had fallen to 3.0% in 1997. This is converse to the situation in advanced capitalist comprise. In the United States of North America for example, it was 59.4% of the GDP in 1994. And in 1993 it was 56% in UK (Adejoro, 2001). Operating surpluses on the other hand has kept rising from; 68.4% in 1973/74; 69.6% in 93.3% in 1997. As Adejoro who defiantly is not a “radical” in the mould of wanting to upturn the capitalist system could see “in most countries of the world, the relation ship between wage and non-way incomes is an indication of how equitable or otherwise is the distribution of the national income among the various income groups”. We could this say that an alarming extent of inequity existspalpably in the Nigerian society. For even Adejoro who still looks up to Rostow and his Non-communist manifesto’s stages “the type of institutions which have aided other Countries to “take of” from the traditional society when their primary sector was predominate are, in the Nigerian situation being negatively exploited not only to make “take – off” almost impossible but also to deny the bulk of Nigerians”. This is the very same “type of institutions”, policies and mechanisms which NEEDS enshrines, the neo-classical worship of some supposedly blind market forces and its so-called “invisible hand” of supply and demand which Hoogvelt (1997) has shown is “at all times, and at all levels….guided and steered by politics and power”, within nations and in the world capitalist marked.

Nigeria today with an estimated population of 132 million and a growth rate of 3.5% is 158 in a ranking of 174 countries with a Hunan Development Index of 0.453 according to UNESCO in 2003. We occupy the 62nd position out of 85 countries on the Human Poverty Index. With 64% “combined gross enrollment” into primary, secondary and post-secondary educational institutions, life expectancy is an abysmal 43.4 years. Oil earnings still remain the backbone of the economy, generating 95% of Government revenue, while the restive people of the Chikoko South, the Niger Delta where the oil is gushing from, languish, and perish from neglect and despoliation of their environment and a degradation of their lives.

NEEDS claims the Reform Agenda is turning the country around. Yet inflation from 10.5% in 2000 is today 11.6%. Rural to urban drift persists as 5.3% urbanization, it “is one of the fastest in the world” over 70% of Nigerians live below the poverty line with the largely agrarian country’s population in the rural areas being 53.4% (NPC, 2004). Yet the able-bodied youths that throng into the towns and cities, with high hopes of escaping the yawning poverty and desperation in the villages get sucked into the homelessness and disillusionment of towns and cities with no jobs, turning to crime and prostitution. According to the UNGASS Report on Nigeria of December 31, 2005, “public health expenditure in 2002 was 1.7% of GDP while, private sector health expenditure was 3.5%” double that for public health. Yet the neo-liberal soul of NEEDS calls for Governments divestment from social services in the name of increasing private participation.

The Nigeria economy still remains integrated in a rapaciously dependent way by central capital with the new face of imperialism. In fact with the wind of such laws as the privatization and commercialization Decree of 1988 and the Bureu for public Enterprises Act of 1993 strongly blowing the sails of privatization and deregulation, the neo-liberal ship of the regime seems afloat still, quite near to an iceberg.

Nigerians export partners are us (38.3%), India (99%), Porazil (6.8%), Spare (6.2%), France 5.6%, Japan and Ero-American interests make up over 55%. Our import partners are US (15.6%), Uk (9.6%), Germany (7.3%), China (7.2%), Italy 4.3%.

At this juncture we need to look move closely at ‘their’ NEEDS. What is it? Can it, is it actually meant to economically “empower” the immense majority of Nigerians? Or is it meant to economically empower those who have looted our treasury or buccaneering comprador elites who in essence are outposts for bigger, external influences?. Is it really a workable “development strategy” What are its relations to the pan-African “development strategy” – NEPAD? Which other endogenous forces are involved in the socio-economic dynamics of Nigeria and how? We shall try to look at these interrelated questions.

NEEDS AS ‘A BRAND NEW SECOND HAND CAR’.

There is a cartoon in Berney karunombe of LaRRI’s “NEPAD: A new partnership between rider and horse? which I find quite amusing. It depicts Mbeki as ‘dad’, Obasanjo as ‘mum’ and NEPAD as their bouncing balby. It is not surprisingly very apt. talking on “NEPAD as old wine in ‘new African’ bottles’ in the 2/02 issue of PSI’s focus on the public services Moiré van driel noted that “the NEPAD rings a bell”. It is very similar to the South Africa government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy. Through NEPAD, the GEAR is being imposed on the continent as a whole” lands being buttressed this when he said “for many, the top-down nature of the NEPAD process and its adoption of neo-liberal economics are reminiscent of the South Africa situation”. While noting that “it would hardly be surprising to find that South Africa is the dominant influence in NEPAD” he further pointed out that “South Africa’s economic policy has conflicted with and overlooked its social polices…..resulting in growing income poverty and inequality”. NEEDS was formulated after the adoption of NEPAD; It could thus be said that what Mbeki deposited in codifying capitalism’s rampage as neo-liberal globalization in South Africa’s bedroom has been yearningly taken in by Obasanjo as his Government’s NEEDS. In seeing the future progression of NEEDS in GEAR “we have to keep in mind that in South Africa, GEAR has led to massive job losses and impoverishment and that it is opposed by all progressive forces in civil society” (van Driel, 2002).

NEEDS sees its vision as emerging more from endogenous dynamics. As stated in the “…vision of tomorrow’s Nigeria” in its overview, it claims that its “vision is based an the constitution, the Kuru declaration; previous initiatives such as vision 2010; and the wide spread consultation and participation throughout Nigeria that was part of the NEEDS process” the 2001 Kuru declaration which claims to embody “the vision we have for Nigeria… to become the catalyst of (Africa) renaissance” enclose NEPAD from its a embryonic Mbekist “MAP”.

It is interesting though that slyly the document does not mention the particular one of the “previous initiatives” which it is most akin to – SAP!. Iyayi (2006) shows that the pre-occupation of Nigeria’s “indigenous ruling class” with the resolution of the indigenization problem “since flag independence in 1960” had involved methods of “muted defiance of the dictates of international capital” as the 1972 – 74 indigenisation’s process of economic masturbation had been an one hand. On the other was “obedience to” the market forces solution of “commercialization and privatization of state established and funded enterprises” which has “won” for Nigeria, “formally ranked by the UNDP as the 9th potentially richest country n the word” a position (not enviable of course) of “the 13th poorest nation on earth”. The thread running from SAP to NEEDS is that acquiescence. That acceptance of the neo-liberal paradigm of the most virulent strain of capitalism, economically empowers some Nigerians – albeit an infinitesimal minority – economically. This is because “the neo-colonial status of the country has continued to involve the Nigerian economy in two forms of capital accumulation”. These are “the expanded accumulation of capital for the metropolitan economy and the primitive accumulation of capital for the indigenous class of Nigeria capitalists”.

NEEDS “focuses on four key strategies: re-orienting values, reducing poverty, creating wealth and generating employment”.

With regards to “re-orienting values”, no sane person would note any such re-orientation from the “post – master” of billions of naira of public finds” values of Abacha’s Ismaila Gwarzo which Oshiomhole criticized in his “New Beginning May Day speech of 1999 and those values of those with NEEDS and those sowing CEEDS, presently in Nigeria. Further “discriminatory justice” persists even with their EFCC and ICPC while “ordinary Nigerian are arraigned and often times shot for committing “petty” crimes or have their faces shown on crime fighter as Africa China put it, for stealing maggi.

Poverty has not in any way reduced by all indices. The percentage of poor people which was 28.1% in 1980, 46.3% in 1985, 42.7% in 1992 ans 65.6% in 1996 has climbed beyond 70% in the NEEDS years. The greatest problem though is that NEEDS does not even seem to understand properly (or cannot?) the why of poverty. It identifies “inadequate growth” as “the main cause of poverty in Nigeria” pg 30. In the abridged version of the document prepared by Omar Sattaur for the National Planning Commission; “social exclusion” is seen as the “result” of “a bundle of factors” of poverty. It does not take a genius however to realize that the poverty of the mass of Nigerians is a direct consequence of “a bundle of factors” that have at their core, capitalist underdevelopment and roguery. The ostentatious lifestyle of our elites does not amount to a “social exclusion” of the poor. Thus is a transference of the NEPAD perspective of poor Africa’s “marginalisation” to class relations within the nation state. On the contrary, rather than “marginalisation” as we pointed out earlier or ‘social exclusion” as stated in NEEDS, we have social inclusion based on subordination and alienation, exploitation and oppression, domination and repression of the working people by a degenerate ruling class of the most terrible hue.

.

NEEDS claims it will create wealth. While we could say it is labour that creates wealth (noting NEEDS disdain for labour and labour relations, being “industrial relations blind” as Issa Aremu (2004), put it for the sake of our argument being made clearer, we could agree that yes, NEEDS is “creating” wealth. The question however is for who and what percentage of the population are they?.

NEEDS talks of “employment generation”, which would create “about 7 million jobs by 2007”. Yet no less than 70,000 public servants with the FGN have been laid off in the past one year alone, in the name of down – sizing “rightsizing”. Yet as Aremu (2004) put it “we have witnessed more job – losses of workers even as we witness top heavy recruitment”. We thus cannot but agree with him that NEEDS harbours class bases against workers, seeing them as sources of “wastes” and “costs” rather than value-addition agents”.

Top on the list of key strategies which “NEEDS” proposes (in) achieving its goals” is to “privatize, deregulate, and liberalise key sectors of the economy”. As Fasina (2004) put it “it requires the dismantling of the public sector through a “renewed privatization, deregulation and liberalization programme to shrink the public sector and bring up the private sector”. And who benefits? Primarily (with metropolition capital that it is going to play a role of sub-imperialist agent for the absentee czars of the “Washington consensus), the transcorp’s of this world. And issues of “orientation of values” that does not see a moralizing president’s problem with immorality of lies, not to talk of owning 200 million shares transcorp simply because it could be said not to be illegal!. It is in this light that we not only agree with Fashina that “NEEDS. is a rehash of the old SAP doctrine” we see the farce of SAP then, as the tragedy of our present socio-economic realities.

It must be stated here before going on that there is no truth in basing NEEDS on the constitution flawed as it is. While chapter 2 remains unjustifiable, it should be progressively realizable. The programme however by “transferring the public wealth to a few”, makes the soico-economic rights of the majority of Nigerians progressively (or retrogressively?) unrealizable. NEEDS simply put could be understood within the context of sharpening socio-economic contradictions driven by neo-liberal globalization and grafted on our not too distant past as what ASUU (2000) called “the unending legacy of IMF’s structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)”.

NEEDs in general being best understood as the manifesto of Obasanjo’s “Reform Agenda which he never presented as an electoral platform (and thus, which unlike the off-touted position of does the likes of El-Rufai not give him the mandate to implement, inspite of a questionable return to power through the polls in 2003), as been summarily engaged in this essay. The compendium of NEEDY reforms of the present administration of the FGN We shall now look at some of its transport and commication and the health system. Quite a number of them are driven by members of the Presidents kitchen cabinet that are said to have cooked NEEDS (as Falae did SAP, as if they were not merely reading out the mene mene… as did (Danrel).

Charles Soludo has been roudly praised for the banks consolidation programme of the Reforms Agenda. He played central right amongst the strikers in the NEEDS team as Obasanjo’s special Economic Adviser before moving to the Central Bank. Even the representative leadership of organized labour have given him a put on the back. It really cannot be faulted that the backs consolidation as brought about bigger banks with bigger amounts of money in their vaults. But it should be asked, at what cost? And in whose interest?. The banks consolidation went a pace of course with job losses. This is a critical part of the private sector that is supposed to mop up the hundreds of thousands that the public sector is laying off and still recruit millions more to meet the target of 7 million more jobs set by NEEDS. The “more jobs” deemed created in the private sector really boils down to more people selling “pure water” and “recharge cards”. It has had virtually no impact on enhanced manufacturing capacity. It is also noteworthy to ask about the funds of people that are not like Jay Jay Okocha, “little people” with “little monies that mean their whole lives to them, whose monies” are trapped in the liquidated banks. Anas A. Galadima reported in the November 21, 2006 issue of Daily Trust (pp. 4) for example that “N1.9 billion belonging to depositors in banks that were liquidated between 1994 and 2003 is yet to be claimed by the owners”.

What will now happen with those affected by the 2005 reconfiguration of the face of banking in Nigeria? It is also pertinent to point out that the bank consolidation is primarily in the interest of the indigenous ruling class, to facilitate the enhancement of their position of primitive accumulation in Nigeria and sub-imperialist interests on the (sub-) continent through loans it is for the transcorps and the Globacoms of Nigeria. This however will not undermine the economic dominance of foreign capitalist interests in the exploitation of Nigeria’s resources. It would rather assure international finance capital of the “seriousness” of players in their second eleven, whose turf they are playing on.

Oby Ezekwesili does not seem to respect “due process” (and values of truth when it comes to reforms in the education sector. The way she is going about he reforms with 25,000 workers in her ministry warming up for the door of unemployment and her handling of the “unity schools” brouhaha gives cause for concern. A leading weekly. The News also caught her in a lie with statistics as she sought to justify the unjustifiable, “privatisation”, “public-private partnership (jargonry for the former) of the schools. It is also interesting that over 50% of the reforms activities had been conducted before calling for a summit of all stakeholders in the sector. This is really due process in reverse. It is interesting to note that while NEEDS affirms its commitment to turning the tide of “inadequate attention to policy framework within the sector”, and has beautiful goals for education, some of the steps beings taken now are backward within the context of the 1977 National Education Policy. Colleges of Education and Polytechnics are to be harmonized into the University system. The poor interest in COEs and “Polyjambs” will not be best addressed by such harmonization. The harmonization of HND and B.sc holders’ terminal levels in the public service is a more fruitful venture.

A major thrust of education in NEEDS is the development of “entrepreneurial education”, this is a subtle ideological waefare against the humanizing role of education

With infrastructure, while it can not be doubted that a few roads here and there have been constructed and FERMA established, the opaqueness of the ministry of works especially under Anenih (and to some extent Ogunlewe) to public scrutiny of its accounts and the billions of naira, but cannot be accounted for cannot that make us ask if it is reform or deform. The state of roads as death-traps, including the near-abandoned Ilorin – Oyo – Ibadan, the eye-sore of Benin-Ore-Sagamu highways and the erosion of roads in the South-East and North Eastern States cannot be justified. Further, an efficient transport system entails a more integrated approach than that pursued by the government.

The issue of aviation? Does one really need to talk about this. Three major air crashes and three not exactly minor ones and over 300 Nigerians dead speak the terrible macabre story of Nigeria’s aviation industry. Obasanjo’s stiffness in keeping Borishade at the cockpit, long beyond when any gentlemen in a civilized society would himself have resigned makes one to wonder. This is moreso the case when after it became impossible with the October 28, 2006 ADC crash to keep him as minister of Aviation, he was moved just in time for the billion-naira Abuja carnival to the Tourism ministry.

Communication is something Obasanjo has been so praised on with the “geesim” magic. But wait a minute, is GSM not more one of the features of globalization with its penetration of all available markets and the “universalisation” of a “coca-cola” culture? The world over, there was no single mobile phone in 1978 by 1998 there was 305 million. As close by as 1985, there were no internet use in the world, by 1998 there were 180 million interest users. Should George Bush, Schroeder, Rawlings or Mugabe be congratulated for internet access being available in American, German, Ghanaian or Zimbabwean, cyber cafes?

There have actually been giant strides made in health services in recent times the Health Sectors Reforms Programme rightly gives the need for reform of the sector as being that “all the data show that health services in Nigeria have suffered from decades of neglect, endangering every Nigerian’s health. It is time to confront those realities” it notes that “Nigeria was ranked 187th among 191 UN member states by the world Health Organsation (WHO) in 2000”, pointing out that “Nigeria is ahead only of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Myanmar and Sierra – Leone”.

The Federal Ministry of Health has drafted a national health policy and national health bill through social dialogue of “stakeholders”. An inclusive HSRP strategic implementation committee was constituted and a health sector reforms foundation which is conducting the third national health conference in conjunction with the FMH on November 28-29, 2006 was established.

There is no doubting the fact that the different players in the health team and its administration are driven to pursue the MDGs on health passionately. Who would face the reality of 100 infant deaths for every 1000 births (10%) or 201 out of every 1000 children born before they clock five (a whopping 20%) and not be so passionately driven excepted his or her heart is full of wickedness? The minister of health Professor Eyitayo Lambo, a fine gentleman but nevertheless an a functionary of the FGN and the socio-economic system that drives it, was one of the ministers “queried” in July for not diligently pursuing the neo-liberal public service reforms. A cause for concern in the health reforms though is the import being put on public private partnerships PPP with the intent of mobilizing resources from the private sector towards ensuring better health for all. The recent UNGASS statistics quoted earlier of 31 December 2005 shows that “public health expenditure in 2002 was 1.7% of GDP, while private sector health expenditure was 3.5%”. That is over times two of expenditure on public health. This makes it obvious that more emphasis should be put on building a strong public health system. This is moreso where universal access to health is actually meant when it is said. Further, withregards to health services, the neo-liberal reforms of “appropriate pricing” of user fees will soon start taking its toll of lives and a possible rolling back of gains made in the sector on the altar of “for-profit”. Presently a minimum deposit of N35,000.00 and N200,000.00) must be made for a patient to be admitted, and treatment for such a patient would not commence without it being paid at the National Hospital Abuja. This holds even where such a patient is a child or a woman, in this formally National Hospital for Women and Children. In poverty-ridden Yenagoa, Bayelsa state, a minimum deposit of N10,000.00 must be paid before admission at the federal medical centre.

The issue of HIV and AIDS is one that while some efforts really have been put in, and results gotten (e.g reduction of prevalence rate by .4% to 50%), it still remaining much more motion than movement, considering the billions of dollars already pumped into fighting it. The curiously low level of the national response’s impact as against projected impact led to a temporary withdrawal of “Global Funds”. A number of national and international partner bodies are still however tirelessly committed to the combat. A bill on a National Agency for the Control of HIV/AIDS has been fashioned by the FMH. There would be a need to streamline its functions and that of NACA better, to avoid duplication of efforts and conflicts in coordinating the national response. It is noteworthy to point out an alarming danger that HIV and AIDS incidence rates in the rural areas as against the urban is rising astronomically. With greater ignorance and weight of tradition in the country side, it posses peculiar problems for the national response

THE NIGER DELTA

With oil as the mainstay of the Nigerian economy the Niger Delta through oil exploitation has suffered what Doifie Ola (2003) called “the worst assault an the Nigerian environment”. It has also witnessed “the most organised resistance” of several forces ranging from self-determination activists and movements to creek-cowboy, hostage-taking “ethnic militias”.

It was debated at the level of the Labour Party on how to categoriese the Niger Delta crisis. Is it one of environmental rights? Economic depravation? Or socio-national annihilation?. We could not but come to agree that it is a ramified “developmental crisis”.

This much the party grasped and stated that “the Niger Delta problem is nigeria’s problem”. The Niger Delta question really is the tinder box of socio-economic conflicts within the framework of the Nigerian federation.

Doifre states that “despite being the richest in terms of national resource endowment, the Niger Delta remains ‘poor, backward and neglected” as stated by the 1957 Willink commsion.

A 1995 world Bank report had noted the disruption of the region’s ecological balance with about 10% of the area’s mangrove last to deforestation caused by oil exploration and production activities of the powerful transnational corporations.

At the conference on the Peoples of the Niger Delta and the 1999 constitution organised by the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria (ERA/FOEN), speaker after speaker, gave vent to the anger of the people of the Niger Delta. The shadow of the KAIAMA DECLARATION earlier issued at the birth place of the heroic Isaac Adaka Boro on December 11, 1998, militant Ijaw Youths and other compatriots had made bold to state; that the political crisis in Nigeria is mainly about the struggle for the control of oil mineral resources Odia Ofeimu (1999) seemed to buttress this tracing the history of the derivation principle in resource allocation in the country: from 100% in 1946, the Phillipson commission recommended 50% for derilation: in 1961, Hicks – Phillipson recommended 80% ; 100% was actually disbursed in 1953 when the western region pushed for it”. He further noted its being pegged to 25% by the Obasanjo administration in 1975, 5% under Shagari in 1981, 1.5% under Buhari and Babangida’s raising it to 3%. It is presently 13% with the FGN hiding behind a finger as it would not require a constitutional amendment to charge it being a minimum and not a ceiling. It is not surprising that with the “resource control” activism so to speak the issue of derivation principle was one that almost tore the political confab last year at its seams.

The then Ihonvbere at the conference mentioned that “it is very critical that we understand the character of the class forces that we are fighting against”. He further said “personally I am one of those who have very little faith in the visionless, disorganised, corrupt, irresponsible and hopeless Nigerian elites that have led us to where we are today because the clear evidence of their failure is around us”. The Niger Delta crises can however definitely not be resolved within the context of leaders and activists of the region’s struggle for justice and equity crossing over to this self-same elites.

The struggle for changing the conditions in the Niger Delta can be long-lasting only if it is part of what the 3rd All-Nigeria socialist conference of February 2003 at Benin saw as the “struggle for changing the character of the state”. It is however clear that the “struggle for changing the character of the State” would entail a struggle against the system it represents and against the classes that benefit from this system. Such a struggle can of course be successful only if it is rooted in and indeed becomes a struggle of the Nigerian Working people themselves.

One crucial aspect of the conflicts in the region which gets sharper with its tempo moving from its West to its Eastern creeks is the need for deeper understanding of as Ijaw nationalism. Its implosive character and its relations (as representative, of the majority nationality in a pot puri of minorities with other Niger Delta Nationalities One thing though that we must not do in spite of the increasing intermingling (more than substitution as some would want as to believe) of disguised oil-bunkering gangsters with vibrant self-determinationsm in the militant traditions of the youths of the region’s nationalism is not to discard the later for the former. The oppression in the Niger Delta is real, the rabid despoliation of its environment and crass denuding of its resources we real. So is the resistance to these and its fight for social justice.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND NIGERIA’S SOCIO-ECONOMIC DYNAMICS

The civil society as we noted earlier is an amalgam of sorts. Different components of this heterogeneous mix, singly, in collaboration and as coalitions have intervened severally in the struggle for Nigeria’s socio-economic transformation.

The trade unions were at the fore of the struggle for independence and in recent years have given some leadership to the struggle against neo-liberal capitalism. In the past seven years, there have been seven general strikes against the deregulation of pump prices of petroleum products.

Organized labour also constituted a civil society pro-democracy network in 2000. The resolution of this network that labour and progressive activists form a socialist Working People’s Party was jettisoned and a Party for Social Democracy formed in its stead in 2002 (it is now known as Labour Party). Organized labour also teamed up with the Joint Action Forces (representing radical civil society) to form the Labour Civil Society Coalition (LASCO) some two years back. The relevance of both LASCO and JAF seems to have died with the September 21, 2005 demise of our own Chris Hani, Chima Ubani, at the barricade.

The students’ movement is a shadow of itself. Intra-left struggles in the movement from 1991 to 1995 coupled with active state intervention through the spread of corrupt practices, not to talk of socialist values and thoughts now being less “fashionable’ on campuses has left the movement splintered, weak and lacking the respect it used to have in the public domain. A faction of NANS for example supported Obasanjo’s third term bid. With the right perspectives and support from radical civil society. The more progressive faction led by Damilare Lawal, might provide hope for a possible re-birth of the movement.

The women movement is growing. It however still remains a largely urban and educated elite movement. Its impact on the conditions of the working women might yet be more significant in the future.

The earliest of N.G.Os in Nigeria were those for civil rights. The Civil Liberties Organisation formed in October 1987 was the first of these. This is not surprising considering that this was in the era of military dictatorship. Several attempts at coalition building of these NGOs and other movements gave birth to Campaign for Democracy (CD), November 1991; United Action for Democracy (UAD), May 1997; and Joint Action Council of Nigeria (JACON) also in 1997.

Post – military democratization saw to the death of JACON, the ossification of CD and the attempts of UAD to remain relevant. Virtually the same forces in UAD are also constituted as JAF, the civil society component of LASCO.

The NGO community in the country has now grown to involve issues as diverse as micro-credit financing, budget monitoring, transition monitoring, credible elections advocacy, LGBTs rights advocacy, HIV and AIDS and community life development. New forms of coalitions are also emerging, using the new technologies of the cyber age. Prominent amongst these is the Freedom of Information Coalition, which has brought almost two thousand persons together in a yahoo group that played a key role in the passage of the FOI bill.

The manufacturing bourgeosie in Nigeria has also had to challenge some of the neo-liberal policies of the FGN especially on petroleum products prices deregulation. Incidentally some of its captains who are the same elements driving the process of building Nigerian capitalism’s own transnational corporation, were key players in the attempt to foist a third term of the present regime on Nigerians, a project that gulped billions of naira

There seems to be emerging a consensus on “the failure of organized civil society”, that a renaissance of radical civil society is imperative in Nigeria.

The Nigeria left has been a key part of ‘civil society”. The collapse of the Soviet Union and internal dissentions on approaches to the June 12 bourgeois democratic revolution left both the orthodox and the trotskite groups split. Efforts at rallying left forces together were initiated in 2002 with the 3^rd All-Nigeria Socialist Conference that held in February 2003 at Benin. The Nigeria Socialist Alliance that emerged therein could though not be relevant in fighting for social and economic change. Recent efforts however if linked with a rebirth of critical civil society could lead to interventions that would successfully challenge the “received wisdom” of neo-liberal capitalism’s goodness.

In lieu of a conclusion

The NLC’s: The workers’ charter of demands of February 1980 stated clearly that “It is well known that the “laissez –faire” formula of development through profit and competition has created growing and unacceptable inequalities’. It is unfortunate that this is not “well known” to the architects of NEEDS.

NEEDS lied when it says it is based on “widespread consultation and participation throughout Nigeria”. Such formalist presentation of deeper truths is being clever by half. Really “consultations” were made, but just for making sake. The “interim poverty reduction strategy” was as much based on the outcome of such consultations with the people as the introduction of SAP by Babangida was based on the results of vox populi with regard to IMF conditionalities.

If it is otherwise, we challenge the FGN to place NEEDS to the people in a referendum. Critical civil society must formulate and mobilize around alternatives, which can actually lead to Nigerians social transformation.

Cases abound around the world in “fighting for alternatives” as the ICFTU put it in its April 2006 report of six case studies. The Uruguayan case study on energy reforms goes a long way in showing for example that the unbundling and privatization of NEPA/PHCN is not based on efficiency or inefficiency but is ideology-driven.

Critical civil society must better organize itself to win revolutionary – democratic power. The Bolivarian revolution is a pointer to the whole world with Chavez holding its torch.

Nigeria’s socio-economic crisis cannot be resolved on the basis of NEEDS. In depth critique of NEEDS must be done and popularized towards “building a socio-economic system that would assure the working people of a better today and a guaranteed future” (MHWUN 7^th NDC Resolution 5, Dec. 2004).

Many, though not as many as before 1991 for example might be quick to say “philosophers have interpreted the world, the point however is to change it”

They would not be wrong. It is not for us to only interpret the misery of our people. We must change it. Changing the socio-economic landscape of Nigeria and indeed Africa however, is not about sloganeering against NEEDS and NEPAD. It requires critical thinking out of concrete alternatives. And above all based on this, it requires mass action for change.

This would include our changing the way we think, some of the values we have come to now accept, as we get more comfortable and objective appraisals of our recent past as a people.

A new Nigeria, a new Africa and indeed a new world are all possible. We make bold though to say that none of this could be possible on the basis of capitalism. We “can bring to birth a new world on the ashes of the old” as Ralph Chaplin put it so succinctly ninety one years ago when he wrote the solidarity song….And we shall.

Mayibuye Africa!

Forward to social transformation