Nigeria: a new beginning towards the same ends?
Introduction
The 2011 general elections in Nigeria have come and gone, leaving a lot of questions behind, the answers to which will shape the emerging future of the country. The elections were staggered, with those for the National Assembly held on April 9, the presidential ballot, which not surprisingly was the most contentious, held on April 16 and polls for governors and states houses of assembly held on April 26. The general elections have been declared as the freest and fairest in the history of the country since Independence in 1960 by the mainstream national and international media and elections observer groups. This is despite sharp bursts of violence, the bloodiest of which were in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections, in several states in the northern parts of the country. In the wake of these, more than 500 persons lay dead and some 60,000 were displaced. There had been, bomb blasts and associated rampages during the national assembly polls as well with no less than 35 killed and 169 arrested. The state-level elections also witnessed quite a spate of violence and elections in four Local Government Areas of Imo state in the South East zone had to be re-run on May 6.
The orgy of violence associated with the presidential elections, in no less than five of the northern states has been more lambasted than aptly grasped, partly due to the arguable success and credibility of the elections as a whole (when compared to earlier general elections in the country). It took 3days dusk to dawn curfews in 3 of those states and 24-hour curfews in the states of Kaduna and Bauchi for some semblance of calm to be restored. Curfews are still in place in most of these places, albeit now from 9.00pm to 6.00am. President Goodluck Jonathan of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party was declared winner in the presidential election, with some 22million votes to 12million by his closest rival, General Muhammad Buhari, a former military head of state, by the Independent National Electoral Commission. Even before the official results were returned, billows of smoke rose sky high, and in the wake of the results release, lava of wanton anger swept through the streets with scorching frenzy. The palaces of the most revered of Emirs in the north such as the iconic Ado Bayero in Kano and his counterpart in Zaria were torched, and their royal majesties forced to seek refuge in the army barracks. The Sultan of Sokoto, the symbol of the much vaunted Caliphate of “the North” power bloc was equally humiliated by the rampaging wretched of the earth, in the north, and he scampered for safety in the barracks likewise, while the family house of Vice-President Namani Sambo was torched in Zaria. The motorcade of General Muhammad Buhari, whose cause the rioters were apparently championing, was not spared either. Three of his vehicles were smashed to smithereens.
It is pertinent for working people and supporters of democracy from below and the cause of workers’ self-emancipation to understand the significance of these historic elections and its immediate aftermath. It is arguably true that, except for the June 12, 1993 elections which were annulled, leading to a six-year democratic revolution in the country, elections have never been this “free, fair and credible”. It is also a noteworthy fact that President Jonathan, who became president by default when Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died last May, would be the first person from the southern minorities’ nationalities of the turbulent Niger delta to be elected president.
These truth and fact do however conceal much more than what they reveal. The Nigerian state, a contraption of the British colonial masters has wobbled and fumbled for half a century of its nominal independence as the different sections of the parasitic ruling class which steers it, bereft of any mainstay in production have waged time and again, “do or die” struggles for control of the state. This is for the simple reason of the most absurd form of “primitive accumulation” (or more properly put: primitive looting), of the collective wealth of the nation. Elections have thus, not surprisingly been theatres of “war”. Primordial sentiments of “tribe”, ethnicity, regional affiliation and religion have been whipped up to mobilize masses behind the self-serving agendas of these elites.
Perennial instability with such national reality is to be expected, and general elections tend to serve as the trigger which explodes instability into wanton crises. In 1966 and 1983 the military had to step in as the country imploded on the heels of general elections to save the rule of the ruling class as a whole. The democratic revolution of June 12 and the changing global atmosphere against blatant military dictatorship put paid to the continued possibility of the military as the ruling class stabilizing factor. This led the civilian elites to arrive at some form of “power sharing” formula for rotating access to the juicy entrails of the milk cow state, between its sections from the northern and southern parts of the country. Alas, Yar’Adua’s death set the stage for the collapse of this arrangement, leaving a ticking time bomb that is not yet defused, despite the back patting that these elections have earned.
In the beginning: a wobbling giant and its three legs
The place to start for a thorough understanding of the present dilemma of Nigeria is from the very beginning. The British colonial overlords created Nigeria out of the motley of some 250 nationalities and ethnic groups of different sizes through a process of plunder, trickery vagabondage and amalgamations from the late 19th century to 1914. This was with the intent of sourcing raw materials for its expanding industries and creating what would be the largest national market in Africa, for its commodities. The colonialists ensured as much as possible, through law and practice, that local manufacturing was constricted, where it was allowed at all, to avoid “native” competition in the supposedly liberal market. This went along with the constriction of possible roles for educated “natives” in the colonial state. They found allies in the local ruling class of chiefs and kings, perfecting the art of “indirect rule” through which they granted limited powers to these representatives of tradition, in exchange for the native authorities’ bridling of popular opposition to colonial enslavement.
British colonialism was part of the wave of imperialism that constituted “the black man’s burden” in the period before the two world wars. With British imperialism, capitalism, dependent as it was, took roots in Nigeria, and with this a working class emerged, comprising: clerks, messengers and other subaltern staff for the colonial administration; stevedores in the docks; turners and fitters in the railways; teachers in missionary and later public schools and so on and so forth. A crop of professionals such as lawyers, journalists, priests, engineers and other educated petite elites similarly sprang up. They were dissatisfied with their double second class position in society, despite their education. Racism in the public service and professional circles put them niches below their white colleagues and the chiefs’ authority mocked their learning. They thus demanded representation in governance, while accommodating the logic of continued colonial domination. They became the first nationalists, in the country’s anti-colonial struggles, concentrated largely in Lagos and major cities in the south. Their first fruit and which emboldened their horizon was the 1922 Sir Hugh Clifford constitution, which established a Legislative Council (whose functions were more advisory, really) with room for elected non-official representatives (though their elections were limited to Lagos and Calabar)
The 1930s and 1940s were tumultuous times in the world. Their echoes fired nationalist passions in Nigeria. Movements and nationalist parties of emerging elites were formed and demands for some form of self-governance got more strident. It would however take the coming in of the working class into the anti-colonial struggle for a decisive turn to be arrived at. From the late 1930s to the end of World War II, expanding demands of a British capitalism at war had resulted in a six fold growth of the working class and it had come to play a key role in the nationalist movement of the 1940s. Its first General Strike, which lasted for 44 days across the length and breadth of the country, was for improved Cost of Living Allowance. The dynamics of these economic demands feeding into and standing astride the fears of the colonial masters, as a political contestation, is a graphic example of how the economic and the political merge in mass strikes, demonstrating the might of the working class.
The new atmosphere of greater urge for liberty which the 1945 General Strike established was a major contributory factor to the colonial state’s enacting the Richards constitution a year later. The constitution granted more democratic rights to Nigerians; the Legislative Council now had pan-Nigerian “powers” and regional councils to advise the Lieutenant Governors were also established. This chalice of “self-government” for the emerging multi-national state was laced with a poison which still permeates every single pore of the body of Nigeria’s polity as run by indigenous elites, today. This poison which carried both the prejudice of the British about the composition of Nigeria and its intent of foisting a contraption as state that would perpetuate a balance of power amongst the elites that the British could play on even from London, was; the regionalization of the country’s polity.
The sentiments of Britons had always been that there are only three nationalities in Nigeria being: “the Hausa in the Northern Region, the Ibo in the Eastern Region and the Yoruba in the Western Region”, with the minorities being merely “related tribes” . This was rolled into the Richards constitution which created three regions, along the lines of these sentiments. At the time, this was roundly condemned by most progressive nationalists, with Nnamdi Azikiwe describing this as “Pakistanization” of Nigeria. This “Pakistanization” was not jut from the British’s looking backwards at its prejudices; it also entailed its looking forward towards a strategy of containment. The pan-Nigerian character of the brewing nationalist struggle became splintered by the nascent elites of the three majority ethnic groups along regional lines.
This ethno-regional splintering of the elite-nationalists’ camps was furthered by the subsequent Macpherson constitution of 1951. It granted greater autonomy to the regions, including on fiscal issues and in 1954 primary budgetary responsibility was transferred to the regions such that governments therein could appropriate resources through taxes and the sales of commodities and dispense patrimony through contracts, licenses & outright theft from the public till. Such earlier movements that aspired to a pan-Nigerian vision as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) became associated with an ethno-regional nationalist bloc , the Action Group came to represent the emerging Yoruba elites of the Western Region and the Northern Peoples Conference spoke for the conservative elites of “the North”, even as a radical grouping of the nationalists in that region, the Northern Elements Progressive Union which built a strong following amongst the poor talakawas, challenged it there.
Contestations and negotiations between the elites of these three power blocs would mark the fate of Nigeria’s national politics ever since then. The elites of the minority “related tribes” were doomed it would seem, to play second fiddle by the colonialists and their inheritors. The cry of representatives of the southern minorities led to the establishment of the “Willink Commission for Inquiry into the Fears of the Minorities and the Means for Allaying Them” in 1956. But its term of reference ruled out any possibility of territorial amendment of the tripod of regional blocs, making its deliberations merely a lot of hot air .
It was not only the minorities that would be marginalized by the colonialists and whose marginalization would continue in post-colonial Nigeria. A witch hunt of radical expressions of the labour movement was also systematically pursued. Bitter propaganda against communist influence in the working class was conducted by the British official press and newspapers from the stable of Nnamdi Azikiwe who had just the decade before been shot to his greatest heights by the mass strike led by such “communists” and their likes. Suspected socialists were as well denied employment in both the public service and private sector, while known “Lefties” like Wahab Goodluck were denied the right to represent workers in negotiations and trade unions were infiltrated to smash radical influence . This situation partly explains the weakness of the labour movement to play any decisive role in what would be the beginning of post-colonial Nigeria, despite the fact that in 1950, a united front of organized labour, market traders and the rump of NDP, with the then Nigeria Labour Congress had cleared 18 of the 24 seats into the Legislative Council in Lagos. Barely a decade into Independence, General Yakubu Gowon would follow the same path of attacks on independent political organization of the working class as activists of the Socialist Workers and Farmers Party formed in 1963 would be hounded, the party smashed and possession of communist literature decreed a crime against the state.
Nigeria, a giant with clay feet has wobbled through the labyrinth of chaos and tenuous order, spasms of violence and a civil war that wiped out a million lives, military dictatorships and mass disillusionment with spates of civil rule. Its people cling on to hope even in the face of hopelessness. Billions of dollars that could arguably have been used to further development and improve the prevailing conditions of life in the country have vanished into private pockets. Ethno-regional sentiments become instruments of blood-soaked intra-class negotiations; “lacking a material base, the indigenous elites resort(ed) to the manipulation of primordial loyalties – religion, ethnicity, and region” . Corruption, which is “the principal method by which the Nigerian indigenous capitalist class has attempted to accumulate the large sums of monetary capital needed to establish itself as both an economic and political class” becomes the straw man of Nigeria’s bane and the excuse for more corruption in the name of anti-corruption.
The trail of elections in Nigeria, probably more than any other sphere of national life best captures and reflects this tale of woes, intermingled with hope that has been the fate of a Nigeria where elite politics has found safety valves in its primordial cleavages which have been ideologically accentuated. It also points at just how such limits of manipulation might be ruptured and the dammed avalanche of mass discontent unleashed.
A trail of elections and shattered expectations
General elections in Nigeria have hardly ever been free and fair. The fractious nature of the hegemony of its elites and the state’s gross legitimacy deficits have engendered this situation and as well reinforced it. Conducting and institutionalizing credible elections have thus come to occupy a central position in the view of many, including organized labour and progressives as the way forward to transforming the Nigerian state, and building a united and peaceful nation “that works for the people”.
It might be necessary to look more closely at the place of elections in relation to democracy and emancipation to better grasp its place as ideology. Free, fair and credible elections have generally come to be seen as the main hallmark of liberal democracy, which is supposed to approximate equality of all citizens, within the framework of a supposedly impartial rule of law. Interestingly though, in ancient Athens, the classical democracy of antiquity, leaders were not elected, but drawn from lots. Elections were seen as open to the manipulation of more powerful and/or charismatic contenders for leadership. There is no gainsaying that the elective principle in itself could be very important for building democracy and greater equality from below, at trade unions shop floors and neighbourhood associations for example. In the broader society ridden by class divisions between the rich and the poor though; “Elections broadly conceived, refer to the process of elite selection by the mass of the population in any given political system” .
Such an “elite selection” process or the institutionalization of liberal democracy requires some level of coherence between the elites contending for selection, which the tripodal regionalization of the country had sacrificed for the farce of wazobia “federalism”. “The nature and character of the state affect in a significant sense, the electoral process and its outcome… where a state is weak and consequently exhibits traits of failure, elections are likely to be assailed by numerous problems that may threaten the entire election and its outcome” . The nature of the Nigerian state that had emerged on the basis of foisted wazobia chauvinism rooted in patrimony as the surest avenue to stupendous wealth and benefaction had two contradictory elements; no regional group of elites was strong enough to dominate the centre and set agenda for national development, but; government in a region had the resources to foster its own coterie of support whilst marginalizing the elites of the “related tribes” in it, which the majoritarian parties in other regions warmly courted. The state was thus characterized by strong centrifugal forces that weakened it with a written-in state of perpetual instability.
This dilemma of the nascent Nigerian state did not show itself in the first federal elections held in 1954. The three dominant parties formed a unity government; Independence was not yet visible, even if it hung in the air. Things changed in 1959 when elections to usher in a post-colonial Nigeria were held. And as Udogu noted: “the elections of 1959 served as a prologue to the political turmoil that has been the bane of Nigerian politics for over four decades” . Sixteen parties contested, but the locus of power resided in the midst of the big three. NPC formed a coalition government with NCNC, while AG became the official face of the opposition.
“The first term of the coalition government, 1960-64 was full of political crises, instability and loss of confidence between the coalition parties” . By the time elections came up, it had broken, but it was not over ideological differences or principles. Rather, “the breakdown of the NPC/NCNC coalition was as a result of disagreement over resource allocation, appointments, the sharing of spoils and other benefits of office” . Meanwhile, the opposition AG split, with its NNDP splinter group forming the Nigeria National Alliance with the NPC. AG, NCNC, NEPU & the radicalized United Middle Belt Congress then formed an opposition coalition, the United Progressives Grand Alliance. Socialist Workers and Farmers Party the largest party formation of the far left in Nigeria’s history, counting its membership in tens of thousands and publishing a bi-weekly paper, Advance, had called for the UPGA united front, but was largely ignored by the bourgeois parties in the alliance, (it had won 1% of the votes in the Eastern Region in the period). The Labour Party, which had emerged from a split in SWAFP within its first year hardly fared any better in the First Republic. The direct impact of the working class on the First Republic’s elections was thus very limited, despite its rising influence spurred by the 1964 general strike. It remained at the margins as the different elite groups and coalitions battled for the national polity’s dominance. But, “no single group or coalition could dominate the national political and economic system” ; throwing the First Republic into spasms of crisis and wanton violence, that paved the way for its collapse when khaki boys took over the formal reins of power in 1966.
It was thirteen years later that the military conducted general elections. The American presidential system replaced Westminster “parliamentarism” in the 2nd Republic, in an attempt of the ruling class to overcome its fragmented hegemony. Matters only got worse with the credibility of civilian rulers falling to its nadir by the time the Republic was truncated.
The ghosts of the First Republic’s parties lined the pavilion of the Second as farcical apparitions. The National Party of Nigeria, which captured power at the centre and in most of the northern states approximated the NPC, Nigeria Peoples Party, was not exactly NCNC, but it seemed its shadow. The Unity Party of Nigeria and, to a lesser extent, the People’s Redemption Party alone were near-unblemished incarnations of the AG and NEPU of the First Republic, respectively. As with ghosts, the life they lived hitherto was relived albeit devoid of any redeeming ethos of a soul. NPP joined NPN as junior partner in a coalition; this collapsed, and it then joined UPN, PRP & GNPP to form an UPGA now re-christened Progressive Parties’ Alliance.
It was not only the elite parties that re-emerged in the Second Republic as ghosts of the First’s. The parties of the Left lived as ghosts politically and legally, in the course of the Second Republic. With the gradual lifting of the ban on politics by the military, an All-Nigeria Socialist Conference was held in Zaria, in 1977. In its wake, two socialist parties were formed. The Socialist Working People’s Party, representing the rump of what had been SWAFP and Socialist Workers, Farmers and Youths Party (later to become the Socialist Workers Party), which was formed around Ola Oni, one of the key figures in the First Republic’s Labour Party that had split from SWAFP. Neither was registered, by the military. SWAFP was hamstrung not just by the issue of legality. Its leading lights such as Wahab Goodluck and Ibidapo Fatogun two of the finest trade unionists in the country’s history who used to have the pro-Moscow National Trade Union Congress as a base had earlier been banned from trade unionism for life by the military junta and the merger of trade unions across the ideological divide to form the Nigeria Labour Congress in 1978 had also further de-limited the possibilities of a trade union centre’s unequivocal support for a socialist party. The apparition of a political scene that the Second Republic happened to be, was thus, even much more than was the case in the First Republic, left to the shenanigans of the befuddled bourgeois politicians.
It is important to note that while a lot seemed to be the same within the skulls of Nigeria’s elites, the global situation in 1979 was quite different from that of 1960 when the enthusiasm of Independence could nestle in the legitimacy of state intervention in the economy, with the Keynesian Welfare Nation State in the West, State “Socialism” in the East and developmentalist states laying the basis for industrialization in underdeveloped countries from South Korea to Brazil and Egypt to India. The 2nd Republic was born with Thatcher, Reagan & the neoliberal “counter-revolution” they represented. The slight current urging industrialization amongst the elites was literally wiped out. As with the economy so with the politics; the rawness of the influence and power of money became nauseating.
The degree of rigging in 1979 made that of the First Republic seem pale. Tai Solarin, the reputed radical educationist and social-democratic columnist, described Shagari’s election as “the stolen presidency” and predicted that: “If this government lasts for four years, the NPN will have been firmly planted as Government Party everywhere, and the UPN, GNPP, the NPP and PRP will have been drained to annihilation, both in membership- it is already starting – and in morale.”
The 1983 elections followed the macabre logic of the 1964/65 elections which had glided the 1st Republic to its demise. “Landslide victories” were declared subsequent to elections in which murder, arson, rigging, intimidation and falsification of results were carried out without the slightest compunction. Post-elections violence was like fire during the harmattan season. In Ondo state, within what was the Western region in the First Republic, it led to the reversal of the NPN “victory” of Akin Omoboriowo as Governor against his erstwhile boss and then serving UPN governor, Chief Adekunle Ajasin. The logic of ‘64/’65 in ’83 could however not be reversed. On the last day of the year, the soja boys rolled in the tanks. The voice of one Sani Abacha declared the abrupt end of the 2nd Republic to the world. General Muhammad Buhari would emerge by the end of the day as the junta’s designated head of state. Babangida was to overthrow him 20months later in a palace coup, institute a diarchy as part of a “hidden agenda” but was forced to “step aside” in the heat of the 1993 presidential elections and its annulment.
There was no doubt before now that the “freest and fairest” election in Nigeria’s history was that of June 12, 1993. Many still belief, and probably not wrongly, that it remains much fairer ad freer than the recent general elections. While the contest was between Bashorun MKO Abiola, of the Social Democratic Party and Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Party, for many Nigerians, the main issue was voting out the military from power. MKO obviously won, the Babangida junta annulled the election and a six-year democratic revolution which ended with the democratic victory of the counter-revolution, erupted.
The military exited from Aso Rock on May 29, 1999, but on its own terms. One of these was the conduct of what, to many analysts, was till then the most rigged elections in Nigeria, on the wings of which General Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military dictator was returned as president. Onuoha has argued that “the reason for the major rigging was to ensure that the party had an absolute majority in order to avoid a coalition and consequent weak take-off of a new government, which was part of the crises of the transition governments of 1959 and 1979”.
The “Fourth” Republic has obviously broken the jinx of civilian regimes collapsing when they try to consolidate. The 2003, elections did not herald its curtains and in 2007, with elections which have been described by some as they most fraudulent ever in the world, the ruling class in Nigeria made history; a civilian government handed over to another, as Obasanjo handed the keys of Aso Rock to Yar’Adua, with an ambulance. There are several factors which made this jinx-breaking a possibility. Internationally, the wave of democratic revolutions from 1989 through the ‘90s, that swept away maximalist rulers, juntas and one-party states, makes the atmosphere less encouraging for would-be coup plotters in the barracks. Nationally, paradoxical as it may seem, the much vilified Peoples Democratic Party, which has been in power for the past 12years and is set for another 4years at the centre is the bulwark, reactionary as it might be, of the ruling elites in Nigeria against its self-destruct instincts and the livid anger of a distraught people.
NPN in the 2nd Republic represented the attempt at bridging the regional nature of elites’ parties in the country. It was really their first serious attempt at building a national party. PDP took over from and was the fruition of the seeds of NPN. Of course, seeking to build a national party does not equate to having any serious programmatic agenda for the transformation of the country. PDP is as much a fruition of NPN as a self-serving behemoth of corruption, “kleptocracy” and clueless national leadership as it is its fruition in building a pan-Nigerian partisan platform, in which to a reasonable extent the centrifugal contention over allocation of resources amongst the elites could somewhat be attenuated with mind-boggling flushes of money.
The zoning principle was central to maintaining honour amongst thieves within the partisan monstrosity which controlled the central government and 28 out of the 36 states. Its point of departure had been reached in secret, according to some of the elites in “the North”. Before Obasanjo was handed power in 1999, a secret pact had been reached. The northern elites were ready to concede “power shift” to “the South”, provided it would return by 2007. It did with Yar’Adua, but with his death and Goodluck Jonathan who had been his vice stepping into the office, the flow of horse-trading was truncated. It was probably the only way a politician from the minorities of the Niger delta could have gotten the keys to Aso rock.
The 2011 elections: a new beginning or an old ending?
Umaru Musa Yar;Adua became president under a pall of illegitimacy in 2007. The general elections that year had been such an obvious charade that he could not but acknowledge this and during his inauguration, promise amends. It was not just the legitimacy of his government that was at stake, the maturity of the entire ruling class in the country was called to question by the brigandage that was the first civilian-to-civilian transition in its history, even as General Muhammad Buhari, who had for the second time lost, did for the second time as well, head for the courts.
Yar’Adua formed a government of national unity, forging a “united front” of the shameless “political class”. It included the All Nigeria People’s Party, the platform Buhari had contested on. To assuage the sensibilities of Nigerians and thus re-constitute the ruling class’ rather fractious hegemony, electoral reforms was included as a key element of Yar’Adua’s seven point agenda and within three months of the administration, the Justice Mohammed Uwais-led Electoral Reforms Commission of 22 Nigerians, distinguished in their different walks of life was constituted.
In December 2008, the Supreme Court, by a decision of four Justices to three, upheld Yar’Adua’s elections, while the Uwais committee submitted its report. In January 2009, I argued that: “these two political and judicial events in December have much more than a symbolic relationship, bearing on elections. While the Supreme Court’s ruling settles the past electorally for Yar’Adua and Nigerians, the Electoral Reforms Committee’s report present recommendations to ensure, hopefully, that a Hobbessian state of elections would only be something in the political history of Nigeria, marking a period of immaturity of the country’s political elites.” It would seem the projections into the future then has been both validated and at the same time, challenged by the ongoing reality of the 2011 elections.
It can hardly be doubted that the present elections have such transparency as only the June 12 elections could have laid claim to. The modified open-secret ballot as proposed by the Uwais committee was utilised and votes were counted at each Polling Unit, and publicly declared there. This was central to the credibility and aura of freeness and fairness that the elections now are adorned with. The Uwais committee’s report contained several other relatively progressive proposals which were not adopted by the Federal Government. This included the manner of appointment of the INEC Chair; the presidency was still to unilaterally determine this, more or less.
As the tenure of Maurice Iwu, the gangster-umpire who conducted the 2007 elections general elections (including those for governor, a quarter of which were upturned by the courts), drew to an end by June 2010, he scampered around to have his services retained for an encore. The death of Yar’Adua on May 5 thrust Goodluck Jonathan, his vice, forward. To consolidate on his fragile hold on power, his choice of INEC Chair was of the greatest import. There were few persons that could have been as welcomed by Nigerians, particularly organized labour and the civil society movement as Professor Attahiru Jega, Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University Kano a former Leftist president of the university teachers’ union, civil society activists and member of the Uwais committee.
He has deservedly won accolades for his commendable conduct of the 2011 elections thus far. Nigerians had borne the costs of what AlJazeera described as the most expensive elections ever in Africa, but not a few feel that he has lived up to the high expectations of the citizenry, despite a false start on April 2 (when the National Assembly polls earlier scheduled for that day had to be postponed, on the same day); at least at the polling units. Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), whose Buhari/Bakare ticket that was supposed to have dragged President Jonathan into a run-off lost out equally agree that the elections, seem on the face of it, free and fair. It alleges though that rigging was built into the excel spreadsheet package used for collation in its strongholds of Katsina and Kano states while in states within the South East an South South, it challenges the 90% plus votes garnered by the PDP. It filed its petitions against the elections on Sunday May 8.
CPC was formed last year around the personality of General Muhammad Buhari. Projecting an ascetic figure of discipline and order, straightforwardness and frugality, a large number of opposition elements, in the south of the country, many of whom had not been active in partisan elite politics flocked to him as an alternative to the dozen years of the PDP locusts. He was also deemed to have a following amongst the talakawas, or sans culottes in the north. Action Congress of Nigeria, a shadowy claimant to the heritage of the Yoruba west was next of what could have amounted to any significant force of opposition. There was much posturing about the ACN and CPC forging an alliance to challenge the PDP before the general elections commenced, to no avail. After the National Assembly elections made it clear except to the most optimistic that the PDP might be bloodied but was far from being brought down, attempts at forging the alliance were renewed and subsequently failed again. It is doubtful though that even such an alliance would have held water, as combining the CPC & ACN votes against PDP’s still gives Jonathan a victory margin of 8million votes.
CPC has however been fingered by many as being directly or indirectly responsible for the mayhem that rocked the northern parts of the country. This is largely due to General Buhari’s statements during the elections that this time around he would not be going to the courts as he did in 2003 and 2007 (spending 50 months, cumulatively) and rather asking his supporters to defend their votes. Some PDP governors in states within the southern parts had further helped to raise the myth of a persecuted Buhari when they refused to allow his scheduled campaigns to hold in their states’ capitals.
The anger of the lumpen mass does however go deeper than Buhari and CPC. The official unemployment rate nationally stands at 19.7%. The figures in the northern parts double this. While northern elites have always been in the corridors of power, holding its central reins for the better part of the 50years of Independence, they have failed woefully to develop infrastructure, or raise the level of education of the children of the masses in the same “north” which they have used to bargain for such access to power. Not a few of them, such as General T. Y. Danjuma a former army boss and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the current central bank chief have lamented this in recent times. Drug addiction is rampant amongst the lumpen youths, in major cities in the north, particularly Kano. And what they get “high” on are such cheapies as glue, gum, petrol and even faeces. For a significant number of these, as with the broader talakawas, General Buhari represented a symbol of “change” and their spontaneous violence at his loss was a cry of desperation with machetes, clubs and blood.
The blood of young men and women, graduates who as Youth Corpers were used as polling officers by NEC was spilt without mercy by the rampaging lumpen. Some were forced out of police stations and beaten to death, while others were burnt alive inside Corpers’ lodges. The face book updates of at least one of them before these grisly incidents, reveals that CPC supporters had tried to force underage voters on him, and not without success, confirming the fact that rigging at the polls had not been a preserve of PDP.
To limit the view of violence in the elections to the northern parts, would however present a wrong and inadequate picture. There was none of the six geo-political zones of the country where there were no echoes of violence during the polls. Akwa Ibom and Imo states were quite bloody flashpoints in the South South and South East, for example. The major difference with the northern parts was not just one of the extents of destruction in the wake of violent clashes. The confrontations there, unlike in the northern states where they were associated with the presidential polls, took place during the national assembly and gubernatorial/states houses of assembly elections, where the contending candidates were locals. A related difference is that violence in the southern states seems to have been initiated by unpopular serving governors/legislators and their ruling parties, before and in the process of elections, to intimidate voters, while challenging partisans resisted.
The 2011 elections are very significant in the annals of the country, for several reasons, of which the nature of violence, particularly in the northern parts was one. The national assembly elections threw up surprises, while also confirming the people’s tiredness with PDP. It maintains a drastically reduced majority in parliament, but could not help the fall of a number of its big wigs. The PDP lost five states, while winning one. ACN made the most inroads, winning two more states and Lagos (it had earlier claimed 3 states through the law courts as haven being rigged by the PDP in 2007 and elections were not held in these).
Three possibilities co-existing presently as nascent trends are visible on the horizon. In the first scenario; PDP would definitely constitute some form of a government of national unity on May 29. CPC, unlike ANPP in 2007, has made it clear it would not to be part of such a government. ACN has adopted a similar posture, even if its adversarial rhetoric could largely remain posturing. PDP would however be set to play the historic role of at last giving the ruling elites some form of élan, even if merely an assumed one. By 2015 and possibly subsequently, elections while they might have some warts on the nose and close to the scrotum would hold and be considered more or less credible. Intra-class electoral coherence would have thus been institutionalized and the broader class struggle would take hold of other moments in the national life for its fiercest orgies
The second scenario would see the PDP’s defeat and a fratricidal falling out of the class it represents, in its victory. The centrifugal pull which still exists could be aggravated by the aftermath of the elections, with the expansion of the coasts of its opposition. It is unlikely, for now, that such could lead to a split of the country or its being restructured on a confederation basis. The wind of this possibility would however blow with a lot of carnage and deepening of ethno-regional sentiments, across the divide.
The earth-shaking significance of the actions of protesters who stormed the palatial covens of revered custodians of culture tinged through and through with the vestiges of feudalism and the authority of religion, bears the germ of the third possibility. Their acts, which the regime finds very worrisome as President Jonathan admitted and which was echoed by James Campbell, a former US ambassador to Nigeria , were something hitherto inconceivable. The momentum of this hour it initially seemed could lead this profanity to even greater wantonness which would make the subsisting order quake with fear. But this is rather unlikely, in the immediate instance, with the present swagger of law and order across the land, strutting in its dark gown of curfews. This hour will pass, but its boldness would give the fire next time such bravado that the moon and stars of the caliph and emirs it strikes at now might seem too near earth, and it will rise to claim heaven itself; challenging the very rule of the elites that have broken down the hopes of the common man and woman, in the north, more than anywhere else in the land.
The Labour movement and the unfolding situation
The pertinent question to ask now, with our quest for democracy from below, that is truly emancipatory, might be; “whither the labour movement, in all these?”
Its different strands took different pathways in the build up to the general elections, from the margins. The Labour Party endorsed Goodluck Jonathan’s bid for the presidency and was the first party to congratulate him after the presidential elections; the trade union movement was nonpartisan, playing the role of elections observation, while; a number of the left sects were/are trying to form an independent socialist party.
These different pathways reveal deeper cleavages that have taken shape over the last two decades. In 1989, Nigeria Labour Congress had formed the Nigeria Labour Party, when the General Babangida administration initiated the political transition to the diarchy that was the Third Republic. Of the 13 political parties formed then, representatives of the junta had noted that only the NLP and the Republican Party formed by Local Government Council Chairmen (then on zero-party basis) had genuine national spread and appeal. Babangida was however to ban all the parties and set up two parastatal-like parties; the National Republican Party (that was “a little to the right” as the junta put it) and the Social Democratic Party (being “a little to the left”). While the socialist left mobilised nationally for the NLP, it was largely shut out of its inauguration by the trade union bureaucracy which then threw in its lot with the SDP, after the ban, without as much of a whimper.
In the heat of revolutionary pressures that shook the country after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections won by MKO Abiola, the SDP candidate, the Babangida government and the Interim National Government contraption it handed over the reins of state to in a hurry where both kicked out by general strikes and mass protests within the spate of 82 days.
The subsequent military junta of Abacha proscribed NLC and the virulent oil workers unions and banned all forms of partisan politics, the following year. Despite this, two Left parties where established that year; Democratic Alternative and National Conscience Party. Both have not made any significant showing in the current republic (and the leadership of NCP supported Buhari during the last elections, even though the party had a presidential candidate!) The republic had opened in 1999, with only three parties registered by the out-going military; PDP, ANPP & AD (the precursor, in a sense, of ACN), allowed to contest elections. DA & NCP amongst others took the Federal Government to court and in 2002 won the opening up of the partisan political space, which now has 63 registered parties.
NLC which marked its “new beginning” in 1999 as well, wasted no time in setting its agenda for the future. One of its set tasks was the formation of a political party. Its political policy declared that such a party could not but be socialist. After three conferences which witnessed the enthusiastic involvement of the revolutionary Left, the constitution and (socialist) programme of what was to have been the Working People’s Party, were drafted in 2002. That same year though, the trade union bureaucracy took the winds from the sails of the efforts towards forming the WPP. In its place the Party for Social Democracy was formed. This was in an attempt to bring in “patriotic” middle class elements, as explicitly stated and to keep out “extremist” Leftists as implicitly acknowledged. Fulltime officers in the NLC (but not its affiliates) were also barred from playing prominent roles in the party.
On one hand, most Leftists outside the trade unions, felt, and still strongly feel betrayed by that action. On the other hand, Left elements within the NLC came to see themselves as not being part of the party. The seeds of yawning gaps between the trade union movement and the labour party on one hand and between the PSD(LP) and the revolutionary left on the other were thus sown at its very inception. After intense debates within the party, carried out as well openly the party’s nomenclature was changed from Party for Social Democracy to Labour Party, at its First Convention on February 28, 2004.
The party’s stronghold is Ondo state where Dr. Olusgeun Mimiko, a social-democrat of the Awoist traditions since his university days is governor . While many on the Left are ready to concede a general progressive nature to his politics, not a few of the other candidates that have contested on the party’s platform, in 2007 & 2011, have been adjudged as representing neoliberal interests, contrary to the expected left(-tending) orientation of a (social-democratic) labour party. More importantly, the party, it would seem, has placed more currency on winning such rich candidates than in mobilising for membership within the working class.
These considerations had led Left elements in the party to form the Campaign for a Mass Based Labour Party (CMB-LP), a few years back. By the time the 2011 elections would come though, the CMB-LP had fizzled out. In what could be, at least partly, grasped as an act of desperation, some other left elements last year formed a non-electoralist party; Socialist Working People’s Party . There are also ongoing discussions amongst a plethora of sects on the Left –which include those constituting the SWPP, as it were- to form a broader revolutionary socialist party. It is quite possible that one of the presently registered Left parties could serve as its organisational template.
With the simmering cauldron of mass discontent meshed with great expectations which the 2011 elections’ flashpoints give an inkling of, events in the coming period would require partisan leadership with programmes radically different from what the dominant parties in the country today have to offer. This makes the efforts at building a partisan revolutionary alternative something that can not be waved aside. Such efforts would however have to go beyond the present sectarian boxes of the Left. It would have to be rooted in the struggles of the mass of Nigeria’s working people.
The working class has never been as strong in Nigeria as it has been in the present Republic. It has time and again, brought the system to temporary shutdowns with 9 general strikes in 12 years. In 2004, in the heat of one of such general strikes, the president Olusegun Obasanjo had described organised labour as posing the threat of being an alternative government. While the dust of elections might now be clearing, massive working class struggles seem to be looming. The first major one would most likely be struggle for the implementation of the new minimum wage of N18, 000.00. Such economic demands with the flush of confidence that a seemingly new political beginning for the nation is going through could have greater political significance beyond the ghoulish rising of lumpen anger that followed the presidential elections.
Nigeria’s hour of decision could very well be before 2015, when the next general elections would hold. Considering the touchstone place of elections in the vane of the wind and whirlwinds that have marked the country’s history, the most decisive battles ahead just might likely be still hinged on the manifestations of deeper contradictions in the rampage of electoral masquerades. The law courts upturning almost a third of the gubernatorial elections held in 2007 laid a basis for staggered elections and the pathway to 2015 is strewn with elections in different states that could serve as triggers for contentions beyond these states. The country’s elites, with their grandstanding and horse-trading would have much more to contend with than in the days gone by, with the tremors that will shake the heights of their citadels from the foundations, when massquakes erupt from below. Organised labour’s prime place in these forthcoming tremors cannot be overemphasized. The diffused strands of its organisational, political and ideological facets, much more than the might or cunning of bourgeois elites, might be the undoing of the extent such moment of tremors would reach. It could be hoped though, that, it is “morning yet on creation day”. Challenges being confronted by the Labour Political Commissions of both the NLC and (especially) TUC, might serve to bridge the chasms that presently de-limit the labour movement’s active leadership of the struggle for revolutionary-democracy in the country.
In lieu of a conclusion
The general elections in Nigeria definitely signal the evolution of new dimensions of our national polity. This could be in a manner of continuity, and most likely would be so, in the immediate instance. The general elections might have come and gone, but the shocking waves in their aftermath might not have wholly subsided. With armed intervention by the police, army and state security services, law and order seem enthroned in the troubled parts of the country, but the anger and discontent of millions is still quite palpable.
Many Nigerians are happy that at least for once, (relatively) free, fair and credible elections have been held. They are ready to try out President Jonathan. But it is unlikely the PDP regime at the centre will be much different from what it has been this past dozen years. The expectations that now run high in those ready to accept him, or at least take the progress that has been made, warts and all, as something to be defended, is likely to be shattered in no distant time. This is despite the fact that amongst the elites (and even a broad spectrum of the masses)e who wanted (a) change, not a few are eager to start engaging with this contrived new beginning, including by going to court, as the CPC has done
The gubernatorial and states houses of assembly elections results have equally shown that there would most likely be greater demands on authorities at the sub-national levels as there now exists a basis for believing that the people’s votes would be counted and would count in enthroning those saddled with the tasks of governance. Be that as it may, thus far we can say, while a lot seems to have changed in elections in Nigeria, a lot still remain very much the same. The finery of changes seems to merely mask a new beginning to the same ends of a parasitic elite’s ostentatious existence at the expense of the immense majority of the population.
It is however unlikely that a population: whose immiseration deepens with the pangs of jobless growth; which is beaten hollow by rising costs of living, while real wages decline and; that lives in the vice-like grip of increasing insecurity, but which has now come to feel a texture of hope and envision possibilities beyond the normal run of our national reality, will be ready to live on the promises of mere good luck and a receding “better future”. The present relative credibility that the elites have won for their dominance of the polity represents attempts at consolidating the kwashiorkored form of liberal democracy that cannot but be the lot of a rentier neo-colonial capitalist state. Illusions being sown in some quarters that the country is a “semidemocracy” (whatever that means!) that is gradually moving towards true democracy that could safeguard the welfare of the masses and enthrone equality, are mere pies in the sky.
The unfolding period will unfurl with much confusion and in a zigzag manner. Primordial befuddlement will serve as stumbling blocks, for awhile. But, the de-mystification of the blue-blooded guardians of the grand old “North” power bloc is a precursor to the falling off of the wool from the eyes of Niger delta activists and those in the southern zones who might today look up to Goodluck Jonathan as a messiah of their own. This new beginning is for the elites is an assumed new route to the same ends of the continued subjugation of the immense majority of the population, but the wind they have sown in dredging this new path for their old road’s way, cannot but be reaped as an abundance of whirlwinds that will upturn their sails.
Abuja
May, 2011
References
Anifowoshe, R., (2003): “Theoretical Perspectives on Elections” in Anifowoshe, R. & Babawale, T., (eds): General Elections and Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Lagos
Aye, B., (2003): “May Day: Socialism and the Working Class” in The Guardian, May 1, p. 16
Azikiwe, N. (1961): Zik: A Selection from the Speeches of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Cambridge University Press, London
Babawale, Tunde (2003): “The 2003 Elections and democratic Consolidation in Nigeria” in Anifowoshe, R. & Babawale, T., (eds) General Elections and Democratic consolidation in Nigeria, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Lagos
Ihonvbere, J. O., (1994): Nigeria. The Politics of Adjustment and Democracy, New Transaction publ., Brunswick/London
Iyayi, F., (May 1986): ‘The Primitive Accumulation of Capital in a Neo-Colony: the Nigerian Case’, Review of African Political Economy, 13 (35), pp. 27-39
Lewis, P. (2007): Growing Apart: Oil, Politics, and Economic Change in Indonesia and Nigeria, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour, MI
Onuoha, B., (2003): “A comparative Analysis of General Elections in Nigeria” In Anifowoshe, R. & Babawale, T., (Eds) General Elections and Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Lagos
Sklar, R. L., (1983): Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, Africa World Press, 2004 edn.
Suberu, R. T., (2001): Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria, US Inst. Of Peace Press
Udogu, E. I., (2005): Nigeria in the Twenty-First Century: Strategies for Political Stability and Peaceful Coexistence, Africa World Press
The 2011 general elections in Nigeria have come and gone, leaving a lot of questions behind, the answers to which will shape the emerging future of the country. The elections were staggered, with those for the National Assembly held on April 9, the presidential ballot, which not surprisingly was the most contentious, held on April 16 and polls for governors and states houses of assembly held on April 26. The general elections have been declared as the freest and fairest in the history of the country since Independence in 1960 by the mainstream national and international media and elections observer groups. This is despite sharp bursts of violence, the bloodiest of which were in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections, in several states in the northern parts of the country. In the wake of these, more than 500 persons lay dead and some 60,000 were displaced. There had been, bomb blasts and associated rampages during the national assembly polls as well with no less than 35 killed and 169 arrested. The state-level elections also witnessed quite a spate of violence and elections in four Local Government Areas of Imo state in the South East zone had to be re-run on May 6.
The orgy of violence associated with the presidential elections, in no less than five of the northern states has been more lambasted than aptly grasped, partly due to the arguable success and credibility of the elections as a whole (when compared to earlier general elections in the country). It took 3days dusk to dawn curfews in 3 of those states and 24-hour curfews in the states of Kaduna and Bauchi for some semblance of calm to be restored. Curfews are still in place in most of these places, albeit now from 9.00pm to 6.00am. President Goodluck Jonathan of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party was declared winner in the presidential election, with some 22million votes to 12million by his closest rival, General Muhammad Buhari, a former military head of state, by the Independent National Electoral Commission. Even before the official results were returned, billows of smoke rose sky high, and in the wake of the results release, lava of wanton anger swept through the streets with scorching frenzy. The palaces of the most revered of Emirs in the north such as the iconic Ado Bayero in Kano and his counterpart in Zaria were torched, and their royal majesties forced to seek refuge in the army barracks. The Sultan of Sokoto, the symbol of the much vaunted Caliphate of “the North” power bloc was equally humiliated by the rampaging wretched of the earth, in the north, and he scampered for safety in the barracks likewise, while the family house of Vice-President Namani Sambo was torched in Zaria. The motorcade of General Muhammad Buhari, whose cause the rioters were apparently championing, was not spared either. Three of his vehicles were smashed to smithereens.
It is pertinent for working people and supporters of democracy from below and the cause of workers’ self-emancipation to understand the significance of these historic elections and its immediate aftermath. It is arguably true that, except for the June 12, 1993 elections which were annulled, leading to a six-year democratic revolution in the country, elections have never been this “free, fair and credible”. It is also a noteworthy fact that President Jonathan, who became president by default when Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died last May, would be the first person from the southern minorities’ nationalities of the turbulent Niger delta to be elected president.
These truth and fact do however conceal much more than what they reveal. The Nigerian state, a contraption of the British colonial masters has wobbled and fumbled for half a century of its nominal independence as the different sections of the parasitic ruling class which steers it, bereft of any mainstay in production have waged time and again, “do or die” struggles for control of the state. This is for the simple reason of the most absurd form of “primitive accumulation” (or more properly put: primitive looting), of the collective wealth of the nation. Elections have thus, not surprisingly been theatres of “war”. Primordial sentiments of “tribe”, ethnicity, regional affiliation and religion have been whipped up to mobilize masses behind the self-serving agendas of these elites.
Perennial instability with such national reality is to be expected, and general elections tend to serve as the trigger which explodes instability into wanton crises. In 1966 and 1983 the military had to step in as the country imploded on the heels of general elections to save the rule of the ruling class as a whole. The democratic revolution of June 12 and the changing global atmosphere against blatant military dictatorship put paid to the continued possibility of the military as the ruling class stabilizing factor. This led the civilian elites to arrive at some form of “power sharing” formula for rotating access to the juicy entrails of the milk cow state, between its sections from the northern and southern parts of the country. Alas, Yar’Adua’s death set the stage for the collapse of this arrangement, leaving a ticking time bomb that is not yet defused, despite the back patting that these elections have earned.
In the beginning: a wobbling giant and its three legs
The place to start for a thorough understanding of the present dilemma of Nigeria is from the very beginning. The British colonial overlords created Nigeria out of the motley of some 250 nationalities and ethnic groups of different sizes through a process of plunder, trickery vagabondage and amalgamations from the late 19th century to 1914. This was with the intent of sourcing raw materials for its expanding industries and creating what would be the largest national market in Africa, for its commodities. The colonialists ensured as much as possible, through law and practice, that local manufacturing was constricted, where it was allowed at all, to avoid “native” competition in the supposedly liberal market. This went along with the constriction of possible roles for educated “natives” in the colonial state. They found allies in the local ruling class of chiefs and kings, perfecting the art of “indirect rule” through which they granted limited powers to these representatives of tradition, in exchange for the native authorities’ bridling of popular opposition to colonial enslavement.
British colonialism was part of the wave of imperialism that constituted “the black man’s burden” in the period before the two world wars. With British imperialism, capitalism, dependent as it was, took roots in Nigeria, and with this a working class emerged, comprising: clerks, messengers and other subaltern staff for the colonial administration; stevedores in the docks; turners and fitters in the railways; teachers in missionary and later public schools and so on and so forth. A crop of professionals such as lawyers, journalists, priests, engineers and other educated petite elites similarly sprang up. They were dissatisfied with their double second class position in society, despite their education. Racism in the public service and professional circles put them niches below their white colleagues and the chiefs’ authority mocked their learning. They thus demanded representation in governance, while accommodating the logic of continued colonial domination. They became the first nationalists, in the country’s anti-colonial struggles, concentrated largely in Lagos and major cities in the south. Their first fruit and which emboldened their horizon was the 1922 Sir Hugh Clifford constitution, which established a Legislative Council (whose functions were more advisory, really) with room for elected non-official representatives (though their elections were limited to Lagos and Calabar)
The 1930s and 1940s were tumultuous times in the world. Their echoes fired nationalist passions in Nigeria. Movements and nationalist parties of emerging elites were formed and demands for some form of self-governance got more strident. It would however take the coming in of the working class into the anti-colonial struggle for a decisive turn to be arrived at. From the late 1930s to the end of World War II, expanding demands of a British capitalism at war had resulted in a six fold growth of the working class and it had come to play a key role in the nationalist movement of the 1940s. Its first General Strike, which lasted for 44 days across the length and breadth of the country, was for improved Cost of Living Allowance. The dynamics of these economic demands feeding into and standing astride the fears of the colonial masters, as a political contestation, is a graphic example of how the economic and the political merge in mass strikes, demonstrating the might of the working class.
The new atmosphere of greater urge for liberty which the 1945 General Strike established was a major contributory factor to the colonial state’s enacting the Richards constitution a year later. The constitution granted more democratic rights to Nigerians; the Legislative Council now had pan-Nigerian “powers” and regional councils to advise the Lieutenant Governors were also established. This chalice of “self-government” for the emerging multi-national state was laced with a poison which still permeates every single pore of the body of Nigeria’s polity as run by indigenous elites, today. This poison which carried both the prejudice of the British about the composition of Nigeria and its intent of foisting a contraption as state that would perpetuate a balance of power amongst the elites that the British could play on even from London, was; the regionalization of the country’s polity.
The sentiments of Britons had always been that there are only three nationalities in Nigeria being: “the Hausa in the Northern Region, the Ibo in the Eastern Region and the Yoruba in the Western Region”, with the minorities being merely “related tribes” . This was rolled into the Richards constitution which created three regions, along the lines of these sentiments. At the time, this was roundly condemned by most progressive nationalists, with Nnamdi Azikiwe describing this as “Pakistanization” of Nigeria. This “Pakistanization” was not jut from the British’s looking backwards at its prejudices; it also entailed its looking forward towards a strategy of containment. The pan-Nigerian character of the brewing nationalist struggle became splintered by the nascent elites of the three majority ethnic groups along regional lines.
This ethno-regional splintering of the elite-nationalists’ camps was furthered by the subsequent Macpherson constitution of 1951. It granted greater autonomy to the regions, including on fiscal issues and in 1954 primary budgetary responsibility was transferred to the regions such that governments therein could appropriate resources through taxes and the sales of commodities and dispense patrimony through contracts, licenses & outright theft from the public till. Such earlier movements that aspired to a pan-Nigerian vision as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) became associated with an ethno-regional nationalist bloc , the Action Group came to represent the emerging Yoruba elites of the Western Region and the Northern Peoples Conference spoke for the conservative elites of “the North”, even as a radical grouping of the nationalists in that region, the Northern Elements Progressive Union which built a strong following amongst the poor talakawas, challenged it there.
Contestations and negotiations between the elites of these three power blocs would mark the fate of Nigeria’s national politics ever since then. The elites of the minority “related tribes” were doomed it would seem, to play second fiddle by the colonialists and their inheritors. The cry of representatives of the southern minorities led to the establishment of the “Willink Commission for Inquiry into the Fears of the Minorities and the Means for Allaying Them” in 1956. But its term of reference ruled out any possibility of territorial amendment of the tripod of regional blocs, making its deliberations merely a lot of hot air .
It was not only the minorities that would be marginalized by the colonialists and whose marginalization would continue in post-colonial Nigeria. A witch hunt of radical expressions of the labour movement was also systematically pursued. Bitter propaganda against communist influence in the working class was conducted by the British official press and newspapers from the stable of Nnamdi Azikiwe who had just the decade before been shot to his greatest heights by the mass strike led by such “communists” and their likes. Suspected socialists were as well denied employment in both the public service and private sector, while known “Lefties” like Wahab Goodluck were denied the right to represent workers in negotiations and trade unions were infiltrated to smash radical influence . This situation partly explains the weakness of the labour movement to play any decisive role in what would be the beginning of post-colonial Nigeria, despite the fact that in 1950, a united front of organized labour, market traders and the rump of NDP, with the then Nigeria Labour Congress had cleared 18 of the 24 seats into the Legislative Council in Lagos. Barely a decade into Independence, General Yakubu Gowon would follow the same path of attacks on independent political organization of the working class as activists of the Socialist Workers and Farmers Party formed in 1963 would be hounded, the party smashed and possession of communist literature decreed a crime against the state.
Nigeria, a giant with clay feet has wobbled through the labyrinth of chaos and tenuous order, spasms of violence and a civil war that wiped out a million lives, military dictatorships and mass disillusionment with spates of civil rule. Its people cling on to hope even in the face of hopelessness. Billions of dollars that could arguably have been used to further development and improve the prevailing conditions of life in the country have vanished into private pockets. Ethno-regional sentiments become instruments of blood-soaked intra-class negotiations; “lacking a material base, the indigenous elites resort(ed) to the manipulation of primordial loyalties – religion, ethnicity, and region” . Corruption, which is “the principal method by which the Nigerian indigenous capitalist class has attempted to accumulate the large sums of monetary capital needed to establish itself as both an economic and political class” becomes the straw man of Nigeria’s bane and the excuse for more corruption in the name of anti-corruption.
The trail of elections in Nigeria, probably more than any other sphere of national life best captures and reflects this tale of woes, intermingled with hope that has been the fate of a Nigeria where elite politics has found safety valves in its primordial cleavages which have been ideologically accentuated. It also points at just how such limits of manipulation might be ruptured and the dammed avalanche of mass discontent unleashed.
A trail of elections and shattered expectations
General elections in Nigeria have hardly ever been free and fair. The fractious nature of the hegemony of its elites and the state’s gross legitimacy deficits have engendered this situation and as well reinforced it. Conducting and institutionalizing credible elections have thus come to occupy a central position in the view of many, including organized labour and progressives as the way forward to transforming the Nigerian state, and building a united and peaceful nation “that works for the people”.
It might be necessary to look more closely at the place of elections in relation to democracy and emancipation to better grasp its place as ideology. Free, fair and credible elections have generally come to be seen as the main hallmark of liberal democracy, which is supposed to approximate equality of all citizens, within the framework of a supposedly impartial rule of law. Interestingly though, in ancient Athens, the classical democracy of antiquity, leaders were not elected, but drawn from lots. Elections were seen as open to the manipulation of more powerful and/or charismatic contenders for leadership. There is no gainsaying that the elective principle in itself could be very important for building democracy and greater equality from below, at trade unions shop floors and neighbourhood associations for example. In the broader society ridden by class divisions between the rich and the poor though; “Elections broadly conceived, refer to the process of elite selection by the mass of the population in any given political system” .
Such an “elite selection” process or the institutionalization of liberal democracy requires some level of coherence between the elites contending for selection, which the tripodal regionalization of the country had sacrificed for the farce of wazobia “federalism”. “The nature and character of the state affect in a significant sense, the electoral process and its outcome… where a state is weak and consequently exhibits traits of failure, elections are likely to be assailed by numerous problems that may threaten the entire election and its outcome” . The nature of the Nigerian state that had emerged on the basis of foisted wazobia chauvinism rooted in patrimony as the surest avenue to stupendous wealth and benefaction had two contradictory elements; no regional group of elites was strong enough to dominate the centre and set agenda for national development, but; government in a region had the resources to foster its own coterie of support whilst marginalizing the elites of the “related tribes” in it, which the majoritarian parties in other regions warmly courted. The state was thus characterized by strong centrifugal forces that weakened it with a written-in state of perpetual instability.
This dilemma of the nascent Nigerian state did not show itself in the first federal elections held in 1954. The three dominant parties formed a unity government; Independence was not yet visible, even if it hung in the air. Things changed in 1959 when elections to usher in a post-colonial Nigeria were held. And as Udogu noted: “the elections of 1959 served as a prologue to the political turmoil that has been the bane of Nigerian politics for over four decades” . Sixteen parties contested, but the locus of power resided in the midst of the big three. NPC formed a coalition government with NCNC, while AG became the official face of the opposition.
“The first term of the coalition government, 1960-64 was full of political crises, instability and loss of confidence between the coalition parties” . By the time elections came up, it had broken, but it was not over ideological differences or principles. Rather, “the breakdown of the NPC/NCNC coalition was as a result of disagreement over resource allocation, appointments, the sharing of spoils and other benefits of office” . Meanwhile, the opposition AG split, with its NNDP splinter group forming the Nigeria National Alliance with the NPC. AG, NCNC, NEPU & the radicalized United Middle Belt Congress then formed an opposition coalition, the United Progressives Grand Alliance. Socialist Workers and Farmers Party the largest party formation of the far left in Nigeria’s history, counting its membership in tens of thousands and publishing a bi-weekly paper, Advance, had called for the UPGA united front, but was largely ignored by the bourgeois parties in the alliance, (it had won 1% of the votes in the Eastern Region in the period). The Labour Party, which had emerged from a split in SWAFP within its first year hardly fared any better in the First Republic. The direct impact of the working class on the First Republic’s elections was thus very limited, despite its rising influence spurred by the 1964 general strike. It remained at the margins as the different elite groups and coalitions battled for the national polity’s dominance. But, “no single group or coalition could dominate the national political and economic system” ; throwing the First Republic into spasms of crisis and wanton violence, that paved the way for its collapse when khaki boys took over the formal reins of power in 1966.
It was thirteen years later that the military conducted general elections. The American presidential system replaced Westminster “parliamentarism” in the 2nd Republic, in an attempt of the ruling class to overcome its fragmented hegemony. Matters only got worse with the credibility of civilian rulers falling to its nadir by the time the Republic was truncated.
The ghosts of the First Republic’s parties lined the pavilion of the Second as farcical apparitions. The National Party of Nigeria, which captured power at the centre and in most of the northern states approximated the NPC, Nigeria Peoples Party, was not exactly NCNC, but it seemed its shadow. The Unity Party of Nigeria and, to a lesser extent, the People’s Redemption Party alone were near-unblemished incarnations of the AG and NEPU of the First Republic, respectively. As with ghosts, the life they lived hitherto was relived albeit devoid of any redeeming ethos of a soul. NPP joined NPN as junior partner in a coalition; this collapsed, and it then joined UPN, PRP & GNPP to form an UPGA now re-christened Progressive Parties’ Alliance.
It was not only the elite parties that re-emerged in the Second Republic as ghosts of the First’s. The parties of the Left lived as ghosts politically and legally, in the course of the Second Republic. With the gradual lifting of the ban on politics by the military, an All-Nigeria Socialist Conference was held in Zaria, in 1977. In its wake, two socialist parties were formed. The Socialist Working People’s Party, representing the rump of what had been SWAFP and Socialist Workers, Farmers and Youths Party (later to become the Socialist Workers Party), which was formed around Ola Oni, one of the key figures in the First Republic’s Labour Party that had split from SWAFP. Neither was registered, by the military. SWAFP was hamstrung not just by the issue of legality. Its leading lights such as Wahab Goodluck and Ibidapo Fatogun two of the finest trade unionists in the country’s history who used to have the pro-Moscow National Trade Union Congress as a base had earlier been banned from trade unionism for life by the military junta and the merger of trade unions across the ideological divide to form the Nigeria Labour Congress in 1978 had also further de-limited the possibilities of a trade union centre’s unequivocal support for a socialist party. The apparition of a political scene that the Second Republic happened to be, was thus, even much more than was the case in the First Republic, left to the shenanigans of the befuddled bourgeois politicians.
It is important to note that while a lot seemed to be the same within the skulls of Nigeria’s elites, the global situation in 1979 was quite different from that of 1960 when the enthusiasm of Independence could nestle in the legitimacy of state intervention in the economy, with the Keynesian Welfare Nation State in the West, State “Socialism” in the East and developmentalist states laying the basis for industrialization in underdeveloped countries from South Korea to Brazil and Egypt to India. The 2nd Republic was born with Thatcher, Reagan & the neoliberal “counter-revolution” they represented. The slight current urging industrialization amongst the elites was literally wiped out. As with the economy so with the politics; the rawness of the influence and power of money became nauseating.
The degree of rigging in 1979 made that of the First Republic seem pale. Tai Solarin, the reputed radical educationist and social-democratic columnist, described Shagari’s election as “the stolen presidency” and predicted that: “If this government lasts for four years, the NPN will have been firmly planted as Government Party everywhere, and the UPN, GNPP, the NPP and PRP will have been drained to annihilation, both in membership- it is already starting – and in morale.”
The 1983 elections followed the macabre logic of the 1964/65 elections which had glided the 1st Republic to its demise. “Landslide victories” were declared subsequent to elections in which murder, arson, rigging, intimidation and falsification of results were carried out without the slightest compunction. Post-elections violence was like fire during the harmattan season. In Ondo state, within what was the Western region in the First Republic, it led to the reversal of the NPN “victory” of Akin Omoboriowo as Governor against his erstwhile boss and then serving UPN governor, Chief Adekunle Ajasin. The logic of ‘64/’65 in ’83 could however not be reversed. On the last day of the year, the soja boys rolled in the tanks. The voice of one Sani Abacha declared the abrupt end of the 2nd Republic to the world. General Muhammad Buhari would emerge by the end of the day as the junta’s designated head of state. Babangida was to overthrow him 20months later in a palace coup, institute a diarchy as part of a “hidden agenda” but was forced to “step aside” in the heat of the 1993 presidential elections and its annulment.
There was no doubt before now that the “freest and fairest” election in Nigeria’s history was that of June 12, 1993. Many still belief, and probably not wrongly, that it remains much fairer ad freer than the recent general elections. While the contest was between Bashorun MKO Abiola, of the Social Democratic Party and Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Party, for many Nigerians, the main issue was voting out the military from power. MKO obviously won, the Babangida junta annulled the election and a six-year democratic revolution which ended with the democratic victory of the counter-revolution, erupted.
The military exited from Aso Rock on May 29, 1999, but on its own terms. One of these was the conduct of what, to many analysts, was till then the most rigged elections in Nigeria, on the wings of which General Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military dictator was returned as president. Onuoha has argued that “the reason for the major rigging was to ensure that the party had an absolute majority in order to avoid a coalition and consequent weak take-off of a new government, which was part of the crises of the transition governments of 1959 and 1979”.
The “Fourth” Republic has obviously broken the jinx of civilian regimes collapsing when they try to consolidate. The 2003, elections did not herald its curtains and in 2007, with elections which have been described by some as they most fraudulent ever in the world, the ruling class in Nigeria made history; a civilian government handed over to another, as Obasanjo handed the keys of Aso Rock to Yar’Adua, with an ambulance. There are several factors which made this jinx-breaking a possibility. Internationally, the wave of democratic revolutions from 1989 through the ‘90s, that swept away maximalist rulers, juntas and one-party states, makes the atmosphere less encouraging for would-be coup plotters in the barracks. Nationally, paradoxical as it may seem, the much vilified Peoples Democratic Party, which has been in power for the past 12years and is set for another 4years at the centre is the bulwark, reactionary as it might be, of the ruling elites in Nigeria against its self-destruct instincts and the livid anger of a distraught people.
NPN in the 2nd Republic represented the attempt at bridging the regional nature of elites’ parties in the country. It was really their first serious attempt at building a national party. PDP took over from and was the fruition of the seeds of NPN. Of course, seeking to build a national party does not equate to having any serious programmatic agenda for the transformation of the country. PDP is as much a fruition of NPN as a self-serving behemoth of corruption, “kleptocracy” and clueless national leadership as it is its fruition in building a pan-Nigerian partisan platform, in which to a reasonable extent the centrifugal contention over allocation of resources amongst the elites could somewhat be attenuated with mind-boggling flushes of money.
The zoning principle was central to maintaining honour amongst thieves within the partisan monstrosity which controlled the central government and 28 out of the 36 states. Its point of departure had been reached in secret, according to some of the elites in “the North”. Before Obasanjo was handed power in 1999, a secret pact had been reached. The northern elites were ready to concede “power shift” to “the South”, provided it would return by 2007. It did with Yar’Adua, but with his death and Goodluck Jonathan who had been his vice stepping into the office, the flow of horse-trading was truncated. It was probably the only way a politician from the minorities of the Niger delta could have gotten the keys to Aso rock.
The 2011 elections: a new beginning or an old ending?
Umaru Musa Yar;Adua became president under a pall of illegitimacy in 2007. The general elections that year had been such an obvious charade that he could not but acknowledge this and during his inauguration, promise amends. It was not just the legitimacy of his government that was at stake, the maturity of the entire ruling class in the country was called to question by the brigandage that was the first civilian-to-civilian transition in its history, even as General Muhammad Buhari, who had for the second time lost, did for the second time as well, head for the courts.
Yar’Adua formed a government of national unity, forging a “united front” of the shameless “political class”. It included the All Nigeria People’s Party, the platform Buhari had contested on. To assuage the sensibilities of Nigerians and thus re-constitute the ruling class’ rather fractious hegemony, electoral reforms was included as a key element of Yar’Adua’s seven point agenda and within three months of the administration, the Justice Mohammed Uwais-led Electoral Reforms Commission of 22 Nigerians, distinguished in their different walks of life was constituted.
In December 2008, the Supreme Court, by a decision of four Justices to three, upheld Yar’Adua’s elections, while the Uwais committee submitted its report. In January 2009, I argued that: “these two political and judicial events in December have much more than a symbolic relationship, bearing on elections. While the Supreme Court’s ruling settles the past electorally for Yar’Adua and Nigerians, the Electoral Reforms Committee’s report present recommendations to ensure, hopefully, that a Hobbessian state of elections would only be something in the political history of Nigeria, marking a period of immaturity of the country’s political elites.” It would seem the projections into the future then has been both validated and at the same time, challenged by the ongoing reality of the 2011 elections.
It can hardly be doubted that the present elections have such transparency as only the June 12 elections could have laid claim to. The modified open-secret ballot as proposed by the Uwais committee was utilised and votes were counted at each Polling Unit, and publicly declared there. This was central to the credibility and aura of freeness and fairness that the elections now are adorned with. The Uwais committee’s report contained several other relatively progressive proposals which were not adopted by the Federal Government. This included the manner of appointment of the INEC Chair; the presidency was still to unilaterally determine this, more or less.
As the tenure of Maurice Iwu, the gangster-umpire who conducted the 2007 elections general elections (including those for governor, a quarter of which were upturned by the courts), drew to an end by June 2010, he scampered around to have his services retained for an encore. The death of Yar’Adua on May 5 thrust Goodluck Jonathan, his vice, forward. To consolidate on his fragile hold on power, his choice of INEC Chair was of the greatest import. There were few persons that could have been as welcomed by Nigerians, particularly organized labour and the civil society movement as Professor Attahiru Jega, Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University Kano a former Leftist president of the university teachers’ union, civil society activists and member of the Uwais committee.
He has deservedly won accolades for his commendable conduct of the 2011 elections thus far. Nigerians had borne the costs of what AlJazeera described as the most expensive elections ever in Africa, but not a few feel that he has lived up to the high expectations of the citizenry, despite a false start on April 2 (when the National Assembly polls earlier scheduled for that day had to be postponed, on the same day); at least at the polling units. Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), whose Buhari/Bakare ticket that was supposed to have dragged President Jonathan into a run-off lost out equally agree that the elections, seem on the face of it, free and fair. It alleges though that rigging was built into the excel spreadsheet package used for collation in its strongholds of Katsina and Kano states while in states within the South East an South South, it challenges the 90% plus votes garnered by the PDP. It filed its petitions against the elections on Sunday May 8.
CPC was formed last year around the personality of General Muhammad Buhari. Projecting an ascetic figure of discipline and order, straightforwardness and frugality, a large number of opposition elements, in the south of the country, many of whom had not been active in partisan elite politics flocked to him as an alternative to the dozen years of the PDP locusts. He was also deemed to have a following amongst the talakawas, or sans culottes in the north. Action Congress of Nigeria, a shadowy claimant to the heritage of the Yoruba west was next of what could have amounted to any significant force of opposition. There was much posturing about the ACN and CPC forging an alliance to challenge the PDP before the general elections commenced, to no avail. After the National Assembly elections made it clear except to the most optimistic that the PDP might be bloodied but was far from being brought down, attempts at forging the alliance were renewed and subsequently failed again. It is doubtful though that even such an alliance would have held water, as combining the CPC & ACN votes against PDP’s still gives Jonathan a victory margin of 8million votes.
CPC has however been fingered by many as being directly or indirectly responsible for the mayhem that rocked the northern parts of the country. This is largely due to General Buhari’s statements during the elections that this time around he would not be going to the courts as he did in 2003 and 2007 (spending 50 months, cumulatively) and rather asking his supporters to defend their votes. Some PDP governors in states within the southern parts had further helped to raise the myth of a persecuted Buhari when they refused to allow his scheduled campaigns to hold in their states’ capitals.
The anger of the lumpen mass does however go deeper than Buhari and CPC. The official unemployment rate nationally stands at 19.7%. The figures in the northern parts double this. While northern elites have always been in the corridors of power, holding its central reins for the better part of the 50years of Independence, they have failed woefully to develop infrastructure, or raise the level of education of the children of the masses in the same “north” which they have used to bargain for such access to power. Not a few of them, such as General T. Y. Danjuma a former army boss and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the current central bank chief have lamented this in recent times. Drug addiction is rampant amongst the lumpen youths, in major cities in the north, particularly Kano. And what they get “high” on are such cheapies as glue, gum, petrol and even faeces. For a significant number of these, as with the broader talakawas, General Buhari represented a symbol of “change” and their spontaneous violence at his loss was a cry of desperation with machetes, clubs and blood.
The blood of young men and women, graduates who as Youth Corpers were used as polling officers by NEC was spilt without mercy by the rampaging lumpen. Some were forced out of police stations and beaten to death, while others were burnt alive inside Corpers’ lodges. The face book updates of at least one of them before these grisly incidents, reveals that CPC supporters had tried to force underage voters on him, and not without success, confirming the fact that rigging at the polls had not been a preserve of PDP.
To limit the view of violence in the elections to the northern parts, would however present a wrong and inadequate picture. There was none of the six geo-political zones of the country where there were no echoes of violence during the polls. Akwa Ibom and Imo states were quite bloody flashpoints in the South South and South East, for example. The major difference with the northern parts was not just one of the extents of destruction in the wake of violent clashes. The confrontations there, unlike in the northern states where they were associated with the presidential polls, took place during the national assembly and gubernatorial/states houses of assembly elections, where the contending candidates were locals. A related difference is that violence in the southern states seems to have been initiated by unpopular serving governors/legislators and their ruling parties, before and in the process of elections, to intimidate voters, while challenging partisans resisted.
The 2011 elections are very significant in the annals of the country, for several reasons, of which the nature of violence, particularly in the northern parts was one. The national assembly elections threw up surprises, while also confirming the people’s tiredness with PDP. It maintains a drastically reduced majority in parliament, but could not help the fall of a number of its big wigs. The PDP lost five states, while winning one. ACN made the most inroads, winning two more states and Lagos (it had earlier claimed 3 states through the law courts as haven being rigged by the PDP in 2007 and elections were not held in these).
Three possibilities co-existing presently as nascent trends are visible on the horizon. In the first scenario; PDP would definitely constitute some form of a government of national unity on May 29. CPC, unlike ANPP in 2007, has made it clear it would not to be part of such a government. ACN has adopted a similar posture, even if its adversarial rhetoric could largely remain posturing. PDP would however be set to play the historic role of at last giving the ruling elites some form of élan, even if merely an assumed one. By 2015 and possibly subsequently, elections while they might have some warts on the nose and close to the scrotum would hold and be considered more or less credible. Intra-class electoral coherence would have thus been institutionalized and the broader class struggle would take hold of other moments in the national life for its fiercest orgies
The second scenario would see the PDP’s defeat and a fratricidal falling out of the class it represents, in its victory. The centrifugal pull which still exists could be aggravated by the aftermath of the elections, with the expansion of the coasts of its opposition. It is unlikely, for now, that such could lead to a split of the country or its being restructured on a confederation basis. The wind of this possibility would however blow with a lot of carnage and deepening of ethno-regional sentiments, across the divide.
The earth-shaking significance of the actions of protesters who stormed the palatial covens of revered custodians of culture tinged through and through with the vestiges of feudalism and the authority of religion, bears the germ of the third possibility. Their acts, which the regime finds very worrisome as President Jonathan admitted and which was echoed by James Campbell, a former US ambassador to Nigeria , were something hitherto inconceivable. The momentum of this hour it initially seemed could lead this profanity to even greater wantonness which would make the subsisting order quake with fear. But this is rather unlikely, in the immediate instance, with the present swagger of law and order across the land, strutting in its dark gown of curfews. This hour will pass, but its boldness would give the fire next time such bravado that the moon and stars of the caliph and emirs it strikes at now might seem too near earth, and it will rise to claim heaven itself; challenging the very rule of the elites that have broken down the hopes of the common man and woman, in the north, more than anywhere else in the land.
The Labour movement and the unfolding situation
The pertinent question to ask now, with our quest for democracy from below, that is truly emancipatory, might be; “whither the labour movement, in all these?”
Its different strands took different pathways in the build up to the general elections, from the margins. The Labour Party endorsed Goodluck Jonathan’s bid for the presidency and was the first party to congratulate him after the presidential elections; the trade union movement was nonpartisan, playing the role of elections observation, while; a number of the left sects were/are trying to form an independent socialist party.
These different pathways reveal deeper cleavages that have taken shape over the last two decades. In 1989, Nigeria Labour Congress had formed the Nigeria Labour Party, when the General Babangida administration initiated the political transition to the diarchy that was the Third Republic. Of the 13 political parties formed then, representatives of the junta had noted that only the NLP and the Republican Party formed by Local Government Council Chairmen (then on zero-party basis) had genuine national spread and appeal. Babangida was however to ban all the parties and set up two parastatal-like parties; the National Republican Party (that was “a little to the right” as the junta put it) and the Social Democratic Party (being “a little to the left”). While the socialist left mobilised nationally for the NLP, it was largely shut out of its inauguration by the trade union bureaucracy which then threw in its lot with the SDP, after the ban, without as much of a whimper.
In the heat of revolutionary pressures that shook the country after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections won by MKO Abiola, the SDP candidate, the Babangida government and the Interim National Government contraption it handed over the reins of state to in a hurry where both kicked out by general strikes and mass protests within the spate of 82 days.
The subsequent military junta of Abacha proscribed NLC and the virulent oil workers unions and banned all forms of partisan politics, the following year. Despite this, two Left parties where established that year; Democratic Alternative and National Conscience Party. Both have not made any significant showing in the current republic (and the leadership of NCP supported Buhari during the last elections, even though the party had a presidential candidate!) The republic had opened in 1999, with only three parties registered by the out-going military; PDP, ANPP & AD (the precursor, in a sense, of ACN), allowed to contest elections. DA & NCP amongst others took the Federal Government to court and in 2002 won the opening up of the partisan political space, which now has 63 registered parties.
NLC which marked its “new beginning” in 1999 as well, wasted no time in setting its agenda for the future. One of its set tasks was the formation of a political party. Its political policy declared that such a party could not but be socialist. After three conferences which witnessed the enthusiastic involvement of the revolutionary Left, the constitution and (socialist) programme of what was to have been the Working People’s Party, were drafted in 2002. That same year though, the trade union bureaucracy took the winds from the sails of the efforts towards forming the WPP. In its place the Party for Social Democracy was formed. This was in an attempt to bring in “patriotic” middle class elements, as explicitly stated and to keep out “extremist” Leftists as implicitly acknowledged. Fulltime officers in the NLC (but not its affiliates) were also barred from playing prominent roles in the party.
On one hand, most Leftists outside the trade unions, felt, and still strongly feel betrayed by that action. On the other hand, Left elements within the NLC came to see themselves as not being part of the party. The seeds of yawning gaps between the trade union movement and the labour party on one hand and between the PSD(LP) and the revolutionary left on the other were thus sown at its very inception. After intense debates within the party, carried out as well openly the party’s nomenclature was changed from Party for Social Democracy to Labour Party, at its First Convention on February 28, 2004.
The party’s stronghold is Ondo state where Dr. Olusgeun Mimiko, a social-democrat of the Awoist traditions since his university days is governor . While many on the Left are ready to concede a general progressive nature to his politics, not a few of the other candidates that have contested on the party’s platform, in 2007 & 2011, have been adjudged as representing neoliberal interests, contrary to the expected left(-tending) orientation of a (social-democratic) labour party. More importantly, the party, it would seem, has placed more currency on winning such rich candidates than in mobilising for membership within the working class.
These considerations had led Left elements in the party to form the Campaign for a Mass Based Labour Party (CMB-LP), a few years back. By the time the 2011 elections would come though, the CMB-LP had fizzled out. In what could be, at least partly, grasped as an act of desperation, some other left elements last year formed a non-electoralist party; Socialist Working People’s Party . There are also ongoing discussions amongst a plethora of sects on the Left –which include those constituting the SWPP, as it were- to form a broader revolutionary socialist party. It is quite possible that one of the presently registered Left parties could serve as its organisational template.
With the simmering cauldron of mass discontent meshed with great expectations which the 2011 elections’ flashpoints give an inkling of, events in the coming period would require partisan leadership with programmes radically different from what the dominant parties in the country today have to offer. This makes the efforts at building a partisan revolutionary alternative something that can not be waved aside. Such efforts would however have to go beyond the present sectarian boxes of the Left. It would have to be rooted in the struggles of the mass of Nigeria’s working people.
The working class has never been as strong in Nigeria as it has been in the present Republic. It has time and again, brought the system to temporary shutdowns with 9 general strikes in 12 years. In 2004, in the heat of one of such general strikes, the president Olusegun Obasanjo had described organised labour as posing the threat of being an alternative government. While the dust of elections might now be clearing, massive working class struggles seem to be looming. The first major one would most likely be struggle for the implementation of the new minimum wage of N18, 000.00. Such economic demands with the flush of confidence that a seemingly new political beginning for the nation is going through could have greater political significance beyond the ghoulish rising of lumpen anger that followed the presidential elections.
Nigeria’s hour of decision could very well be before 2015, when the next general elections would hold. Considering the touchstone place of elections in the vane of the wind and whirlwinds that have marked the country’s history, the most decisive battles ahead just might likely be still hinged on the manifestations of deeper contradictions in the rampage of electoral masquerades. The law courts upturning almost a third of the gubernatorial elections held in 2007 laid a basis for staggered elections and the pathway to 2015 is strewn with elections in different states that could serve as triggers for contentions beyond these states. The country’s elites, with their grandstanding and horse-trading would have much more to contend with than in the days gone by, with the tremors that will shake the heights of their citadels from the foundations, when massquakes erupt from below. Organised labour’s prime place in these forthcoming tremors cannot be overemphasized. The diffused strands of its organisational, political and ideological facets, much more than the might or cunning of bourgeois elites, might be the undoing of the extent such moment of tremors would reach. It could be hoped though, that, it is “morning yet on creation day”. Challenges being confronted by the Labour Political Commissions of both the NLC and (especially) TUC, might serve to bridge the chasms that presently de-limit the labour movement’s active leadership of the struggle for revolutionary-democracy in the country.
In lieu of a conclusion
The general elections in Nigeria definitely signal the evolution of new dimensions of our national polity. This could be in a manner of continuity, and most likely would be so, in the immediate instance. The general elections might have come and gone, but the shocking waves in their aftermath might not have wholly subsided. With armed intervention by the police, army and state security services, law and order seem enthroned in the troubled parts of the country, but the anger and discontent of millions is still quite palpable.
Many Nigerians are happy that at least for once, (relatively) free, fair and credible elections have been held. They are ready to try out President Jonathan. But it is unlikely the PDP regime at the centre will be much different from what it has been this past dozen years. The expectations that now run high in those ready to accept him, or at least take the progress that has been made, warts and all, as something to be defended, is likely to be shattered in no distant time. This is despite the fact that amongst the elites (and even a broad spectrum of the masses)e who wanted (a) change, not a few are eager to start engaging with this contrived new beginning, including by going to court, as the CPC has done
The gubernatorial and states houses of assembly elections results have equally shown that there would most likely be greater demands on authorities at the sub-national levels as there now exists a basis for believing that the people’s votes would be counted and would count in enthroning those saddled with the tasks of governance. Be that as it may, thus far we can say, while a lot seems to have changed in elections in Nigeria, a lot still remain very much the same. The finery of changes seems to merely mask a new beginning to the same ends of a parasitic elite’s ostentatious existence at the expense of the immense majority of the population.
It is however unlikely that a population: whose immiseration deepens with the pangs of jobless growth; which is beaten hollow by rising costs of living, while real wages decline and; that lives in the vice-like grip of increasing insecurity, but which has now come to feel a texture of hope and envision possibilities beyond the normal run of our national reality, will be ready to live on the promises of mere good luck and a receding “better future”. The present relative credibility that the elites have won for their dominance of the polity represents attempts at consolidating the kwashiorkored form of liberal democracy that cannot but be the lot of a rentier neo-colonial capitalist state. Illusions being sown in some quarters that the country is a “semidemocracy” (whatever that means!) that is gradually moving towards true democracy that could safeguard the welfare of the masses and enthrone equality, are mere pies in the sky.
The unfolding period will unfurl with much confusion and in a zigzag manner. Primordial befuddlement will serve as stumbling blocks, for awhile. But, the de-mystification of the blue-blooded guardians of the grand old “North” power bloc is a precursor to the falling off of the wool from the eyes of Niger delta activists and those in the southern zones who might today look up to Goodluck Jonathan as a messiah of their own. This new beginning is for the elites is an assumed new route to the same ends of the continued subjugation of the immense majority of the population, but the wind they have sown in dredging this new path for their old road’s way, cannot but be reaped as an abundance of whirlwinds that will upturn their sails.
Abuja
May, 2011
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