WHICH WAY NIGERIA? THE WORKING CLASS AND THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION*
INTRODUCTION
The Federal
Government of Nigeria initiated what it describes as a “transformation agenda”
when President Goodluck Jonathan took up the reins of office after the 2011
elections. It would seem that the Jonathan administration was keying into the
frustrations of Nigerians with the worsening social-economic conditions of the
immense majority of the population and the perennial state of instability of
the nation. But essentially, despite feverish claims to the contrary, little if
anything has changed. Nigeria still relies majorly on the exploitation of crude
oil for its revenue (with probably more of such revenue entering private
pockets than the collective coffers), unemployment is on the increase, poverty,
and disillusionment stalk the land, along with violence ethno-regional
conflicts, particularly in the north eastern region.
The country
has had considerable growth despite the storm of the global economic crisis.
This has led the elite to attempts at sowing the illusion that the country is
immune from the vagaries of the failure of the neoliberal project; a
justification for continued pursuit of neoliberal policies, by the state. But,
this jobless growth is of course
spurred largely by the exploitation of extractive resources, mainly crude oil.
Attempts at utilising the resources generated from petro-dollars for rapid
industrialization have not been so successful, especially after the Import
Substitution Industrialisation strategy of the late 1960s/1970s was rolled back
for export-oriented growth with the Structural Adjustment Programme initiated
in 1986, by the Federal Military Government.
Successive
“development” strategies by the civilian wing of the ruling class since the
restoration of the Third Republic in 1999, such as the National Economic
Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), the Vision 20:2020 and the
current Transformation Agenda, have
all been based on the neoliberal paradigm, with its attendant illusions.
Liberalisation of the economy has led to the collapse of industry, particularly
the textile industry which used to be the largest in the manufacturing sector.
The informal economy has ballooned with a tertiatization, where services come
next to agriculture in terms of employment of the workforce.
With a 23%
rate of unemployment (with that of youth being about 60% according to the
state), and a burgeoning informalisation of work, organised labour represents
much less than 10% of the country’s workforce. The Nigeria Labour Congress’
affiliates organise just 4.5million workers and the Trade Union Congress some
2million workers in a country with a population of 168million citizens. But the
trade unions occupy a strategically central place in the articulation of vision
and struggle from below, for pro-poor and working people transformation.
In this
light, closer collaboration between the two trade union centres has helped to
forge more lasting ties between the trade union movement and other social
movements, over the decades, and in more recent times with radical “civil
society organisations”. The extent to which the quest for a better society by
the unions and (other) social movements has been successful has been greatly
influenced by: “the context and trends in global political economy”; the
character of the Nigerian state; the trend of industrialization; the facets and
depths of inter-linkages of issues and struggles of concern to the working
people, and; the alternatives envisioned for a new social order, including how
this is framed.
This paper
attempts to put the foregoing in perspective.
CONTEXT AND TRENDS OF GLOBAL
POLITICAL ECONOMY
At the time
of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, on September 15, 2008, it would seem that
new vistas for a post-neoliberal period were unfolding. Indeed, the October
issue of Working People’s Vanguard, the
now rested monthly newspaper of the now defunct All-Nigeria Socialist Alliance
had two stories that expressed two sides of the organic crisis of the
capitalist system which it is yet to rise out of. There was an “obituary” for
neoliberalism by Joel Odigie which presented the event as an end of the
neoliberal era, and an analysis of “capitalism in crisis” by Baba Aye, which (while
being optimistic) noted that the challenges ahead were about as severe as the
opportunities unfolding.
Five years
after, neoliberalism appears resilient, as the bosses feel confident enough in
their realisation that ‘tis obviously not
“the final conflict”. The reasons for
this are multifarious, but at the heart of these lie two intertwined realities that
confront quests for reform-as-resolution on one hand, and the revolutionary
resolution of the current situation on the other.
Several
Keynesian, post-Keynesian and neo-Keynesian formulations of different hues have
been presented on a global level and in different countries, including by the
trade unions. At the global level, the trade unions articulation of such a
formulation is best grasped with an analysis of the Global Jobs Pact of 2009. This period was also when the G20 was
formed, arguably as an expanded form of the G8. The Global Union Federations
were invited for its meetings at which they argued the GJP, pushing for a
jobs-led recovery from the global economic crisis.
The bosses
have quietly, both surely it would appear, put aside any serious consideration
of the GJP, after the coming out of the Great Recession, even though the
economic crisis still remains relentless, with its most adverse effects being
borne by the poor and working people. Indeed, within countries, rather than uphold a social-democratic compromise
like that of the 1930s “New Deal”/post-War order which the GFJ envisions, the
bosses have gone on the offensive. What is left of the Welfare State is being
rolled back with austerity measures in advanced capitalist countries and in resource
rich but economically backward countries like Nigeria, the bosses continue with
the narrative of “nothing has changed; long live neoliberalism”.
The general
crisis of capitalism has not been met with folded arms by the poor and working
people. Resistance has spurred revolts and even, as is the case in the Middle
East and North Africa region, revolutions.
The streets have been occupied no doubt and mass strikes have rocked the
world of work. But a major limitation of these has been the absence of a post-capitalist
socialist world’s vision, as a
material force in that it inspires the minds and hearts of the millions of
people challenging the status quo.
This is a
very sharp departure from the revolts that met the economic crisis that was the
Great Depression. Not only was the USSR an example of where economic crisis did not occur, the socialist ideology it espoused took life and blood
in the tens, and hundreds of thousands of communist parties militants and their
influence in the mass actions taken such as sit-ins in factories, and “hunger
marches” on the streets.
The
Keynesian reformist “class compromise” that came out of this intense class
struggle was largely a safety valve to deflect a more revolutionary resolution.
This led to the so-called “Golden Age” of capitalism as rate of profit soared
and more crumbs could be scoured to secure (near) full employment and the
social security of welfare states, in the
advanced capitalist countries.
Countries
like Nigeria that where then under colonial domination could not (i.e. their
elites) lacked the sovereignty to really tap into the “welfare state” paradigm
of this period[1].
The 1960s was Africa’s decade of independence, and the twilight of the post-War
order. In that brief window before the accursed dawn of a neoliberal order, the
interventionist state central to the
Welfare State model could be pursued by the newly independent state’s elite.
Different variants of developmentalist states
were the result of this, till the late 1970s.
In Nigeria,
as with many other countries in the “Third World” as they were the called, this
took the form of an ISI strategy as the pivot of “National Development Plans”.
By the 1980s when the Washington Consensus of neoliberalism was being
consolidated, in the face of the decline and collapse of the East bloc, capitalist triumphalism went along with
the supposed rolling back of the state in favour of a deregulated “free
market”.
Neoliberalism
and its myth of a “free market” became dominant on the back of ruthless attacks
against the working class. Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the air traffic
controllers strike and Margaret Thatcher’s breaking of the long drawn miners’
strike are just some of the sharpest examples of the triumphs of capitalism’s
neoliberal gladiators. In Nigeria, this took the form of proscriptions of trade
union centres in 1975, 1988 and 1994.
The
political, ideological and organisational setbacks faced by the working class
over the last thirty odd years set the background for both the limitations of
its rising in this period of change and the challenges of re-igniting its
latent possibility for changing the world. Another world is indeed possible,
but it must not only be envisioned, it must be central to our praxis and
narrative to be won.
THE CHARACTER OF THE NIGERIAN STATE
Nigeria is a
rich country with poor people. This of course is because the social wealth
generated from the toil of the working people on its lands and the exploitation
of the wealth in the bowels of these lands are appropriated by a handful of
elite and their overlords in the metropoles of imperialism. This is the
defining dynamics of the nature of the Nigerian state, with systemic corruption
as the trappings of its details.
The working
class played a central role in the nationalist movement that led to
de-colonisation. But the British colonialists, not surprisingly handed over the
reins of the state to the most backward section
of the (then) nascent comprador bourgeoisie, as represented by the Northern
People’s Congress. Ethnicity and religion from the word go became incendiary
elements of elite political mobilization, with which the strategy was to
perpetually divide working people along identity lines. The trade unions have
been the strongest counter-pole to this tendency, being the major pan-Nigerian social movement from below.
Over the
last 53 years of post-colonial politics, balancing the interests of different
fractions of the ruling elite defined along ethno-regional lines (being the
most convenient for this class devoid of much productive ethos), has been a
cardinal component of the Nigerian state, with a philosophy of cake-sharing. An
attempt to understand the neo-patrimonial dynamics of the Nigerian state led to
the conceptualisation of prebendalism (Joseph
1983).
The Peoples
Democratic Party which has held power at the centre since the establishment of
the Fourth Republic in 1999 has been the most successful effort at elite
party-formation and state-building. This partly explains the unrivalled
escapades of corruption that has been the stock in trade of the bosses in this
period. It has, with the lubricant of sleaze been able to establish the most
lasting of -albeit still tenuous- elite “consensus” and hegemony.
Despite
pretensions at (resource) nationalism which started with the indigenization
decrees in the early 1970s, except for (and even this, rather arguably) the
1975-76 and 1984-85 interregnums of Generals Murtala Mohammed/Olusegun Obasanjo[2]
and Generals Muhammadu Buhari/Tunde Idiagbon juntas, the Nigerian state has
always been a very pliable tool of Western imperialism.
In the
current period for example, while resource
nationalism is a defensive ideology and instrument for a number of
countries in the Global South, the Nigerian state is more concerned with
bending as backwards as it can to ease the conditions for exploitation of its
natural resources, all in the name of securing “foreign direct investment”. As
information from wikileaks further
shows, this is not at all for altruistic reasons. Individual elites benefit
immensely from the shadowy angles of such “liberalisation”.
INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE CHALLENGE
OF DEVELOPMENT
Nigeria
remains an under-industrialized country, despite the hope of its elite for the country’s
economy to be one of the 20 largest in the world by 2020. This perspective is
actually an understatement. It has witnessed de-industrialisation despite its low level of industrialization ab initio, over the past twenty five
years.
In the immediate
post-colonial period, state intervention led to an increase in the contribution
of manufacturing to the GDP from 19.8% in 1966-67, to 32.4% by 1971-72 (Teriba
and Kayode 1977). By 1982 when the first austerity shocks hit the country, and
with the over reliance on petroleum that had become entrenched, this had fallen
to 9.2% and “manufacturing value-added as a percentage of GDP was about 5% in
2000 (less than the proportion at independence in 1960), making Nigeria one of
the 20 least industrialized economies in the world” (Iwuagwu 2011).
By the end
of 2012, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, manufacturing
contributed 7.7% to GDP growth. With the foregoing, it does not take a lot to
agree that “Nigeria’s experience with industrialisation since independence is a
classic case of misfortune” (Amakom 2008). This is not the least because of an
absence of industrial linkages (Ajayi 2007). It is very unlikely that the
current “industrialisation strategy” of the Federal Government based on a
cluster concept rooted in neoliberal paradigm can turn this sorry tale around.
THE TRADE UNIONS, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
AND ALTERNATIVES
The trade
union movement has been at the fore of the quest for alternatives from below by
social movements in the country. This has been particularly so since the
establishment of the Nigeria Labour Congress in 1978. NLC tried from its early
days to build traditions which established strong linkages with the class
interests of the workers and the tasks of national development in opposition to
imperialism. In 1981, it issued the Workers’
Charter of Demands which could be considered its first programmatic
statement in this direction, and during the hey days of SAP, its “Nigeria NOT
For Sale” leaflet was a major mobilisational document of resistance.
The spate
of attacks against the trade unions and particularly against its more radical
sections led to the “compromise of 1989” where a “consensus” to do away with
sharp ideological divides was arrived at, with consequences till today. But of
course, 1989 was also the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, compromise at
home partly reflected disillusionment with a bigger global picture of the
collapse of what was for many, an alternative model.
This could
be said to have dampened the categorical depth of subsequent efforts at
formulating alternatives for national development. The new beginning of labour
which started in February 1999 did, in this direction, come with a vast
expansion of breadth, but a sorry loss of depth. It is within this context that
the promising but still born Alternative
National Development Agenda process of 2009 – 2011 can be situated.
The
expansion of breadth however raised the political profile of organised labour
as the rallying banner of the social movements. From the 2000 anti-fuel price
hike strike, a new practice was introduced as a constant to mass strikes.
Dubbed “General Strike and Mass Protest”,
the nine general strikes since then have brought tens of thousands into the
streets as workers downed tools. The peak of this was with the mass revolts of
January 2012, yet again against a hike in fuel price which saw mass strikes,
demonstrations, processions, etc involving millions of persons in over 50
cities and towns across the country[3].
A major
problem that unions face is that, they have been much clearer on what they are
against, than the alternative they seek in a well articulated manner. This was
a time that it was clear that the trade unions, and indeed a majority of
Nigerians stood for a socialist political and economic system, as testified to
by the 1986 Political Bureau report which was suppressed by the military. Now,
we have at best, episodic formulations and constrained formulations of
alternatives. Related to this problem is the gross lack of the rootedness of an
alternative vision beyond collective bargaining in the “official” politics of
the union militant. But as more and more shop stewards get radicalised in the
unfolding moment, questions are being asked on “what is to be done?” This is
particularly so as a disconnect yawns between the labour movement and the
Labour Party which it established in 2002.
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION
This paper
has tried to situate the current Nigerian situation in a world in turmoil
within the realities of this world itself and with it, the historically
established realities the working class in Nigeria are living. We cannot but
see the similarity of the challenges facing the trade unions and progressive
forces in the country, with those which change-seeking activists across the
world now face. But along with these, we bring into relief the peculiar
dynamics and dimensions of the narratives and practice unfolding within the class
struggle therein.
In
summoning up, we cannot but stress the most important task this paper sets for
itself. It is not enough to interpret the world, the point of course is to
change it, for which our analysis serves as a point of departure for discussions
at this conference.
Thank you
for listening.
*Being
(the draft of) a paper presented on Monday November 4, 2013, at the National
Union of Mineworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) International Colloquium, organised by the NUMSA Reserach & Policy Institute, and held on
November 3-7, 2013, in Johannesburg, South Africa
REFERENCES
Ajayi, D.D.
2007, ‘Recent Trends and Patterns in Nigeria’s Industrial Development’, Africa Development, vol. 32, no. 2:
139-155
Amakom, U.
2008, ‘Post Independence Nigeria and Industrialisation Strategies: Four and
Half Erratic Decades’, Available at SSRN 1266633.
Aye B.,
2008, ‘Capitalism in Crisis; Working
Peoples Vanguard, October
Aye B.,
2012, Era of Crises and Revolts
Perspectives for Workers and Youth, Solaf Publishers, Ibadan
Falola, T.,
1996, Development Planning and
Decolonization in Nigeria, University of Press of Florida, Gainesville
Iwuagwu, O.
2011, ‘The Cluster Concept: Will Nigeria’s New Industrial Development Strategy
Jumpstart the Country’s Industrial Takeoff?’, Afro Asian Journal of
Social Sciences, vol. 2,
no 4
Joseph, R.
A. 1983, ‘Class, state, and prebendal politics in Nigeria’, Journal of
Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, vol. 21, no.3: 21-38
Nigeria
Labour Congress, 1981, Workers’ Charter
of Demands, NLC, Lagos
Teriba O
and Kayode M.O 1977, ‘Issues in Industrialization’, in Teriba O. and Kayode
M.O, (eds), Industrial Development of Nigeria: Patterns, Problems and Prospects, Ibadan
University Press, Ibadan
[1] See Falola T., 1996
[2] While the junta
lasted till October 1979 when Generals Olusegun Obasanjo/Shehu Musa Yar’Adua
handed over to civilians of the 2nd Republic, the radical posturing
of that regime (which nationalised British economic concerns including BP for
Britain’s support of apartheid and Kissinger’s gambit in Angola) mellowed
drastically after the assassination of General Mohammed on February 13, 1976
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