Thirty Years After Black Wednesday

The Great Anti-SAP Revolts and thereinafter

1989 was one of those years that represent a turning point in history. A wind of mass anger threw away authoritarian regimes behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, students took over Tiananmen Square in China, the Berlin Wall fell paving the way towards German re-unification. And in Nigeria, there was a mass upsurge like none other since 1 October 1960.

This was a revolt against the structural adjustment programme and the legendary spate of corruption of the General Ibrahim Babangida-led junta, in the midst of rising poverty. From 24 May, all hell was let loose for almost two weeks. Students ignited a wildfire of action, with the first spark struck at Benin, where Uniben students took to the streets.

This immediately spread to Ibadan and then Ilorin, where activist students mobilised thousands of students from UI and Unilorin (and Kwara Poly) respectively on to the streets. They were joined in no time by other angry youths. Each day, over the first week of the revolt, new university/polytechnic cities and towns joined the uprising.

These included Port Harcourt, Jos, Calabar, Kano, Enugu, Owerri, Bauchi, Maiduguri. Not one of the six geopolitical zones of the country, was left out.

The peak of this hurricane of people on the streets was on Wednesday 31 May, the day University of Lagos students marched onto  the streets, with revolutionary student groups mobilising against the dictates of the right-wing students’ union body which tried its utmost best to keep the university out of the national revolutionary situation. Students from other campuses in the state, such as LASU, LASPOTECH and FCET also trooped out in their numbers.

Lagos at the time was the seat of the federal government, as well as being by far the most populous city in the country, with a population of 4.5 million. Tens of thousands of youth from this number descended on the streets across the various sectors of the city. Initially, the police were overwhelmed. In a riotous orgy denoting a festival of the oppressed, business establishments of the rich were attacked, and barricades set up on major roads.

The state's crackdown began on the day when the revolt peaked, defining it as a "Black Wednesday", soaked in the people's blood. By late afternoon on 31 May, the tanks were rolled out and anti-riot Mobile Police(MOPOL) units moved on the insurrectionists, firing live bullets. And as June unfurled its first days, reaction was fully reasserted by the regime.  

A dozen people were killed in Lagos and not less than two in Ibadan. Many more lives would have been lost, but for the fact that some sections of the police surreptitiously supported the protesters. They provided information in some cases that made us avoid areas that MOPOL units which were ready to "kill and go" were located.

Universities were shut down in the six most affected of the then twenty-one states of the federation and some radical lecturers sacked. Curfews were imposed in the major cities and public political meetings banned.

But a message was clearly sent home to the ruling class that it could not go on ruling the way it was ruling. Repression alone could not guarantee its hold on power. Concessions had to be made.

At the peak of the revolts which the New York Times described at the time as “economic riots”, President Babangida expressed surprise at the people’s revolt over higher prices of commodities. But after crushing the spontaneous rebellion, he rolled out a number of concessions. These included employment of over 60,000 young persons, mass transit buses and provision of buses for students’ unions.

Some lessons for today

There are a few lessons for activists today to learn from the rebellion thirty years ago. Probably the most important is that if we fight, we might win, but if we don’t, we have lost already. The concessions won were far below the aim of those who took to the streets, inchoate as this might have been. But even these would not have been gotten without the rebellion.

Indeed, most of our victories until the class of bosses and the capitalist system they represent are overthrown would at best be partial victories. This fact is made manifest in the outcomes of the series of struggles against fuel pump price increases over the last twenty years as well as those for increases in national minimum wage (with the latest being effectively a downward review of real wages vis-à-vis the 2011 National Minimum Wage Act).

We must thus not limit our struggles to fight for reforms. Our end goal must be revolutionary seizure of power by working-class people who will then control and manage the economy and society based on democracy from below, with power actually residing in workers, poor farmers and youth at the grassroots of workplaces and the communities.

Capitalism is an international system, indeed a worldwide system. It must be overthrown globally, with revolutions in several countries, almost simultaneously. And indeed, revolutionary moments such as that which rocked Nigeria thirty years ago come in waves, sucking in several countries at the same time.

We have seen similar periods in more recent times. In 2011/2012, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street movement, and the January Uprising in Nigeria were all part of a wave of revolts from below, flowing from the general crisis of capitalism which commenced in 2007.

Neither the spate of crises nor the waves of revolutionary moments in this period has petered out. Waves have their tides and ebbs and yet tide again. As the capitalists run about in disarray peddling false solutions, the crisis of their system worsens and working-class people’s anger bursts out in strikes and revolutions.

Reactionary forces smashed the revolution in Egypt and derailed it in Libya and Syria. But in Algeria and Sudan, the working masses and youth again rose overthrowing long entrenched regimes in democratic revolutions of the working masses and youth.

In Nigeria, the main beneficiaries of the January 2012 Uprising were sections of the bosses’ class then in opposition to the PDP, who took the initiative of forming the APC. But, far from making life better for the immense majority of the population, we have only become poorer under their watch.  

Re-election of the APC might very well be merely the calm before a storm, very much like the goodwill Goodluck Jonathan received when he was voted in as president in 2011. The APC government has already made it clear that the “next level” of his government after re-election would involves even worse times ahead for the working masses. There must be resistance to the forthcoming social and economic attacks we are likely to face.

Rebellions often start spontaneously. The spark of the Arab Spring was instantaneous demonstration of mass outrage when Mohammed Bouazizi set himself ablaze in Tunisia. And when UNIBEN students trooped out in May 1989 they hardly imagined the extent to which the revolts would spread.

But sustaining a rebellion requires political organisation. This was a major failing of the anti-SAP revolt. Conversely one of the main reasons why the “June 12” struggle lasted six long years and the military (in collaboration with the forces of imperialism) saw no option but to retreat back to the barracks eventually was because radical and revolutionary forces built some form of concerted organisation, first as the Campaign for Democracy and in the latter part of that struggle as the United Action for Democracy (and Joint Action Council).

The Importance of political organisation of forces seeking far-reaching change of the social order cannot be overemphasized. However, the decisive social force for transformative progress in the class struggle is the working-class. Unfortunately, this class did not move into the arena of the 1989 revolt.

The working-class movement encompasses the broad array of people whose exploitation enrich the bosses. They labour in the factories, mines, offices and informal economy. Their primary organisation is the trade union. The bureaucracy of officials which leads the trade union movement stood aloof from the revolt. This was a major difference between 1989 and 2012, where in both cases the uprisings started spontaneously.

As activists, we have to work with, but as well where necessary against the officialdom of the trade unions. They wield immense power as a result of being the leadership of organised labour. But they see themselves as a mediatory body between rank and file workers and the bosses’ class. Thus, even when they move the might of workers’ power into such massive struggles for the soul of society as in 1989 and 2012, they are often ready to grab the slightest opportunity available to diffuse the steam of mass anger.

Revolutionary forces must thus build organisation, with deep roots in the rank and file of the working-class movement, which could act as a steam engine that helps transform such mass anger from below into historical movement forward i.e. revolutionary overthrow the bosses.

The revolt in May and International Socialism in Nigeria

The revolt of May 1989 had deep impact on the generation of students’ activists that threw themselves body and soul into organising for it, in different ways. For some of us at Ilorin it led to the formation of the May 31^st Movement (M31M).

M31M started as a rebellion within a rebellion, a revolution within the revolution. We were convinced that there were key lessons that the Left as a whole was not drawing from how the revolt started and its entire dramaturgy. Some of the lessons earlier spelt out above stared us in the face, even at the time.

There were others, which included the need for the revolution to be able to defend itself. This particular one however was however laden with seeds of guerrillaism or the commitment to building a “politico-military” organisation at the expense of a mass movement of the working-class people. But practical work helped to clear our heads, and pathways from that direction.

Not only did we throw ourselves into practical work aimed at building a revolutionary socialist organisation of workers and youth, we also gave high priority to sharpening our theoretical understanding.

This was the period when the Soviet Empire known as the USSR and its East Bloc was collapsing. We had questioned this supposedly “actually existing socialism” as being a parody of what socialism should be, as individual activists, even before it started collapsing. Socialism could not be the monstrosity of authoritarian rule represented by the Stalinist bureaucracy in that Empire.

Our quest for understanding and relentless questioning of received socialist wisdom led to intensive study of what appeared to be a melange of ideas. These included the works of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Raptis, Ernest Mandel, Mao Zedong, Regis Debray, Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, Hal Draper, Georg Lukacs and ultimately Tony Cliff.

Tony Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russia came to us through the library of Awareness Movement, a small group of International Socialists with its base at the College of Education Ila Oragun. It had unfortunately collapsed years earlier. One of the five comrades who took the first steps to build the M31M had two elder brothers that had been members of AM, whose libraries he raided for the group.

The book’s analysis was like fresh breath in helping to understand and better situate Russia for what it was – a bureaucratic state capitalist state. Its international socialist perspective became the theoretical touchstone for our politics and building the forces of International Socialism in the country.

At the turn of the century, M31M became the Socialist Workers Movement. And on 29 January 2011, SWM merged with the Socialist League to form the Socialist Workers League (SWL) and later the Socialist Workers and Youth League (SWL).

Conclusion

Looking back at the anti-imperialist revolt of 1989, we are more than ever convinced that the task of defeating imperialism cannot be separated from that of overthrowing the bosses at home. There is no “progressive bourgeoisie” as some sections of the left uphold in theory and/or practice.

This helped us to maintain a consistent class position during the six-year period of revolution and counter-revolution that was the struggle of June 12. Our stance of “Neither MKO nor IBB” (and later Abacha when he replaced IBB) echoed the “neither Washington nor Moscow” stance of International Socialists during the Cold War.

In the present era of crises and revolts we are living through, the need for ideological clarity cannot be overemphasized. Revolution and counter-revolution are like Siamese twins often wedged together in a struggle of life and death. And the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend.

A lack of such understanding has led many an activist to glorifying such enemies of working-class people like Muammar Ghadaffi, Vladimir Putin or Bashir al-Assad at the international level or visualising some supposed usefulness of a Muhammadu Buhari or the APC for example, in the struggle for a better world.   

Our point of departure is and must always be that of the working-class people for revolution from below. Today, SWL continues to fight besides and with working-class people in the trade unions, communities and on the streets. Only through struggle will we overcome – overthrowing the bourgeoisie and building socialist society across the globe.

Freedom cometh by struggle as we learn from the great anti-SAP revolt. The struggle continues until victory is won. This requires the ever-expanding struggle and solidarity of working-class people and youth, for the workers united, determined and conscious of their historical mission cannot be defeated. Every generation has to discover its mission, and fulfil or betray it, as Frantz Fanon teaches us.

The generation of 2019 must take a further leap beyond that taken by the generation of 1989. Workers and youth unite and fight!