Authoritarian Democracy and Radical Resistance in Nigeria*
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| #RevolutionNow activists demonstrating at the offices of the secret police (SSS/DSS) |
In our article for Issue 64 of Amandla
in June, which analysed the February/March elections and related
developments, we pointed out “the hollowness of liberal democracy in Nigeria”.
In the months since then, the regime represented primarily by the ruling All
Progressive Congress has become more authoritarian, whilst clinging to the
shell of liberal democracy in form. The Coalition for Revolution (CORE) in
Nigeria, further exposed the repressive essence of the regime. The state has
violently tried to suppress the #RevolutionNow campaign launched by CORE in
August without much success. This marks renewal
of radical politics.
Attacks on press freedom,
disregard for court orders and the crushing of peaceful demonstrations have
become the order of the day. The likelihood of this slide towards a
quasi-fascist order is likely to go further except curbed by struggle from
below. This is in the light of the declaration of the president in the wake of
his re-election that working-class people should brace themselves for tougher
times ahead.
Turns to authoritarianism are
often taken by the ruling class to push through unpopular policies and
programmes at the behest of capital accumulation (or to maintain the stability
of the capitalist system as some form of Bonapartism or the other). The
Argentine political scientist, Guillermo O’Donell for example theorized on how
military regimes that emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s in Latin America
created Bureaucratic Authoritarian States to push through modernization of
countries in the region.
In the 1960s to the 1990s when
military dictatorship was somewhat in fashion, this took the shape of a series
of military juntas in Nigeria. Buhari himself first appeared as a head of state
at the twilight of 1983 as General Muhammadu Buhari, with a coup which ousted
the short-lived second republic.
Of the half a dozen juntas that
wielded power for all but four years from 1966 to 1999, his regime was the most
autocratic, despite not being as murderous as that of General Sani Abacha. He
whipped Nigerians in line with a national “War Against Indiscipline (WAI)”,
retroactively effected laws which carried the death sentence, instituted Decree
No 2 for detention without trial and Decree No 4, the most repressive press gag
law in the country’s history, purged the civil service and selectively
prosecuted civilian politicians, apparently targeting those from the southern
parts of the country with great vehemence.
When running for his first term
in office, four years ago, Buhari claimed to have become a “converted
democrat”. But obviously, “dictatorial
habits have proved hard to give up”. The habits of those who wield state
power is however hardly ever the essential element of the ensemble that
determines the nature of the regime they establish, continue or reconstitute.
The dynamics of the world they meet on one hand as well as the nature and
balance of class forces in struggle on the other, are usually of much more
importance.
Increasing impunity and
repression
Autocratic regimes have a
propensity for constricting freedom of expression. The mass media and
increasingly social media as well, face their ire. Since the 29 May
inauguration of its second term, the APC regime has taken its tyrannical
attacks on the mass media a notch or two higher.
It unleashed an avalanche of
repressive measures in the very first week of June. The National Broadcasting
Commission (NBC) a supposedly neutral regulator of the broadcast industry,
headed by Mr Modibbo Kawu a stalwart of the ruling party, suspended the license
of Daar Communications.
DAAR Communications, whose
African Independent Television and RayPower FM radio (the largest private
broadcast network) were both shutdown, is owned by Mr Raymond Dokpesi, a chieftain
of the Peoples Democratic Party. The reasons proffered were “inciting
broadcasts and media propaganda against the government” and failure
to meet financial obligations to the regulatory body.
That same week, Koffi Bartels, a
journalist with the Nigeria Info FM radio was beaten black and blue by police
officers. This was after he tried filming Special Anti-Robbery Squad police
officers beating a young man. The policemen also said he had
“been giving them problem for a long time” in his coverage of police activities
in Rivers state which had been a major, theatre of violent battle between APC
and PDP during the elections. The
US-based Committee to Protect Journalists called on the Nigerian authorities to
“investigate and hold accountable the police officers”, to no avail.
By July, Press Attack Tracker
(PAT) informed that not less than 36 Nigerian journalists
were attacked between January and July. 30 of these were during the general
elections in February and March. This was just a foretaste of what was to come,
making an earlier
wave of attacks on press freedom last year appear like child’s play as
captured in the October Endangered
Voices: Attack on Freedom of Expression in Nigeria report of
Amnesty International.
The government’s reign of impunity
has not been limited to suppression of press freedom. 11 members of the Shi’ite
minority Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), were killed on 28 July. A senior
police officer and young journalist were also felled by stray bullets of
security personnel. The members of IMN were protesting the continued incarceration
of their leader, Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzakky, in contempt of a 2016 court
ruling.
Zakzakky and one of his wives had
been detained since 2015. This was after at least 348 of
his followers, including one of his wives and three of his sons were killed
and secretly buried in mass graves, in what has been described an
operation of the Army with a “pre-determined mandate” to attack the Shi’ites
during one of their ritual processions. IMN members have mounted a series of
peaceful protests in Abuja, the country’s capital to demand the release of Zakzakky.
Dozens
of IMN members were brutally killed on 29 October 2018 during one of these
demonstrations.
After
the July 2019 killings, the IMN was banned. The government claimed that it
had only “outlawed the criminality of the group”, but members of IMN were not
been banned from practicing their religion. But 12
members of the group were again murdered by security personnel in a
nationwide crackdown on 10 September, while marking the Ashura an annual
Shi’ite mourning ritual.
An often under problematized aspect of the
emerging post-fascist regime is its political consolidation of powers across
the arms of government into one warhead of the executive. Friction between the
leaderships of the two national legislative houses and the executive was the
norm under earlier administrations, even when all sides were from the same
party, including Mr Buhari during his first term. But he now has allies as the
Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Just weeks before the elections, Buhari
removed Mr Walter Onnoghen as Chief Justice for corrupt practices in what was a
deft political masterstroke, especially as it appeared that Mr Onnoghen had surreptitious
affiliation with the PDP. The role of the Chief Justice in constituting
election tribunals, as well as the interpretation of laws, cannot be
overemphasized. Mr Ibrahim Tanko Mohammed was sworn-in as Chief Justice in
April. Despite verbal commitments to respect for the rule of law, his
(in)actions presents the picture of a chief judge who is not keen to rock the
boat.
It is probably within this
context that the government believes no
criticism can stop the enactment of a social
media gag bill, presently before the Senate, which has been described by a
former radical Senator, Mr Shehu Sani as a move towards
totalitarianism. An earlier attempt to pass such a law in 2016 failed under
the then embattled Senate President, Mr Bukola Saraki, due to mass mobilisation
against it.
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| #RevolutionNow activists demonstrating against the draconian bills at the National Assembly |
As if the intent to gag criticism
on social media were not enough, APC Senators also re-introduced
an anti-hate speech bill, in November. If passed, the death penalty could
be imposed on anyone found guilty of hate speech that incites the death of
another person. There is however widespread concern that the law could be used
to hound opposition forces.
Despite the Dutch courage of the
regime, inebriated by its seeming unalloyed potency, resistance has been alive.
These draconian bills, the regime presenting them and the system this regime
represents can be defeated through struggle, the embers of which were stoked on
5 August, and which continues to blaze in the face of the state’s oppressive
weight.
#RevolutionNow and the radical
left
On 5 August, the #RevolutionNow
campaign was flagged off by the Coalition for Revolution (CORE), with 5-core
demands: an economy for the masses, an effective and democratic end to
insecurity, an end to systemic corruption, immediate implementation of the
N30,000 minimum wage and free and qualitative education for all, received
massive support from working-class people and youth.
The regime tried its utmost best
to snuff life out of the campaign, even before it began. On
3 August, it arrested Omoyele Sowore, publisher of Sahara Reporters, the
leading online source of exposés on political corruption and impunity in
Nigeria. Mr Sowore, who is Chair of the African Action Congress (AAC) and was
the party’s presidential candidate during the general elections was central to
the formation of CORE.
The revolutionary coalition brings
together; Take It Back (the movement which gave birth to AAC) and a number of
radical and revolutionary left groups such as the Socialist Workers & Youth
League (SWL), Socialist Vanguard Tendency (SVT), Nigeria Resistance Movement
(NRM), Committee for the Defence of Human Rights as well as the Federation of
Informal Workers of Nigeria (FIWON) and the Alliance of Nigerian Students
Against Neoliberal Attacks (ANSA), the mass platform of students’ (including a
number of their unions) arisen as a
radical alternative to the bankrupt official structures of the National
Association of Nigerian Students (NANS).
And before dawn on 5 August
combined teams of the army, air force, special units of the police and
paramilitary forces took over the streets in all state capitals of the country.
Demonstrations had been planned for 23 out of the 36 states of the federation. Despite
this unprecedented show of coercive strength by the state, #RevolutionNow activists
organised protests in 14 of the states and 9 other cities across the world.
The nationwide action was however limited in most of the locations as the
protesters were constrained by having to circumvent the massive dragnet.
Their dexterous organising was
not sufficient to stave off a crackdown. Not less than 57 protesters, including
some journalists were arrested in 7 states. 32 of the peaceful demonstrators
were also brutalised, beaten and injured with one suffering a gunshot wound
when the security personnel shot at them in Lagos, the epicentre of action.
Attempts to quash #RevolutionNow
activities did not stop with the failure of the 5 August repressive offensive.
There was a standoff on 18 August as police cordoned off the venue of a
national symposium to discuss the current political situation. Once again,
the state failed to stop the movement. In yet another failed attempt to stop
further #RevolutionNow demonstrations, police
barricaded the offices of the CDHR and the Sahara Reporters studio/civic media
centre in the second week of September.
The movement represents a major
turning point of resistance, fanning
the embers of revolt. Apart from the trade unions with their ready-made
structures, no other social force has been able to mobilise nationwide protest
of any sort in the 21st century. And it took the explosion of mass
anger after the military junta of General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the “June
12” presidential elections for the pro-democracy movement led by the
radical and revolutionary left to rise up to such a stature in the mid-1990s.
The CORE-led movement has thus
far demonstrated its building of a national infrastructure necessary for prosecuting
radical struggle. It has also inspired mass awareness raising, without which
revolutionary class consciousness cannot be forged. For example, apart from
#RevolutionNow trending on social media for days on the eve of the flag off of
the campaign, on 5 August, more than 5 million Nigerians searched for “revolution”
on google.
The continued incarceration of
Omoyele Sowore and Olawale “Mandate” Bakare, a 22-year old leader of the TIB
arrested in the heat of the 5 August demonstrations, despite a release order
for their release has also elicited widespread condemnation. This increased
after a series of demonstrations by #RevolutionNow activists in front of the
offices of the secret police, the self-styled Department of State Services
(DSS).
When the #RevolutionNow
activists and other supporters #OccupyDSS offices demonstrations were
dispersed with live ammunition and pepper spray on 12 November, Professor Wole
Soyinka, the renowned Nobel Laurette saluted them and called
on civil society organisations to “come together” to fight the increasingly
authoritarian regime. The response of the radical and revolutionary left has
however not been as unambiguous as that of the liberal democratic professor.
In the wake of 5 August, with an
ahistoric logic of popular struggles, including in Nigeria, and an accompanying
contempt for the relative success of the movement’s first steps, the pervasive
tone was dismissive. These included “analysis” for want of a better word, which
considered the movement as nothing but “flippant
agitation” and denigrated the movement’s revolutionary intent by involving
liberals like Wole Soyinka whilst calling for a “left-centre coalition” on the
basis of “basic nationalism”, in the same breath.
And possibly well-intentioned
but nonetheless primarily flawed “preliminary
notes” which reduced #RevoutionNow to a supposedly amateurishly carried
out, ill-prepared spate of protests on 5
August and put it on the same scale as “mobilisation” carried out by probably
less than half a dozen members of some obscure “movement” with 400 copies of a
publication in some corners of Lagos in the mid-70s.
Some even went to the extent of
arguing that “Nigeria
needs a revolution – but it must be a socialist revolution!” as if the
socialist revolution comes readymade like an order on Amazon, as against being
a social revolution entailing several political revolutions,
through which working-class people not only build their strength onto victory
but learning from, shed themselves of the murk of ages!
A summary but apt response to
most of these described such talk by “a section of the exhausted left movement
that cannot organise itself will oppose anything that exposes its inertia and
lack of organisational work for change” as “talking trash”. Arising though,
from the dynamics of the moment is a realignment of radical and revolutionary
forces around CORE. These include groups and persons that might not fully agree
with the repertoire of its methods and strategy, but realise the historic role
it is playing, towards consummating intertwined developing revolutionary
pressures.
Conclusion
The near future is pregnant,
something has to give. Worsening living standards are sowing seeds of anger on
the soil of resistance, which #RevolutionNow is ploughing. The ignition point
for a revolutionary upheaval could be arrived at spontaneously, through the
deepening of economic mass strikes, as the working-class is roused in the
coming period.
After much prevarication, the
trade unions reached an agreement with government in October, on consequential
increments based on the miserly minimum wage of N30,000 passed into law in
April. However, the state governors
have made it clear that they are unlikely to respect this. Meanwhile, the
federal government has increased VAT by 50%, supposedly to fund payment of the
new minimum wage and consequential wages increment.
Rank and file demands will force
the trade union bureaucracy to take action in the states, for any meaningful
implementation of the wage rise to be won. With the genie of #RevolutionNow out
of the bottle, it is unlikely that the battles ahead of working-class people
will remain at the defensive economistic level or be easily called off as was
the case with the #OccupyNigeria
revolts of January 2012.
Geneva
Nov. 2019
* An abridged version of this article was first published as "Radical resistance to authoritarian democracy in Nigeria", in Amandla! Issue 67/68, pp: 38-40
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