Baba Aye's

The living conditions of working-class people in Nigeria keep getting worse, while a handful of rich people keep getting richer. The situation has pushed us to the edge of existence. We cannot continue like this. The hardship we are facing is human made. It is the result of the policies that the government has put in place. Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared that “fuel subsidy is gone” the day he was sworn-in. Ever since then, fuel pump price, electricity tariffs, telecoms tariffs, prices of foodstuffs in the market and virtually of all commodities have all gone up. Our meagre salaries cannot buy anything substantial in the market. We struggle to send our children to school, and many have dropped out of school because parents can no longer afford the cost of tuition. Youth suicide is rising, driven by a spike in the number of students who die from suicide because neither they nor their parents can continue to bear the rising financial costs of their education. We are afraid to fall ill as we c...

The "June 12 struggle" was an interesting period in Nigeria's history. The story of the struggle goes beyond the election that was annulled and its custodian. And the story of the election and the roles different personages and organisations played in the high drama starts well before the six-year democratic revolution unfurled with the annulment.  I've written a bit about this important, somewhat tragic, somewhat farcical, but none the less definitive moment in Nigeria's history. One of the two articles one might be interested in looking up are " Nigeria: the six year revolution " which which was first published in 2008 in the Working People's Vanguard and again in 2015 in the Socialist Worker . The other is " The shadow of June 12 : June 12, the left and Nigeria's democratic revolution", which was published in the Republic in 2022 and which has been republished in its latest special print issue "Nigeria Imaginary", marking t...

Angry youths took over the streets in cities and towns across Nigeria in October, calling for disbandment of the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigeria Police Force, whose operatives were trained and supplied equipment by the British government from 2016 to 2020. The largely peaceful protests were drowned in blood on Tuesday 20th October. In the wake of the massacre, there were violent clashes with scores of police stations torched, several jailbreaks and a festival of ‘looting’. The restoration of law and order in the dying days of the month might however not translate into a restoration of the pre-EndSARS normality in the country. SARS was established in 1992. Its plainclothes operatives were meant to infiltrate robbery gangs to nip their operations in the bud. By the turn of the century they started apprehending online scammers as cybercrime became common.  Young men with tattoos or dreadlocks automatically became ‘419’ (online scam) suspects. Having an iPhon...