Baba Aye's

The Bola Tinubu administration has been on the saddle for two years. How do you see the state of the nation in these two years? My point of departure in responding to that question would be to draw from Malcolm X. He said something to the effect that there are two nations in every nation. The nation of the exploited and oppressed on one hand and the nation of the exploiter and oppressed on the other. For the poor working masses in Nigeria, the last two years have been terrible. Life has become terribly worse, and mere survival a great challenge. The cost of living has shot through the roof. The take home pay of workers cannot take them home. The 2024 minimum wage is meaningless. It is merely nominal. In real terms it is a wage cut compared to the 2019 minimum wage. But for the super-rich. Tinubu has been a blessing. As Oxfam pointed out in its inequality report earlier this year, this class of Nigerians wealth tripled between 2023 when Tinubu came to power and last year. Their riches...

Scores of thousands of young people took to the streets across Nigeria in October 2020, to protest police brutality. Their primary demand was for government to end the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), an elite and particularly vicious unit of the Nigeria Police Force. This mass movement was thus defined as EndSARS. It was sparked when the video of a young man who was allegedly killed by SARS operatives in Ughelli, a small city in the Niger Delta region went viral on 3 rd October. There were over twenty-eight million tweets and retweets of the video and calls for protest within three days. In Ughelli and neighbouring towns there were immediate spontaneous actions by aggrieved youth. By 8 th October, hundreds of protesters set up camp in front of the Lagos State House of Assembly in Nigeria’s most populous city and its commercial hub as well as in the city centre of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory. Within a few days, these numbers had increased to thousands and demonstration...

The Coronavirus public health emergency became considered a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The pandemic has highlighted and worsened global health and social inequalities. Poor working-class people have been most affected in different parts of the world. By the beginning of February, there had been 106m recorded cases and at least 2.32m. The United States, India, Brazil, and Britain are the most affected countries. A second wave which started by the end of 2020 has been particularly debilitating with at least four variants which are more transmissible. Most political commentators expected developing countries, particularly those in Africa to be the most affected. This was because the public healthcare system is in shambles on the continent and poverty (with millions of people living closely together in slums) is so widespread. But for reasons which are not yet clear, this has luckily not been the case. But all the same there have been more than 3.5m reported cases and almost 90,000 d...

Introduction Brasil is a country steeped in contradictions historically and contemporaneously. It is the only Portuguese-speaking country in Latin America, but with the largest population in the region. Undoubtedly the economic giant of Latin America due to the size of its market and level of industrialization, yet it has the fifth highest level of inequality in the region. Being one of the ten largest economies in the world and along with Russia, India and China considered the leading newly industrializing nations in the world, and a middle income country; it is still more often than not categorized as a developing country due to a high prevalence of poverty (Edwards, 2001: 79). Having been the site of the first of military putsches that would lead to an era of Bureaucratic Authoritarian States in Latin America , Brasil today has a model constitution and is the only country in the region with a trade union’s Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) at the helm of the state. The worke...

Capitalism in crisis A working people’s perspective Part 1 The world economy has been shaken to its very foundations in the past few weeks and capitalism faces the beginnings of its worst nightmare since the Great Depression of 1929-38. There have been hues and cries from several quarters and working people in Nigeria and across the world grope for answers and the way forward. Baba Aye of the WPV/ANSA comments on this monumental crisis of capitalism from the Global Labour University in Kassel, in the first part of a series dedicated to furthering working people’s understanding of the issues as a contribution to finding the way forward. There are times really when 200 years would seem like 200 days; in terms of those two centuries impact on the movement of human history. And there are times like now, which people living them and generations to come will never forget; when 200 days seem like 200 years! The September slump of the world economy (more like a ...