Baba Aye's

A Critical Perspective on the Deepening of PPPs in Nigeria and Union Response by Baba Aye [1] Introduction The past decade has witnessed reforms in the health sector, at the heart of which has been a systematic ingraining of neoliberal values, methods and thrust by the government in the framework of the national health system. The trade unions have responded to this in several ways. There have been quite some successes, won through struggle and established with creative strategies and tactics. A number of challenges do however remain.  With a focus on the phenomenon of Public Private Partnership, this brief paper would attempt to: locate the situation in the health sector within the broader context of attacks on public services; identify critical elements of the state’s offensive on the soul of public healthcare delivery; presenting trade union responses, and; discussing the challenges and potentials before trade unions in the sector. Crises and the enthrone...

…as the “Lenin of Africa” dies at 86 [1] Prof Eskor Toyo, fondly called “the Lenin of Africa” by his close associates, died at 7.30pm on December 7, aged 86 years. He had been bedridden for over two years, after a series of strokes. Before ill health made it impossible for his powerful brain and limbs to work, he was one of the most brilliant and committed revolutionaries on the Nigerian Left. Named Asuquo Ita at birth in 1929, at Oron, within the present day Akwa Ibom, Eskor (a “guy name” for Asuquo) became an activist in his teens, inspired by the radical Zikist National Vanguard, in the 1940s. He became one of the first set of Marxists in the country by the late 1940s and mobilised solidarity for the families of coal miners killed at Iva Valley on November 18, 1949, on the platform of the National Emergency Committee constituted in the wake of the massacre. He was equally at the barricades during the 1950 strike of the Amalgamated Union of UAC African Workers’ ...