june 12 struggle for democracy

June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori

Femi Obayori

June 12 in Perspective[Five Critical Essays]

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Femi Obayori 1996

This edition is published byOBABOOKS Publisherse-mail: [email protected]

First Published 1996By Lumumba Memorial BookhouseP.O. Box 504, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria

Second edition, 2003

No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner

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Contents Page

Preface to first edition ………………………………..4

Preface to this edition…………………………………5

NADECO-CD Alliance: Vanguarding June 12……….6

Area Boys In June 12: Of Heroes, Villains And Scapegoats………………………………………23

Kongi’s March For Justice: Rebel Laureate………….43

On The NUPENG Strike……………………………..54

The 40-Hour Strike: A Consummate Expression Of Total Decay……………………………………….72

Postscript……………………………………………..98

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Preface to the First Edition

The June 12 in Perspective (Five Critical Essays) is a collection of essays which attempt to analyse the June 12 upheaval. Majorly materials for the purpose of self clarification and circulation among elements crucial to the problematic aspiration of the Nigerian peoples, the author deems this publication a plus to the much needed enlightenment and conscientisation of the interested public. This more so, perhaps, on account of the fact that much as the ideas expounded represent the author’s views, they equally reflect to a greater degree the viewpoint of a cross section of certain social classes and social groups.

If in places the reader finds the opinion expressed and manner of expression rather “vitriolic” , it is to the extent that the forces being op posed have not been less venomous in their onslaught on the people, more especially in the days the lines were written.

Nor is the author to be expected to camouflage his views behind certain “detached”, “objective”, or “academic” analysis. He dares declare that the June 12 Struggle, rather than being another occasional outburst, partly ideological and largely sentimental, remains in his view, a consummation of a people’s struggle for democracy at a stage in its development.

Finally, this pamphlet is dedicated to the urban and rural dispossessed and those who have laid down their lives that Nigeria, and indeed Africa, may yet witness a glorious rebirth in the age of new human values.

January, 1996

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Preface to this Edition

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NADECO-CD ALLIANCE: VANGUARDING JUNE 12

IEvery political vanguard organisation must continually make critical appraisal of its strategy and tactics and alliances it is objectively conditioned to enter in the process of the struggle. The Campaign for Democracy cannot be an exemption and, of course, has never pretended to be such.

On July 5, 1993, Campaign for Democracy pulled the wool from the eyes of self-defeating progressives, paper-tigerish radicals, as well as cynics and opportunists of both the Left and the Right by successfully mobilising the mass of our people for street protests over the annulment of the June 12 election. This feat was re-enacted in the following months in novel forms including sit-at-home protests and neighbourhood rallies due to the cold- blooded massacre of our people on the third day of the July event. It was the leadership provided by CD that sent Babangida sobbing out of Aso Rock in the dying days of August 1993, and later, the Interim National Government (ING) on the night of November 17, 1993. Thus far with the first phase of the June 12 Struggle. The emergence of Na tional Democratic Coalition, NADECO, and by its side, the Eastern Mandate Union, EMU, in the early days of May, 1994, ushered in (in concrete terms) the second phase of the June 12 Struggle. This ‘great beginning’ also marked the end of all illusory hopes of the half-hearted pro-June 12 bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeois, as well as the mass of our deprived people, compelled under confusion and the pain of extinction in a struggle whose main weapon stifles and strangulates its bearer to finally rest their fate in a hope for a change of heart by the Abacha Junta, a change which would lead to the handling over of power to the bearer of June 12 mandate.

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The role played by Eastern Mandate Union is now part of history. The EMU dramatised its mission by giving an ultimatum to the Junta to quit office and install the winner of the June 12 election in power. But the Mandate Union finally decreed itself out of relevance when in response to the Junta’s threats it conducted a furious retreat. This notwithstanding, a couple of mandators again made high-flown speeches reminiscent of the last kicks of a dying horse but simmered down shortly after. The rest of the mandators, home and abroad, scampered for cover, their feathered caps beneath their armpits. Thus far with the mandators and their mandate. But for now let us be assured that at another moment, and as may be opportune by fate, the mandators shall return to gather their scattered mandates. In time we trust. So it happened that NADECO became the undisputed vanguard of the second phase of the June 12 Struggle. And it was with NADECO that CD had to row in the same boat on the course of glory. NADECO captained the boat.

Let us recall that during the first phase of the June 12 Struggle, CD co-opted a host of platforms and interest groups into an alliance it was able to dominate by dint of its superior tactics and preponderant audacity. But when CD entered the second phase of the June 12 Struggle it did as a member of a coalition notwithstanding its status as a coalition of about 42 affiliates. It is important to note that right from the very first day CD’s rank-and-file became aware of ‘our’ role in NADECO only very few had any hope in the coalition. Although one often heard, informally, that CD was at the centre of NADECO, the rank-and-file had little confidence in an alliance led by ‘these NADECO people’.

The ‘NADECO people’s’ approach to mass struggle started coming to light when on May 22nd, 1994, the

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eve of the Constitutional Conference elections, only very few posters and leaflets appeared. It is now on record that while people, especially in the South West and the Edo home state of the NADECO stalwart and renowned nationalist Chief Anthony Enahoro, answered the NADECO call for a boycott, nothing serious was done about physical stoppage of elections. Living history as recorded in police statement pads, dungeon graffiti and court records would have it that most of those arrested for electoral offences on that day were CD activists, perhaps the NADECO people were more tactical and successfully avoided security agents by using esoteric power (?).

At the same time as NADECO openly rejected mass action it devoted the bulk of its flabby strength to exhuming the corpses of democratic structures butchered by the Abacha Junta in the wake of the November 17th sneak to power. It would appear that NADECO had predicated its eventual victory over the Junta on mere threats on pages of newspapers and its ability to make the corpses of the State and National Assemblies, like Zombies, walk our streets, like ghosts out of Hamlet striking fear into their foes who dis turb their sleep by holding their wards, the people, captive. They wanted to make these structures, in their shredded shrouds, sprout to nature once more! But as it turned out, the ghosts and sabre-rattling of NADECO notwithstanding, Nigerians soon realised that May 30 wasn’t quite dif ferent from any other day after all.

And have we not seen how these walking corpses have faded before the slashing sabre of the Khalifa like the mist before the rising sun and how the captains have been dismounted from their cockroach horses and shoved into the dampening recesses of dungeons, albeit, bourgeois, civilised fashion. And

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the last of it was yet to be seen. There is much more behind six than seven, say the Yorubas. Now NADECO was going to release its programmes piecemeal like jokers in a casino. Meanwhile, the people must wait for the Big Bang. For when the bearer of the June 12 mandate would finally announce his government, the mere proclamation was bound to send the Junta fleeing into the barracks where it belonged. These events loomed and hovered like a ‘haunting’ Messiah over the consciousness and being of our people than their real existence.

The magical pronouncement came after a couple of hide-and-seeks theatrics and left in its wake a couple of no less monumental appearances and disappearances. The scenario was so clear that no activist was to be left in doubt as to what was left of NADECO.

But more importantly, no event has ever provided us with a better opportunity of understanding our ruling class and politicians as well as our people than the events of the last one year, if only we bother to take a keener look. What is the character of this NADECO? What is its understanding of the June 12 Struggle? And did CD go wrong in allying with NADECO?

To use the words of a foreign electronic outfit, most members of NADECO are “respected members of their various communities,” and not one or two but quite a number of them are known to be “basically honest politicians.” But need not somebody tell them that the issue went beyond communal respect and basic honesty; that the essential nature of these people and their position within the political economy of Nigeria made them the wrong specimens for the cap they pretended to wear. NADECO chief tains, no matter how we look at it, are members of the discredited ‘political class’, if indeed class be the appropriate definition of this motley aggregate of self-seekers and hustlers. And indeed, has

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their history of hustling and political opportunism, nay, self-delusion, not bloated our voluminous book of inglorious history? Is the present generation not a living witness to how the political class endorsed the subversion of the Politburo Report because of its socialist contents? Did not the political class hail to the high heavens the implementation of SAP? What about their connivance, open and covert, in the banning of mass organisations, including the NLC, ASUU, and the NANS in the blooming days of IBB’S fascism? And what is more, did not the political class North, South, West and East, united by opportunism and settlement, allow the dissolution of political associations in 1989? What indeed stopped them from seeing in the first place that they ceased to be the determinants of their fates the very day they allowed these things to happen unchallenged? And what is more, did they not, in the pursuance of their opportunistic egunje line, start to scramble to ‘belong somewhere’ the moment the Junta burst two parties into the open from the blues? And are we not also living witnesses to the scheming, infamy, vagabondage and vagrancy that streaked our shredded history book in the last three years of transition before the June 12 bubble burst?

As in Germany in 1919-33, Bulgaria 1919-23, Spain in the 30s and countless other places, bourgeois democratic illusions and liberal inconsistencies have always oiled the wheels of ascending fascism. The movement to full-blown fascism is always blessed with copious donations of opportunism and vacillation on the part of the so-called political classes.

This holds true for our political class, whether respected, honest or dishonest. But at no other time has this manifested more vividly than the short-lived existence of the legislative assemblies whose corpses, as earlier

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mentioned, and tried to walk our streets once again. Imagine an elected legislative arm of government bearing the peoples’ mandate (or rather with people’ mandate forced into its hands) being sworn in by an unelected Junta! This National Assembly, could not even deliberate on matters to which it was restricted - monuments, antiquities, motor parks. For six months it deliberated on matters of its members’ welfare and salaries. And the Junta made sure the ‘new breed’ legislators got enough NICON-NOGA HILTON spoiling treatment both bodily and spiritually as to make them forget that they were indeed supposed to be legislators, deliberating on the interests of our people and accountable to their various constituencies. And have we not seen how these assemblies-upper and lower houses alike- allowed themselves to be turned into a Babangida’s weapon for stifling the June 12 Struggle? Did some NADECO chieftains not aid and abet the imposition of an Interim National Government [ING] by 60 to 30 overwhelming majority votes in the Senate? And what is more, need not somebody ask why the legislators refused to resist the dissolution of the Assembly but waited only to regal us with some voodoo spectacle.

Enough of this nauseating political scenario. Let us now take a look at the kind of economic arrangement that has made it the lot of our people to be ruled by such an aggregate of disparate lot.

There is no way the roll call of developing countries is to be made without Nigeria bursting forth to seek for itself a first grade in the rank, nor is Nigeria, though a neo-colony, to be passed off with a mere wave of the hand in the gathering of capitalist countries. But it remains to be seen how a capitalist country can stand without capitalists.

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The Nigerian capitalist manages capital without employing productive labour just as he has ran a nation in more than three and a half decades without the spirit of nationalism. The Nigerian capitalist inherited an agriculturally-based productive economy from the colonial master which he soon turned to an oil money-gulping, usurious, contract-based economy in which the nepotic habits and psychology of ‘man-know-man’ and ‘kick-backs’ have become official state policy. Eight years of Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was later to introduce into this pathetic national economic scenario the now hegemonic culture of settlement and money-as-a Godhead. Indeed, whenever the history of this generation is to be reappraised by the future generation (if we assumed that the present curse upon us would have passed by then) one wonders what an uphill task it would be understanding that over 100 million full-blooded Nigerians allowed their homeland to be maimed, sucked and raped in eight inglorious years of ascendancy of military dictatorship. Need we quickly step in to save this yet-unborn generation this agony by pointing out that sections of this 100 million found themselves places of dishonour either as key actors or as back-ups in this infamous drama of nation-breaking.

He who wants to accuse Ibrahim Babangida of leaving without having taught our people any lesson should look at our emerging middle class. Examine the banking sector and see the level of ramification and upliftment” it witnessed in the past half a decade! Look at what fat profits they declare. Or take for instance the Labour Movement and check out how, in step with the worsening of the conditions of the working class, the conditions of their leaders in the trade union movement have continued to improve courtesy of ‘new thinking’ and ‘scientific trade unionism’. And what about the car ‘loans’ given to army

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and police officers in the dying days of the Ibrahim Babangida Junta. It was also to the glory of the Junta that at no other time, under no other regime, did the contractual sys tem fatten the pocket of the ‘capitalists’ than the one under scrutiny.

The skeletons and carcasses of abandoned projects that strewn our scotched landscapes bear testimony to the wanton fiducial lawlessness of the era under examination, just as the large number of the members of the middle class that committed monumental landed properties to the care of God leaves nobody in doubt as to the resting places of funds flying out of government coffer. All this courtesy of an endlessly black gold.

It should be clear by now that we are grappling with a class whose outlook is limited by crass parasitism. Concretely speaking, it has not been able to define itself as a capitalist class in the classical sense of it. It is wholly unable to engage labour for the production of surplus wealth for its accumulation, but has defined itself by a mode of appropriation which amounts to stealing from the public treasury through inflated contracts, over-invoicing and di rect day-light robbery. It also fronts for foreign multi-national finance and commercial interests for which it has earned the well deserved name of ‘agbero bourgeoisie’ after the motor park touts. Significantly, its politics is just a reflection of the parasitism, opportunism and long-throatism that mark its mode of economic existence.

II

Having x-rayed the political and economic essence of the political class, inclusive of their NADECO allies, it is important too to analyse June 12 as an object of the strategic coincidence

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between their interests and popular interests. As has been reiterated over and over again by countless Nigerians, some of who have never bothered to attempt a profound analysis of the struggle we are into, the struggle for the actualisation of the June 12 mandate is not a struggle for Abiola, nor is it a struggle of the Yorubas. June 12 is the culmination of a whole lot of events bordering on the very existence of the geographical entity known as Nigeria. The June 12 victory symbolises on the one hand the blowing of the final whistle for the oligarchy to quit the pitch.

The June 12 election and its annulment as well as subsequent scheming cannot be separated from the events of the 60s viz:, the Western Nigeria Riots, the Nzeogwu-led coup, the anti-Igbo pogrom and the 30 months officially sanctioned pogrom called the Civil War. Nor can the truth of it all allow us to carve a gulf between the 1914 amalgamation and June 12. We should also not lose sight of those sad realities that lumped the fate of a people whose leaders moved the motion for independence in 1956 with the fate of another who resolved against independence in 1957.

To understand June 12 properly, we must also be able to fit in its proper place the pioneering effort of Governor Yohanna Madaki. His unapologetic removal of a powerful vassal of the Caliphate like the Emir of Muri preceded the election of non-Hausa-Fulani majority into local councils among those hitherto cowed people of the Mambila range.

The religious/ethnic riots that spattered the historical landscapes of the Middle Belt and South of the North in the 80s and early 90s are but part of the real foundation upon which the June 12 victory was built. In citing the history of June 12, chroniclers must also always define a place for the April

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22 Movement of Major Gwazor Okar and its agenda of self-determination notwithstanding its tactical flaws.

The June 12 Struggle in its essence, therefore, represents the consummation of the people’s political consciousness, an active contest for political power by the politically conscious and mature section of the coun try opposed to the hegemonic cabal. May God help us! (Power no be breakfast bread).

From the economic angle, the ordinary man in the street, maimed, sucked and animalised in seven years of IBB’s SAP programme, could see salvation in god image of the great philanthropist and humanist multi-millionaire, Chief M. K. O. Abiola. And did not Abiola Milk and Rice begin to appear in the market square even before his resounding victory. To the common man be he Hausa or Ibo, Christian or Muslim, Abiola was simply a messiah. On June 12, he felt he must claim his freedom by thumb-printing the stallion, Abiola’s party’s symbol. And once the Junta made bold its intention to annul the people’s decision without scruples the quest for salvation became a revolutionary quest. Hence the June 12 Struggle embodies the elements of self-determination and economic empowerment, in other words, a nationalist as well as economic struggle.

The southern section of our political class, nurtured in the art of whipping up ethnic and tribal sentiments whenever it felt marginalised in the game of treasury-looting, saw in the struggle another opportunity to settle account with its northern allies. This was after it had become clear that the oppressed people, especially in the South West, would challenge the Oligarchy, in spite of their elites.

Sadly, even this decision they could not arrive at in good time. To most of them the crumbs from the Oligarchy’s table

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represented a bird in hand, which was worth more than the prospects of equal access to power. And so it was that most of them continued to vacillate and play hide-and-seek until the midnight of November 17, 1993 when Abacha stuffed horse shit-soiled hay into their ever-open mouths. Then it dawned on them that there was the need to fight. That was really true-to-type in the sense that they always ran to their “people” each time they got their noses bloodied in the tempestuous terrain of booty sharing by their more advantaged Hausa-Fulani brothers. Even at that, they always harbour an overwhelming suspicion of the people since they are conscious of the strength that inheres in their unity and resolve. However, and this is extremely significant, they try to lead the people using tactics that would minimise their accumulation of political experience. This is because the Southern elites understand too well that, they could also be fair game when the time comes for the masses to settle scores with the elites on a multi-national scale.

Thus, the elites would rather have placards, petitions and the likes rather than full-scale resort to political street-craft.

It is therefore understandable why the political class, in pursuit of the actualisation of the June 12 mandate, would rather prefer a carnival of market women to a cannibalistic charge of an angry youthful mob. To the political class, a few sporadic outbursts here and there, a few acts of thug gery and banditry which they can effectively control and use to bargain at negotiation table, is more appealing than a self-moving, dynamic action of the people against the status quo. NADECO could not put its members out in the streets to lead mass actions. The NADECO to which we belonged belittled propaganda work. In short, it would appear that, within it, we never could reach beyond our arm’s length politically. As such initia tive eluded us.

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If July 5 to November 17, 1993 represented an authentic people’s movement slowed down by the people’s representatives, May 30th till date represents a movement of the people’s representatives facilitated and accelerated by the people to the dismay of the representatives. Oh Lord, protect us from an accursed generation!

Ordinarily, the people would appear so vague, fluid and innocent just as they appear like saintly-pawns in the hands of the evil politicians they elected. But can the people be separated from the politicians they elected, or rather can the people be isolated from and set against the society that produce them or rather the society they produce as the case may be? And would there then have been a society at all in the first place without the masses? Indeed, must the people not admit the responsibility for the deeds of their leaders or rulers as the case may be once they are yet to realise their oppression (that is when they are yet to be oppressed) or when they have realised such but have not purged themselves of all hindrances, both bodily and spiritually, as to enable them face the oppressor in a pitched battle? Indeed, the leader must be spared the burden of bearing both his own blame and that of the led no matter how inconsequential in weight the latter may seem.

Caught in the very web of its own selfishness, and puerile political speculations, the Nigerian mind, denuded of even the semblance of contemplative strength, rose up to an imaginary American intervention on the eve of the struggle to actualise the June 12 mandate. Churches, mosques and, indeed, tagless seers saw on the horizon of apparition the colossal image of the American Marine bearing at the muzzle of his flaming bazooka the flower of freedom, a farcical antidote to fascism. Only that the same Spirit failed to reveal to this seers what they would otherwise have read in living history: that the Marines, like

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heaven, only help those who help themselves and in the interests of the United States.

But what do we expect of such a people? What do we expect of a people whose whole social essence has been destroyed (or rather a people that allowed their social essence to be destroyed) in eight years of uninterrupted, unabated ascendancy of individualism as a state religion and settlement as social ethic? In eight years! Eight years of deprived humanity, eight years of raped humanity, eight years in which all the colourful legacies, no doubt of diluted essence, of past ages were torn down and replaced with gilded death-robes and gowns of torn. The Babangida years saw the reduction of our people to the whims of one man-Ibrahim Babangida. For once a people and a man stood face to face in opposition and yet, with their fates inseparably bound. Never in history has the success of a people been so dependent on the failure of a man; never in history has the success of a man been so dependent on the naivety and stupidity of a people.

III

Thank God July 5th came to pass and the hope in our people rekindled! Thank God our people separated their fate from the fate of a scoundrel. Thank God we have our people, we have the CD and now we have NADECO, all one and the same - the product of a common existence. We must return to where we started out. As belated an effort as it may appear, and no matter how inconsistent its members have been, NADECO represents a gigantic leap forward in the expansion of our democratic space.

For the first time in the course of our disgustingly interrupted, bloodstained history, the ‘political class’ has come forward to challenge the military

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under a banner not sanctioned by the Constitution or by decree. For the first time our bourgeoisie come out to defend the people’s mandate illegally. For the first time, sections of our political class are organising and learning the methods of struggle their colleagues in other parts of the world like Latin America and Europe take as a matter of right and responsibility.

It could also mark the beginning of the emergence of bourgeois statesmen who would insist on bourgeois liberal rights and structures as becoming of a true capitalist class.

It is also significant that this is happening at a time when the oil dependent political economy, the basis of the squandermania of the ruling elites, is in troubled waters. Without oil money (or similar revenue) of Nigeria’s scale, no nation can sustain a mammoth class of retainer capital ists the kind we now have in Nigeria. The demand for autonomy, self-determination or independence as the case may be by the oil-producing communities is a demand for an end to the personalisation of public wealth. In fact, it is a demand for the abolition of that class whose existence has been based on oil money.

And since the current political scaffolding called Nigeria is based on oil, the re-configuration of the balance of nationalities could well mean that oil- money would no longer be preyed upon by the Oligarchy and its junior partners supported by a huge state machine.

The implication then is that those politicians who are likely to dominate the affairs of this country or what would become of it in the not-too-far future would be those who have purged themselves of the leprous plague of parasitism and contract-greed. For those few elements within NADECO who have resisted Abacha’s baiting with oil-money and contracts, the hardship they now experience may as

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well be a dress rehearsal of what would indeed be the rule of the future - a future in which every capitalist would have to prove his worth as a capitalist only by his ability to organise labour for the purpose of wealth creation rather than dipping fingers into public purse.

For the majority yet to see the difference between NADECO and the SDP or say UPN/NPN we only hope that the ridicule they would receive would not dwarf the type of demise that would befall them a hundred folds. And so far as the spirit that brought NADECO into existence is concerned, they are aliens, or rather, mere fellow travellers. The sooner they are yanked off as the journey progresses the better. In essence, the fewer the better, a la V. I. Lenin. Initially the base of the struggle broadened in size, now the broadened base must acquire a new quality.

It would have become clear by now that there is nothing fundamentally wrong in working with NADECO, given its support for the actualisation of the June 12 mandate.

What needs to be tidied up, and was never properly done, was the nature of the alliance. On the other hand, we have an already existing umbrella organisation or a coalition based on the programme of the restoration of democracy via a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) and the expulsion of military from power; that was CD which was tested in action, the problematic is precisely the subsuming of the CD into another coalition which was yet to stand the test of real, practical struggle. That was problem number one.

Secondly, there is also the problem that the exact role of the CD within the Coalition was not clear outside some vague, verbose designations and heart-soothing pronouncements.

By committing these two initial errors, CD authomatically stripped itself of playing the role of the tutor of

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NADECO, of infusing it with the drive and dynamism necessary to neutralise and nullify the vacillations and inconsistencies of the other elements within the coalition.

Notwithstanding the initial oversights, it remains the duty of CD to lure and draw trusted elements within the coalition directly and openly against the regime, making them share responsibilities for the consequences of those actions. But CD must concentrate its effort primarily on strengthening its own structures for an independent programme for the actualisation of the June 12 mandate within the limits of its own human and material resources while maintaining its position within NADECO. The first step towards this has already been taken.

********An objective analysis of NADECO’s vanguard role or CD’s involvement in NADECO cannot be complete without a look at a couple of events similar in their appearances and representing links in the chain of events before us.

Whenever our activists criticise the half-heartedness of NADECO’s leadership and the consequent failure of some of their actions or when seeming lack of success of our actions are seen as a reflection of the incorrectness of our involvement in NADECO, it is of ten forgotten that the history of failure on our part has not always been the history of alliance with NADECO.

It remains to be seen how a link is to be drawn between our failure to successfully mobilise the masses to stay at home on May 9th, 1994 and our involvement in NADECO. This is without prejudice to the claim by CD’s Chairman Dr. Beko Ransom Kuti and active cadres generally, includ ing yours truly, that we were satisfied with the outcome of May 9.

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There was also the January 2, 1993 ultimatum CD issued to IBB to vacate office which it could not venture to follow up with any concrete action not just because we lacked the courage but also because our courage carried us too far ahead of the masses. January 2 was a reflection of our alienation from the unprepared masses at a certain point in their struggle against fascism. But there was no NADECO then.

Perhaps the problem basically was trying to work according to some schematic design whether or not such fitted into the objectively existing situa tion. The mammoth street protests of July 5 and 6 cannot always be re-enacted nor could they always be standards to measure CD’s popularity with the masses. Just as August 12, 13 and 14 were a novel advancement over the shortcoming of the nonetheless more attractive and more inspiring deeds of July 5, 6, and 7, so must we at every point in time, be able to introduce new and decisive methods to the struggle.

It is in this sense alone that one can begin to understand Dr. Ransome Kuti, the CD Chairman better when he said CD was satisfied with the outcome of May 9 Sit-At-Home. The refusal of the people to stay at home on May 9 was not deemed by CD to be a reflection of dwindling support for its agenda unlike ‘The Champion’ (May 10, 1994) would want us to have it. The posture of the people was a demand for more meaningful, more result-oriented method of struggle. It was an expression on the part of the people that the only condition they could lose what they have is the possibility of getting what they want either in the present or in the future.

Once more, the current struggle is strictly for power. It is a revolutionary struggle. What it means is that the novelties we begin to introduce into the struggle must not be those that would drag us away from the path of

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collision with the state machinery. The people and the people’s power must come in collision with the ruling order at a certain point in time. But the question that remains to be answered is whether we have the wherewithal as an organisation to do this or not. I have my doubts. Meanwhile the struggle continues. It must continue on CD platform and on NADECO platform. Everybody involved in the struggle against fascism and against 30 years of oligarchic domination, no matter his disagreement with others and his love for his own method, must have a platform from which to operate and must be allowed to operate. New platforms are going to emerge and new alliances forged, but the people’s real movement towards progress and the future remains one big social movement without a tag. This movement, I think, is the most important. And surely, it has passed its first infantile test, now it must go through the ritual of manhood. 15-20 July, 1994. Lagos, Nigeria.AREA BOYS IN JUNE 12: OF HEROES, VILLAINS AND

SCAPEGOATS

IThe June 12 Struggle can hardly be fully appreciated and chronicled without taking cognisance of the special contribution of the Area Boys community in Lagos and their equivalent all over the South West. Of all the classes and social groups that jumped into the June 12 bandwagon, only the Area Boys played their expected role most consistently; only the Area Boys needed the most minimal mobilisational impulse for the most far-reaching effect. This is true of the June 12 Struggle as for all popular protests for a reform of the existing order, or for the pulling to pieces of the existing order. They lurk in the shadow, bidding their time, waiting for such moment as that society that scorns them puts forward a demand for scorn upon

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itself but by its civility, its advanced culture, could not generate enough faith to do so, to come out and save the society from its self-afflicted dilemma. At every opportune moment the Area Boys come out of their dark alleys to loot by rage and fire, to impress their stamp on our national psyche. June 12 was one such opportunity, an ample one.

It would therefore be doing a great service to ourselves by, once and for all, seizing this opportunity to investigate and understand the Area Boys phenomenon. It is essential to go a little bit beyond the chagrin and hatred of the middle class for this ‘non-class’ to the arena of concrete deciphering and proper definition of the social relation and the psychology that always put the society at the mercy of this lot at the moment of every social upheaval. Their history dates before June 12. The beginning is where we must begin.

On May 13, 1992 when the Olusegun Maiyegun-led NANS called a general strike and mass action against the harsh economic realities of the IBB days occasioned by the Structural Adjustment Programme [SAP], which intensified earlier in March, 1992 as a result of the deregulation of the economy, nobody was in doubt as to whether or not the police would drench the popular movement in blood. What indeed caught many off balance was the manner of justification of the killings and the middle class support it generated.

The protest, flagged off at the University of Lagos, Akoka campus, had been relatively peaceful after the initial verbal confrontation between the students and the police at the University gate. At first, it was an all-student-affair. Hoodlums, street urchins, vandals, vagabonds, in short, all that could pass for Area Boys in the eyes of a typical student in his state of elevated ignorance were actively prevented by the police, ably aided by the students, from joining the protest. But

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by the time the protest got to the “Areas” controlled by the “Boys” typified by such landmarks as underbridge shelters, cul-de-sacs, dark alleys and ‘fox holes’, the ‘civilised’ students and the police had lost control. Then the trigger was activated and by evening, not less than six corpses had been deposited in various morgues in Lagos and many more people were receiving treatment for varying degrees of gunshot wounds. The police had no cause to deny the killings. Those shot were said to be ‘Area Boys’ seizing the opportunity of the protest to loot. And to further drive home its point the police PRO spent lengthy media time and resources trying to convince himself and the of the world about how peaceful and civilised the protest was before the ‘Area Boys’ took over. But police claims reeked heavily of falsehood in the light of the reality on the ground. For it remains to be seen how the schoolboy who was shot at Ojuelegba could have passed for an Area Boy in his school uniform and with the very conspicuous satchel, which he slouched with youthful aplomb. One prime-time lie of a thousand police PROs could also not have convinced anybody that the banker whose entrails spilled out of his well-tailored suit was a ‘hoodlum’. It would appear that the Area Boys propaganda has become in the hands of the police an omnibus excuse for their homicidal exuberance - a kind of ‘justifiable homicide’-ala Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).

In 1989, the drenching in blood of the Anti-SAP Protest was also justified by the police, though without any profound effort, through the claim that they were restoring order and putting an end to the free looting being carried out by hoodlums who had taken over the protest. The question that remains to be answered, however, is whether or not hijacked by Area Boys or by some other species of marginal people, it can be

25


possible in our situation to pull off a really peaceful protest? The answer to this question is definitely to be sought in the objectively determined social psychology of the various classes, sub-classes, non-classes and ‘marginadoes’ with which our society is blessed and among whom you can’t but count first the Area Boys and their allies.

On the eve of the July 5 event, what troubled every radical mind the most, apart from the inevitable police interference, was the fear of free-looting and area boys’ hijack of the popular protest. However, on July 5, what shocked the radical mind more than any other thing, having recovered from the spell of seeing the ‘whole of Lagos’ on the streets, was the near-ab sence of looting and the cooperation given the protesters by Area Boys and hoodlums of whatever shade. July 6 was later to shake the radical mind out of its earlier pleasant shock when it witnessed free looting by hoodlums. Once more that gave Abacha a cheap (but needless to say, unnecessary) excuse for unleashing fascist troops on the South West to ‘maintain law and order’.

Although it is clear from all indications that the Area Boys mean no other intention when they join a popular protest save the looting and robbing of the society by rage, it is a matter of opinion whether or not this species of marginals actually contribute to or detract from the people’s struggle. Before going further as to what special role was played by Area Boys in the June 12 struggle, it is important to quickly put our understanding in correct perspective as to the kind of conditions of existence and social psy chology that inform the kind of niche this tribe of marginals has created for itself in our popular struggles.

II

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They are merry, gay and deep-witted; the neighbourhood belongs to them, they belong to the neighbourhood-every nook and cranny, every inch of the neighbourhood they know like the back of their palm. They call themselves ‘Omo Onile’ son of the soil, child of the landlord. Here they were born; here they were bred. They have drunk of its sweet-sad water and have swum in its turbulent sea; they are the Area Boys.

They are half-educated, unemployed or semi-employed young men; those who for one reason or the other, had to drop out school, those who got tired of school routines and discipline, those who once had a trade but could not mobilise enough resources to acquire their instruments of trade or those who suddenly got tired of hanging out for the trickling income of their trade, just all sorts of young men who have problem conforming with the socially acceptable means of earning income.

Mostly drug (commonly ganja) addicts, they could be very quick with their knives and broken bottles and are also flippy-fingered. The communities are training schools for pickpockets, known in ghetto and prison slang as ‘gold fingers’. Apart from petty thievery and ‘toll’ (owo ita) collection from traders and consumers in the area market via half-cajole, half-harassment and clowning, when pressed, they also make money on the side by producing fake documents -from tax receipts to passport and visas-that is, by the big time ones among them.

Their taste too is a thing to be envied by any hardworking graduate. Making upward of between #300 [$10] and #1,000 [$33] daily they see themselves as Yankees who by one stroke of divine ill luck were mistakenly born in Nigeria. To them Ame (America) is that certainly unattainable paradise on earth.

But for all this, they are merely tolerated by a helpless society, they are despised by the society and they know it. They

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also have their own sober moments. Such moments-days, weeks, months, and for those unlucky ones, years that they spend behind bars (for in and out of jail is part of their way of life) constitute their periods of sober reflection and University for tutoring on the epistemology of surviving the outside world, where not only your muscle and luck count but, above all, your wit and meanness of mind.

Although society, which often makes no distinction between them and armed robbers, despises them, its members shamelessly turn to Area Boys’ Capones anytime the law has to be bent or scores settled out of court, Sicilian fashion. Presumably, the Area Boys are conscious of the opportunism which sometimes inform society’s relationship with them. As such, at opportune moments, they entertain no qualms in getting back at it by open expropriation of social wealth, ignoring their usual methods of cajolery. From time to time, as occasion demands, the god of theft must be given a free reign.

But this they cannot do on their own. They have scores to settle with the society but can neither initiate the process nor go into it as a collec tive. They, therefore, bid their time like the vulture with their ears on the ground and their cannabis-sharpened eyes trained on all, waiting for a socially acceptable, organised group to seek redress. It is their God-appointed duty to turn such a process into a riot, an opportunity for free looting. Although they need redress most, they lack a clearly defined economic base and place in the productive and distributive process for such. What unites them is exactly the same thing that separates them, namely, the tendency to survive odds all alone as an individual in a hostile environment.

This individualistic survivalism common to all of them is exactly what divides them. And that is why their rebellious aspiration can only find expression when another

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organised collective settles scores, albeit civilised-fashion, with the status quo . At such moment, they impress their stamp on the popular movement and, thus, invite the police to shoot it down armed with ample excuse. But let no one be deceived that the police harbour any serious disdain for the Area Boys. The boys serve them in a double sense, one as scapegoats whenever there is a pressing need for public relations job to be done and also whenever they themselves are in trouble and require the technical know-how of the underworld. They raid the Boys whenever they are broke and need some ‘relief package’ (it is easier for the Boys to get in and out of police trouble than for water to pass through a wicker fish net whenever there is no need for PR job on the part of the police and the Boys are ready to settle). In moment they also blackmail some of the Boys into doing informant job for them, for the Boys know more than anybody else how things move and their final destination.

Also, as individuals every police man must know when and how to see the boys when he has to do the ‘illegal’ in the area i.e. say procure a few wraps of weeds or find consumers for certain ‘contrabands’!

All these are the things that strengthen the Boys in peace time and make it possible for them to continue to live off the society by cajolery, trickery, harassment and open extortion with minimal police interference, except when some particularly ‘troublesome’ military governor who knows not the logic of the area comes to the fore to perform, only for a while though, the pitiable dance of the novice-in- town or on the eve of some events of global significance such as an impending FIFA visitation.

Just like the police, the politicians also know, use and pay the Boys. Woe betides the politician who comes to the area to campaign without first and foremost seeing the Boys. For the

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Boys have the capacity to spoil the show if not properly settled. There is also the highest bidder syndrome. The politicians, in settling scores among themselves, also have to see and settle the Boys. For the Boys, thuggery is a well-mastered art which they prosecute to the degree of efficiency demanded.

We have now seen how our species of marginals, lumpen-proletariat, have made themselves indispensable to our rotten society, how the gentleman trying to get around the law needs to see them, how the forget needs to see them, from time to time, how the police, either for good or for bad, have to pay homage and how the politicians, whose quickest power of speech is the money, equally settle the boys to get things done, and over and above all how in moment of social upheaval they come to the scene and impress their indelible stamp on the social movement on behalf of the popular mass, for the benefit of the popular mass and at the same time at a great price for the popular mass. We must go back to the specifics of June 12 Circus in which this category of circus kings performed.

III

July 5 did not only shake the minds of the radicals but also those of the Area Boys. So spell-bound was this tribe of traditional looters that some of them actually participated in crowd control and in cases, actually helped in ensuring a successful ignition of the action, even under the watchful eyes of the arms-of-the-law. Others, more respected than the rest, having demonstrated their bullying power in many machete-wielding and charm-throwing as well as incantation-chanting duels in the past, automatically became de facto kommandos of processions to the residence of the president-elect. And it must be said on this day that the democratic forces found the raw, albeit weed/charm-induced, courage of these

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lumpen elements most useful in overwhelming and frustrating police resistance as well as holding those few Area Boys who would not show some understanding in check. Though it must be pointed out too that this surprising attitude of the Area Boys bosses must have been informed by some other hidden agenda of higher stakes. Citing one or two instances of the on ground situation would tell the reader more.

At about 8.20 a. m on Monday, July 5, 1993, a group of youths charged with the responsibility of mobilising and leading a contingent of demonstrators to the Ikeja residence of the president-elect had arrived at Agege Motor Road, Mushin only to be confronted by armed policemen stationed at bus stops and by street lamp posts. There was no doubt that the people were ready to move, as they hung from balconies and windows expectantly without attempting to go to work. Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th had been spent doing house-to-house agitation, leafleteering and pasting posters, so lack of awareness about the intention was completely out of the issue. But here, the people, there the police, between them the leaders, prowling in their soft soles, jeans and khaki or T-shirts. The latter had students written all over them so to say. Time was running out. Then somebody came up with the idea of talking to the Boys. It wasn’t difficult getting to them - they were known and had their bases. After some cross examinations - asking to see the student’s ID card or at least a ‘proof’, questions about knowledge of the terrain, the day’s objective and the like, they declared with enthusiasm that, indeed, they had all the while been waiting for the students to come and lead the ‘action’ having seen the leaflets during the weekend. Then they got down to drawing the battle plan. What a weird thing it was! Burn a couple of Danfo buses on the road; fire a couple of shops! -that was action! And it had to take some painstaking effort explaining the objective of the

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day once more to the Boys before they finally agreed to shelve the ‘original plan’. But all the same tyre was needed for the ‘action’. It meant some token amount for petrol, which they got promptly. Tyres, petrol, petrol and more petrol - for the tyres were wet (it rained the previous day) a couple of teargas canisters and gunshots materialised and the people flooded the street. An attempt was made by the students’ leader to address them, but the people swarmed him, they swarmed the police and the police retreated - the movement had commenced.

All the way to Ikeja, the student leaders kept in close contact with the Area Boys’ bosses, always reminding them of the day’s objective and getting them to deal with those boys who would not abide by this objective in the traditional way - they were usually bullied and dispossessed of their loots which in most cases were not fully returned to their owners. These were mostly wristwatches, trinkets and wallets of passersby defying the strike, some of who took to their heels after being waylaid. The unreturned loot apparently belonged to the bosses who, alongside this, enjoyed every bit of the forced march puffing ganja - you could not stop them after all.

Having gotten to the destination and listened to what ‘Baba’ had to say, the bosses started trying to ‘identify and organise’ their respective groups. They definitely had hoped to get something from Baba, as usual, not realising that the issue at hand went beyond the traditional politician-Area Boys’ ‘egunje’ connection - they were most disappointed.

But on July 6, they started a looting spree, and by noon of the same day, the wanton killing had commenced. By the evening, Abacha officially backed up the killings and sent out more troops on the morning of 7th to complete the job. And once again an excuse was found for killing innocent people. Throughout the remaining scene of the first act of the June 12

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circus, the Area Boys never had the opportunity to fully exhibit their trait on a mammoth scale. August 12, 13, 14,26 and 27 couldn’t have afforded them such because they were Sit-At-Home protests; likewise September 29th to October 1st because, mainly, protests never took off before they were nipped in the bud. On the Lagos Island, however, on September 20th, they defended the democratic process without looting.

On November 10, the day of the Federal High Court verdict that declared the Ernest Shonekan-led Interim National Government illegal, the Area Boys were also at Baba’s house to swell the crowd, also apparently to take crumbs from Baba’s table, and honestly, they did have their lunch at Baba’s expense (by right or by force). But to show the true character of our tribe of lumpen -the very following day, Thursday the November 11th, University of Lagos students returning to their campus after going to town to call for the resignation of the ING were attacked with dangerous weapons under the Yaba-Jibowu Bridge by the Boys for refus ing to allow them turn the peaceful but angry charge into a free-looting exercise.

As Abacha’s sneaky coup of November 17 drew a curtain on the first act of the June 12 circus, the Area Boys also rolled back into their traditional shell of living-by-smartness. We shall encounter them in a more profound colour and shape in the next act. However, we shall attempt to assess the lessons drawn by the new Junta from the by no means good showing of the Boys in the first phase of the June 12 Struggle.

IVOne of the very first ‘sanitising’ acts of the Abacha-appointed Military Administrator of Lagos State, Colonel Olagunsoye Oyinlola, was not only to start ridding the streets of refuse and garbage, but also to clear street traders and Area Boys from the

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streets. On Saturday 26th March, 1994, shortly after Colonel Oyinlola assumed office, seven Area Boys were put on display before pressmen by officials of the State Task Force on Environmental Sanitation after which they were sentenced to varying jail terms without any legal aid of meaning. Their shabbiness of appearance, resulting more from brutalisation by the rifle-wielding Task Force troops than their vagrancy and vagabondage, invariably served as enough evidence against them before the presiding mobile magistrate who for obvious reasons was always eager to dispense with the day’s job as soon as possible.

In the following days, there would even be many more round-ups and clamping in jail. It became even more intensified with the opening of the second act of the June 12 circus mid-1994, which we shall soon come back to.

Ordinarily, it would appear that the Area Boys’ clean-up exercise was merely directed at stemming the menace of these ‘social miscreants’. And no wonder that middle class and popular grassroots sentiments (particularly among the traders) weighed heavily in favour of the anti-Area Boys action at its commencement. It must, however, be said that behind the pretence to sanitise was the determination of the Junta to rob the popular democratic process of one of its major constituencies-the unemployed youths.

For often times, those arrested as Area Boys were jobless youths and apprentices in the neighbourhoods who had nothing to do with drugs, gold-fingering or toll collection, but nonetheless were always on hand to lend their energy to every popular action against the status quo that oppresses and alienates them. These are the people mostly bundled to jail and not the Boys-lack of

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identity card (by an unemployed!) is enough to brand him an Area Boy and be carted to jail.

But just as the battle was indirectly aimed at the ordinary unemployed youth so was it directed at the Area Boys proper. The Area Boys that lent their weight to the democratic process, turning it into riot, nonetheless also have some commitment to the process to a large extent. Every Area Boy knows fully well that the community thrives better under a civilian administration than under the military. The military don’t need paid thugs, for they already have officially paid ones in the form of soldiers and police, all belonging to one party-the Establishment. It is the politicians that need thugs to settle scores. And as many parties as there are and as many factions and sub-faction as there are within each party, as many brigades of tough hands must be mobilised, this many bands of thugs must be constituted. The boys, therefore, have a stake under civil rule as much as other classes of the society. With what experience they had gained in the gubernatorial primaries in 1991, stuffing N50 notes into loaves of bread and swelling the voters ranks for a fee in the Agbalajobi-Sarumi imbroglio and in all the previous numerous ballot peddling exercises that muralled the expensive canvass of IBB endless transition since the November 1987 Local Government elections and their antecedents in the 1983 kill-and-go Adewusi era and more remotely the pre-1966 coup Wetie bloody circus-the Boys needed no intelligentsia to tell them that a civilian government was needed badly.

Equally important is the ethnic factor. From afar it would appear that the boys have no ethnic loyalty - that they serve the highest bidder. But this cannot be entirely true. Many of them are Yorubas displaced from their family houses by ‘foreign tenant’ mainly Igbo traders and fellow Yoruba from the hinterland (Ara Oke). They hate the Ibos as much as the

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Mallams (Northerners) and definitely prefer Baba to IBB. So they must put all their energy into pushing out the Junta.

It must be said also that there are moments this special group of marginals genuinely side with justice with no strings attached. In moments of blatant police brutality against one of their kind or a youth in the neighbourhood, they never failed to show their solidarity through positive action - one of the very few moments they ever organise independent action. The brutal kill ing of the Dawodu brothers in 1987 in central Lagos brought out the humanity in the Boys who held Lagos Island for almost a week until the first move to do justice was made by the authorities. After the January, 1992 killing of a Danfo driver by a trigger-happy cop, the Boys were also handy in effecting the drivers’ one week strike at Mushin where it happened.

The Boys are therefore not merely trouble-making miscreants, they are also human beings with hearts in their breasts. Thus in moments, they break out of the sectarian cocoon of the underworld to make themselves relevant to the laws and norms of the outside world, so that it is not always to be taken for granted that when the outside world moves against the Boys through parliamentary legislations, council edicts and mili tary government decrees such are targeted at the underworld. No! They may as well be targeted at the already bleeding heart of the society - after all the Boys are a product of the society, a part of its burden, just as they also carry its shameful burdens for it. It is not enough to hate the Boys, it is more meaningful to know why the Boys must be hated and to what depth this hatred must go so that the society, and more importantly, the middle class and the oppressed masses do not end up doing an emotional storm stropping job for the ruling class where the stakes are not theirs parse. Anybody who wants

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to properly handle the Boys must be ready to meet them in their sober moments in the dungeon houses and back alleys, perhaps with some wraps of fancy weeds for enlivening the occasion. The secrets and mutual treachery shared between the Boys and the Establishment would definitely overwhelm him.

Meanwhile, let us once more direct our attention to the practical, on the ground involvement of the Area Boys in the June 12 struggle and how the (the Junta and its running dogs) responded to them, as exemplified in the several battles of the second act of the June 12 circus.

VThe Abacha regime exemplifies the most pervasive and unskilful use of lies in the history of authoritarian statecraft in Africa. However, its fate has also dramatised the futility of this medium as a means of political and social engineering. Clearly, social reality has left the grip of propagandists and has refused to be obfuscated, misrepresented or subverted by even the most degenerate fascist liars. Simply put, to want to convince a man that he is a woman is about the most foolhardy lying expedition. And it matters less if at the end of the day, at the bayonet point or in the grey walls of the calaboose, you are able to get him to agree he is a woman - the reality is not changed a bit. Indeed, Abacha and his tribe of power seekers, both within Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, now and in the future, must always be reminded that it wasn’t lies and the naked bayonet that sustained Babangida for eight years in office. Rather, it was synthesised lies, embellished truth, cunning and garlanded bayonet that put a hundred million people belonging to over 250 nationalities at the mercy of a single man. Skilful machinations made a near all-time successful cardsharper of IBB. One of the Abacha’s regime

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greatest undoing remains the fact that he has failed to realise that Chekwumerije’s propaganda did more to hasten IBB out of office than giving him a lease of life.

The history of the second act of the June 12 Struggle, so far as the junta controlled media and their apologists are concerned, is that of lies-churning.

The Junta’s functionaries exposed themselves as formidable czars of lies in the wake of the massive boycott of elections into the Constitutional Conference conducted on May 23rd, 1994. In entire the South West and, indeed all over the country, a dismal number, 300,000 voters out of a registered electorate of over 14 million, turned our in an exercise that marked the first major defeat in the second act of the June 12 circus. Although it clearly paraded a bloodied nose, the junta answered everybody that all was at ease. It would later claim that the boycott and physical disruption of electoral activities took place only in the South West. Predictably, it narrowed down the events to that of timeless tribe of culprits - Area Boys. While it would be out of the question to deny that Boys readily participated in the disruption, it remains to be seen how Area Boys alone could have been responsible for a total boycott of elections if the people were really willing to participate. But ‘we haven’t seen nothing yet’ as ghetto people would say.

On the day of the Lawyers’ protest against the Junta, in July 7, 1994, an innocent police driver was overpowered and lynched by an irate mob along Igbosere Road on the Lagos Island. This was in response to the killing by the police the same day of a schoolboy by overzealous anti-riot cops. Although the Area Boys visibly partook in the vengeful killing of the policemen, it would, however, amount to devaluing the patriotism that motivated the

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social fury evinced by the civil populace of that part of the Island on that day. In other words, the action drew a lot of people from a host of backgrounds. To use the words of our source, the people defined the mission, the Boys supplied the courage - it was a mob action. Yet again the Junta ‘hasn’t seen nothing yet’.

On Monday July 26 when about 70 heavily armed policemen tried to dis rupt a peaceful protest of youths and women numbering about 4000 at Sangrose Market on the Lagos Island, Area Boys came handy in forcing the armed junta dogs to beat a hasty retreat. The Boys had suddenly appeared from their hideouts, encircled the police contingent and cut off all possible escape routes. At the end of the day, outnumbered and overwhelmed, the police had to pacify the protesters and Area Boys. The Boys heeded but only after seeking the consent of the women.

The pro-Junta media on these two occasions, unable to ‘kill’ he event editorially, decided to play up the Area Boys’ involvement. And true to type they must again exhibit their trait-they must loot by rage and fire. On the day following the Sangrose Market incidents, Area Boys went on a looting spree - their excuse being to instil sense in those ‘penny wise’ traders who felt they could open their shops without deference to the June 12 Struggle. Their action invited the full force of State fury, but also helped in no little way in demonstrating the courage and resilience of the Boys. Their mastery of neighbourhood routes and hideouts has always come handy, giving them an edge over the police. Their sheer raw confidence in the face of hissing bullets often drew many more to their ranks, such that, in moments of real struggle, to distinguish between the Area Boys and an ordinary, socially infuriated neighbourhood youth becomes difficult for an outsider. Even the honest journalist not given to ‘risking’ it to the

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scene of ‘ugly’ incidents is also susceptible to such difficulty. And unfortunately enough, since media owners hardly provide insurance cover for their workers and many media workers lack creative adventurism, picking rumours from the streets and formulating conclusions with the solace of whisky glass become the most attractive options in such circumstance. Significantly, within this context, contrary to the Junta’s thinking, junk journalism or ignorant half-a penny scribbling helps it far more than they help the progressive movement. Against this background, the journalist must be careful the way he uses the term Area Boys to qualify sloppily dressed demonstrators lest he hurls the proverbial stone into the marketplace. For most of those people he encounters on the street and passes off as Area Boys are, indeed, as educated as himself if not better educated, not to use it to self if not better cultured, and more responsibly placed in the society. Among them are medical doctors and medical students , lawyers, Ph.D holders, engineers, and composers of no mean abilities. They are intellectuals with full understanding of the philosophical basis of their actions, with well-conceived notions of strategy and tactics as well as the likely consequences of such actions. It is only circumstances that always compel them, in moments of social upheaval, to discard their airs of middle-classhood and don the tattered garb of the wretched of the earth. In short they commit class suicide in the interest of the whole society. And in so doing they invite the hatred of their class colleagues who have not recognised the need for or are incapable of such suicide for selfish reasons. Those who pretend to commit class suicide by staying indoors or by cheering the protesters from behind the ‘safety’ of their window curtains and balconies do as well as those who actually come to the street if pass mark is all that is

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needed. But to stay indoors only to come our later on the pages of newspapers or some podium of Junta-backed rallies to denounce the effort of the people as the handiwork of city vandals alone is most indicative of slavery-as-a way-of-life. It does not get anybody anywhere, especially anybody belonging to an already decimated middle class. Sycophancy on the part of the middle class is the taproot of blossoming fascism. So far, so good.

VI

On Sunday, August 14, 1994, the Lagos State Governor, Colonel Olagunsoye Oyinlola, suddenly appeared on television to announce to the world that he was rounding up the Area Boys, as they constitute a menace to the society and a danger to themselves. This was three days before Abacha’s reckless speech of August 17, which virtually imposed a state of emergency on the South West, and the Lagos area in particular.

Nothing could be more satisfying to the Igbo traders just recovering from their losses in the looting of the last week of July and the first week of August. The propertied class and the on looking middle class mob and conformists also rejoiced. But this wasn’t the first time the government would be showing interest in the life of the Area Boys. Earlier in 1993, the People’s Bank had embarked on a programme of rehabilitation of area boys and girls. Herded into emergency hostels, trades were taught to them free-of-charge. Soft loans, loans in kind and all sorts of empowerment schemes were said to be available to them. Above all, they were counselled against drugs - all on prime NTA Network time. What success was achieved in this is there on the street for everybody to see.

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On September 13, exactly a month after Col. Oyinlola’s appearance, the Lagos State Command of the Nigerian Police Force commenced Operation Clean Up Lagos. ‘Robber’s dens’, gambling hideouts and places where drugs trade and use flourished were claimed to be the prime target areas for routine police raids. This was four clear weeks after Abacha’s declared intention to silence all opposition by all the means at hand, even the most crooked and base. By Friday, September 16, over 200 hundred boys had been bundled to the dungeon.

But who fools who? Must all the unemployed youths in an area, who could not successfully dodge the police, be hauled to the calaboose before the society controls armed robbery and drug? Does it not amount to sheer dishonesty on the part of the state to want to pretend that armed robbery is not sanctioned in a way by the Establishment? And who told the police that they could control drug use by merely hauling the Boys off the street? Who told them that only the unemployed peddle and depend on drugs?

The fact is that drugs abound everywhere like germs (apology to Carat medicated soap). Evens in the police and army barracks, and on our campuses. For instance, stories have been told about rooms in the University of Lagos, Akoka campus, where at least six out of eight occupants take ganja. It is a known fact that some of their ladies won’t go out with a non-drug user. So if the thing is about drug control then belts must be tightened and more effort geared towards training competent per sonnel of The Drug Law Enforcement Agency and counsellors rather than truncheon-brandishing, gun-trotting cops.

But the truth is clear as noonday: nobody is about controlling drugs or armed robbery. The conception on the part of the state that the June 12 Struggle drew considerable strength

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from the involvement of poor dispossessed youth, the unemployed, semi-employed as well as the Area Boys proper must necessarily have informed the renewed enthusiasm with which the so-called anti-hoodlum campaign was carried out all in the hope that by the time the ghost of June 12 once more walked the streets, there would be no ‘plumaged redskins’ in the form of the dispossessed and Boys to join the ‘ghost dance’.

This exactly is where they hit off the mark. June 12 is not about performing a ghost dance, nor is June 12 a revolution to preserve the class of the dis possessed. Nay, it is a call to put an end to all dispossession, a call to protection for the present day propertied class as well as the unpropertied class on the basis of the most minimal, most basic rights of men as universally recognised in contemporary time, as the first step towards the actual and real emancipation of the Nigerian person sooner or later. It either does this or put the entity asunder- so far so good.

So far we have seen how Area Boys give impetus to every people’s uprising by supplying raw courage but also impact on it with their characteristic knack for brigandage, looting and social opportunism, and how their intervention serves the propaganda and military offensive purposes of the State. It requires no deep thought, therefore, to see that this social group-this class of miscreants (as the uniformed middle class would prefer to call them) is not particularly indispensable to a people’s struggle, but at the same time, must be carried along if only in anticipation of its extinction. So that when the time comes as when remnants of the old order begin to mobilise opposition for the restoration of injustice and (dis)order, they are deprived of that constituency of mercenaries who must live by fire and rage and whose morality is limited by possibilities of loot and the defence of the rule of that class or party on whose

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platform the looting process is predicated. But on the whole, only a genuine democratic transformation of the society can guarantee the emancipation of the Boys and the destruction of the relations within them, on the one hand and between them and the society on the other hand.

***It is the tradition of the Area Boys to give their dead a befitting burial with pomp and vengeful jigs so that the heavenward journey is not made tortuous for lack of money to pay the boat-man of purgatory. The Boys that passed on during the June 12 Struggle were mostly deprived of this singular ‘honour’ due to the particularly harsh circumstances of those days. Our struggle owes it a duty to build a monument of the eternity of their ‘heroism’, if only in anticipation of the total emancipation of this undesirable class as well as its total extinction.

March 14-April 18, 1995.Lagos, Nigeria

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KONGI’S MARCH FOR JUSTICE - REBEL LAUREATE

IEnlightenment has always been the greatest enemy of the oppressing classes and the enlightener their first target of assault. If the English nobility had declared in the years of that Empires great Revolution (a Revolution cited in that country’s book of revolutionary history as glorious and regarded by feudal chroniclers as an ‘aberration’ occasioning mutual slaughter of Englishmen by Englishmen), that: “God preserve us from scribblers and speakers. We will live to regret the day the press was invented”, it is to the extent that men of letters, when at the service of the people, are sometimes more formidable than whole army divisions.

What with their ‘vulgar libels’, their screaming headlines and ‘junks’ and their sneers at ‘corruption and political debauchery’, those two enchanting mermaids that have always spiced the peaceably purulent séance of those ‘incubuses’ that weigh down on the living like dead weights and those ghosts that suck out the memory of the living dead. The adage that the “pen is mightier than the sword” is itself mightier than the few words of which it is made. And nothing could be more mortifying to the oppressor than to be a soldier with the barrel of the pen trained on him by a bloody civilian in mufti. He must get his ‘military respect and honour’ back at all costs (even at the risk of losing his honour as a human being in the first place).

The situation becomes even worse for the bloodsucker when the scribbler is not just another half-a-penny juggler or famished radical who, realising that his revolutionary heaven on earth is yet to come, now begins to court ‘settlement’. Nobel

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prize-winning rebels are difficult to come by but are equally ‘dangerous too’. They become even more dangerous when they decide to add political street-craft to their trade, when they align with the masses with their pens put aside, their leaflets-filled jackets flying ruffian fashion and their ‘impudent’ lips reeling and churning out ‘popular grammars’ in readiness to summon the popular masses to a peaceful but defiant march against the oppressor.

On Sunday, 24th July, 1994, Kongi marched for Justice; on Sunday, July 24th, 1994 the Abacha Junta men of guns and baton marched for injustice. We must begin from the beginning.

IISeveral days before the D-day, newspapers had been splashing the event on their pages. Professor Wole Soyinka was going to lead a March for Justice as part of the events commemorating his 60th birthday. Other people would have cut a gargantuan cake, a gangsters wedding affair-ala Graham Greene, but not my Kongi People conversant with the way of the Junta in recent times would have known that the march was not going to be, at least not in the way it had been planned. Everybody knew the Junta in its usual disgust for even the most harmless expression of rebellion and defiance would stop this march - and if need be drench it in blood. But they had come out all the same. Our people, if not in the quest for freedom and justice but just to catch a glimpse of the glittering mammy water skin of Kongi and see the breeze waft that fluffy Martian grey ‘hirsute hell’ crowning his Nobel brain, turned out all the same.

July 24th was a trial for the people and for the Junta. Kongi came on time, the Junta was there before the H-hour but our people came late. Some rather stayed away watching from

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the safety of their balconies, windows and streets. With a few guns and canister launchers trained on residence of

Tejuosho and passers-by, stern-faced troops displayed few martial steps reminiscent of those colonial steps- ‘Yan bi ologun’ romanticised and ridiculed by Kongi in his famous play “ Death and the King’s Horseman” and the arena was set. It was now Kongi and a few dete rmined loyalists against the full force of fascist fury. The men of the law were also armed with their instructions ‘bery bery clear’ as declared by their citrax-faced commander: Kongi must not be allowed to march. He was therefore ‘adbised’ (advised, really) to go home so hoodlums would not hijack the March.

It was a moment of trial; it was a moment of decision. Should Kongi insist on marching ahead of a mob? Would the mob allow him to march ahead of it with the gun trained on the “mob” and not Kongi or should Kongi turn tail and declare the play ended and risk newspaper banality and press ridicule. Kongi insisted on marching. In his own judgement he was as free as any Nigerian and could not be prevented from “taking a walk” with his “friends” on the occasion of his birthday. But this only after all at tempts by him to blackmail the police with his status as a Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and a Nobel Laureate had failed. The police conceded to a march with ‘friends’. But such friends must exclude ruffians, rabbles and even students - all potential materials for the topsy-turvy characteristic of the July days must be kept at bay.

The rest is now history. The ubiquitous Western press screamed: a protest march in support of June 12 mandate was stopped in Lagos by the police. The local press went further to tell how the Nobel Laureate was sandwiched between a horde of 20 policemen on his March for Jus tice from the

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Lagos Mainland to the Island and how he later threw away the insignia proclaiming him ‘Commander of the Republic of Nigeria’ in vexation over the state of the country and the refusal of the men of the law to allow him a bottle of drink at the Island Club after a day’s work. But for the press hype that followed and for Kongi’s reputation, it would have been a fair enough judgement to say the Kongi-led March for Justice was sufficiently managed to ridicule by the Junta.

And the argument has cropped up over and over again in the recesses of ‘secretariats’ and ‘hideouts’ of progressives whether or not Kongi had been right in demanding his right to march with only “friends” and not the rest of the mob?

But if one must say, the question is neither one nor the other. The era under scrutiny called for neither of the two variants of passive struggle save for the symbolism of it - which the press hype had achieved. An attempt to lead a mass protest stopped by the fascist is as good as a successfully executed protest march in the eyes of the world - so long as a Nobel Laureate of Soyinka’s calibre occupies the center stage. Kongi could not have performed better than he displayed on the 24th of July without spoiling the show. And at the same time Kongi, given some other objective realities, could have performed better. When the agenda of a people’s struggle has gone beyond the level of petitions and stone-throwing, but they are yet to grapple with methodological imperatives commensurate with these higher goals, the struggle must either continue to march, petition and rigmarole on a spot like in a circus or pull the mask of orgy of comedy from its face and drink in the full glare of shame. The former signifies hope and determination of a sort; the latter could reflect either a higher courage

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or an early capitulation, borne of lack of courage at all. The former is easier to place; the latter is dual in character.

Kongi has never been a soul deprived of courage - to hold a region as big as France to ransom at gunpoint in the name of justice is not a mark of cowardice. July 24th was never an indictment of Kongi but rather an indictment of our struggle and our nation. To this we shall return at the appropriate time and place.

If in recapturing of radical traditions of the 60s America in his remarkable work, “Last Best Hope” ( Peter) Tauber had written “Demonstrations had run the course of audience tolerance; it would take greater circuses to move the populace” (pp.612) this is even truer for the July days in Nigeria. But if demonstrations would not move the populace, same could not be said of the bloodsuckers. A regime that would not hesitate to drench a nation’s honour in the muck by setting soldiers against defenceless citizens as Abacha did on July 6 and 7, 1993 and by sneaking to power under the cover of darkness and under sweet pretences as he did on November 17, 1993, could hardly be trusted to treat another peaceful march of the same people with kid’s glove-notwithstanding the presence of a Nobel Laureate. Demonstrations are more than enough to set the fascist running dogs cracking. And have we not long since been brought face to face with this truth? Has it not come to pass how only four days after Kongi’s March, July 28th, a peaceful protest at the venue of the Junta’s trial of the winner of the June 12 mandate at Abuja was drenched in blood leaving at least four people dead, how shortly after the Junta’s ‘Enough is enough’ fascist speech, Benin and Ekpoma universities were turned into some rowdy shooting ranges with the students as targets, and how the regime has stepped up its campaign of intimidation and violence against

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activists and progressives? What else does such a regime require than that force that would shoot it out of office? The struggle in the July days demanded more than just marches and protests. Treason against the existing state, treason, not by mere declaration as Basorun Abiola did, but an active treason aimed at destroying and reconstituting the state to reflect the desire of the people was what the time demanded.

III

July 24th, 1994 was not the only novelty Kongi introduced to the June 12 ‘circus’ to the utter disappointment of a number of his young admirers. Saturday September 18, 1993, a peaceful rally jointly organised by the Lagos Mainland branch of the Campaign for Democracy, CD, and Mainland Progressive Youth Movement, MPYM, came under police battering. It was at the Evans Square, Ebute Metta, Lagos. The youths of the neighbourhood gave it back to the police and the whole neighbourhood became one big arena of running battle (hide-and-seek and game of wits between the people and fascist running dogs). Residential buildings in the area were turned into fortresses and strongholds by the youths from which they skilfully stone-picked policemen. The ‘dogs’ dared not penetrate the people’s castle and the people dared not walk the streets, for both parties were unrelently vigilant. Each party held its own.

Then the spectacle changed. Youths came out of their fortresses, on guard no doubt but not attacking. The running dogs stopped prowling, astounded and thankful for the momentary cessation of the attrition. In the arena, just disembarked from his Peugeot 505 Saloon car, was Kongi like a god out of the sea, fluffy-haired, polish-skinned. For a short while, there was peace spiced with an exaggerated sense of victory on the part of the rebelling youths.

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Kongi’s appearance was no accident; he had been billed to speak at the rally. And when he had appeared, the militant youths on ground had expected him to begin his speech outrightly, using his intellectual charm and unbeatable grammar to force the police to concede to an ‘illegal gathering’ against ‘bery, bery clear instructions’ from Headquarters.

The disappointment on the young rebellious faces around Kongi could best be imagined when he pointed out that having made the point in the first place by starting the rally at all, the people should avoid confrontation with the fascist killer squads and disperse or find a cool enclosure within which to hold discussions and reflect. Under pressure from the youths, Soyinka’s attempt to seek out and speak with the commander of the squad came to naught. And it is on record that at the end of the day, it wasn’t Kongi’s advice that eventually dispersed the people but the burning teargas and crashing truncheon. The Nobel Laureate also inhaled quite a dose of the poisonous gas. Perhaps if the people had accepted Kongi’s elderly word?

By sundown, 21 youths were in the police dungeon gaping at the grey walls. Kongi’s attempt to put aside his Rebel laureate garb for Nobel Laureate gown for the sake of the youths came to nothing - the police de nied holding anybody.

What other lesson can we learn from September 18th than that running dogs know not what it means to be a Nobel Laureate; that running dogs deserve none other than dog treatment.

When the running dog is confronted with the spellbinding aura of the intellectual, the ease with which he reels out ‘big grammar’ and his demon strated understanding of the secrets and logic of that law which the

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running dog claims to protect, he is taken aback. The running dog cringes, shivers, then simmers to a sudden realisation that not only must he necessarily carry out his ‘bery, bery clear instructions’ but must also defend his person against the oppressive air of the intellectual. Such de fence would definitely not come in the form of intellect or logic in which the opponent is most learned. It must come by brute force. But even at that, each blow of this attack comes with such half-heartedness that bespeaks an acute inferiority complex.

The dilemma of the running dog becomes even more compounded when he sees the ‘Professor’ in the midst of ruffians and Area Boys haranguing the ‘breakers of law and order’ to ‘bloody rebellion’; when his intellect and logic could not dissuade him from associating with street urchins and trouble makers. And soon, in the eyes of the running dog, the Professor becomes the greatest problem -the Chief Area Boy who must be dealt with according to the law, but with some dignity. He must receive the gas, but only enough to make him clear from the scene of trouble. He must see the truncheon crashing, but only to the extent that it does not yet draw more than a few splashes of blood here and there. He may even be hustled into a station but only to the extent that such is defined as a ‘protective custody’. And when he is finally taken away from the scene of trouble it is to clear the shooting range for easy target practice.

The Professor is not only a problem to the running dog because he harangued the trouble makers or because he sometimes pretends to play the role of troubleshooter, but also because he obstructs his targets and bears a poetic witness to his atrocities, magnifying them in the imagination of the world with such linguistic flourish as to move even the Rock of Gibraltar.

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And what is more, with a background spiced with a rich crop of mythical images of gods and supermen, fetish and omnipotent deities, the running dog could hardly comprehend the origin of the Professor’s enchanting erudition save by some celestial power. For if the Quran had been revealed to Mohammed in some fast and prayer-inspired trance and it had taken forty nights of communing with God on the mountain for the Ten Commandments to be revealed to Holy Moses, who else would say some gnomes in the Mountain of Ascension at Ife or some mermaids in the River Osun had not inspired the Professor’s condensed metaphors.

This is what the intellectual must count on, but only to buy time and impose some sanity on the rowdiness characteristic of all encounters be tween an embittered people and fascist running dogs. For the running dog is nothing but a dog. His universe in the final analysis is not the spellbinding rhetoric and aura of enigma in which the intellectual is encapsulated but his ‘bery, bery clear instructions’. Those instructions are his daily bread, his freedom, his future, and the future of his children, of his wife. In short, the instructions mean the difference between life and death. Not to carry out his instructions is to put himself between the jaws of the lion - the instructor. He, must therefore recoil from whatever spellbinding rhetoric the intellectual presence has cast upon him and carry out his instruction. And this he must do with exaggerated zeal and diligence. For those few words of compliment and those soothing pats on his sore, weather-beaten back from the immediate instructor count so much to him. And the recommendations and pips.

This, the intellectual must count on to cast his spell, which he must also do in good time except there are some higher

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points to be made. Kongi was not prepared for those higher points on July 24th 1994, just as he was not prepared for same on September 18, 1993.

But July 24 was a success so long as the objectives were gotten correctly in the first place. Kongi marched in Lagos and cast a spell on a few running dogs while Lagos sprawled unhindered, but the same march cast a spell on the whole of civilised world, a debilitating foreign relations blow.

***In the dying days of the earlier Junta, the Association of Nigerian Authors, (ANA) had honoured Nigeria’s sole Nobel Laureate with a befitting award- “A Triple Heritage Award”. And so Kongi was at the Museum Kitchen in the midst of poets and storytellers representative largely of the younger but already frustrated (not wasted yet) generation.

Here again, as usual, poetry and politics found harmony. In Kongi’s opinion the unilateral cancellation of the presidential elections’ primaries by the IBB junta was nothing but “dictatorial, undemocratic”, nay,” fascistic.” He searched but could find no ‘lavender’ word for it. Evident from the ‘tortuous, convoluted, circuitous’ nature of the Junta’s transition programme, it was clear that it would not leave unless pushed out of office by the people.

And what was more: that if the Junta would not allow people to meet and discuss at home we would “go to Republic of Benin and hold our discussion.” So it was that Kongi in a brief moment, like a prophet, prepared the young minds before him for the tasks ahead in the coming year. Kongi left the kitchen like all else in a sober mood - so near to feast but without a feast.

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In the third month of the year prophesied by Kongi as the year of intensified struggle, letters on Africa Democratic League (ADL) letter-headed papers and signed by Kongi himself went out to groups, etc., inviting them to a conference on the theme: Consolidating Democracy, to be held in Cotonou, Benin Republic come August. Then there was June 12 and its products. Kongi again had to hurry another missive to his democratic colleagues in Nigeria regretting the inability of the League to go ahead with the democracy workshop as scheduled and urging them to use any means within their power to prevail on the Junta to handover to the winner of the June 12 elections. After all, even meetings abroad could also become difficult. Meanwhile, the dynamics of the struggle later made meetings at home inevitable and people found the means to meet and discuss, and even brought their meetings to the street in the full glare of the Junta, albeit with some painful losses. At any opportune moment Kongi had joined these meetings - objective reality teaches after all. Let us say sixty poetic cheers to Kongi at sixty and wish him many selfless, novel contributions to our struggle. Even with airport harassment, hovering choppers and ‘portrait hunting expeditions’, Soyinka shall outlive our ‘last dictator’.

***A critique of Soyinka’s novel contributions to the June 12 struggle as exemplified by the July 24th event cannot in anyway be complete without due tribute to one man who has equally contributed in no little measure to the struggle for a better Nigeria. He was a hardworking man, a disciplinarian, an educationist and over and above all, a man of principle - honest in a society where to be honest is to be out of the ordinary, where to uphold one’s honour and dignity is to stand for poverty and tribulations.

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Tai Solarin took time off convalescence to speak with the people at Evans Square on September 18, 1993. However, the police honoured his presence with some show of fascist bestiality - but he even tually spoke to them that had come to listen.

On July 24, 1994, himself and his wife, Sheila, were also with Soyinka at Tejuosho. Uncle Tai insisted he was going to march and he did march, not alone, but with friends - more than Kongi was allowed, perhaps on account of his age.

“Talo so pe ao ni baba? Kai ani baba. Tai Solarin baba wa kai ani baba”. Three days later on Wednesday 27th July, 1994, Baba Tai Solarin passed away in active service to the nation and mankind. And according to his will, he was buried on a piece of the farmland at Mayflower School, Ikenne, which he founded 40 years ago. He wore his inevitable khaki shirt and shorts on this last journey home - to mix and mingle with the elements and as such with nature. Even in death he clung to his principle. Indeed, it must be said that men like him are not like ‘pieces of cloth on the market square’. They are hard to come by.

4-8th December, 1994Lagos, Nigeria.

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ON THE NUPENG STRIKEI

Those who claim that oil is the basis of Nigeria’s unity are indeed more than mere enunciators of what appears like the absolute truth. Oil -petroleum- confined to a small corner of the geographical entity known as Nigeria is indeed the lifeblood of the nation. This is true not only in the sense that it constitutes more than 90% of the nation’s source of foreign exchange but also that the sections of the country that control this oil are exactly those outside the geographical limit of the oil sources, and are expectedly depen dent on it for the running of their comparatively advanced economic life. He who controls the oil and all the activities associated with it controls the nation. He who holds sway in the oil sector, either for the progress of the oil industry or for its temporary disablement, controls the economic life of the nation. In the hands of an oppressive regime, the oil becomes a source of financing reckless economic spending, life of debauchery and corruption as well as mean of sustenance of the instrument of repression of

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the people. In the hands of the opposition, to hold the oil industry and hold it firmly is to have sounded the death knell of the ruling clique.

The NUPENG pro-June 12 strike, commenced on July 4, 1994 with overwhelming enthusiasm and hope, and ended on August 17 unceremoniously, has more than demonstrated this. And what is more, than that a whole array of even more salient points has been thrust out from the dark chambers of our collective national tragedy of absurdity to the full glare of dispassionate, naked self-criticism. The potency of labour strikes, strike in the oil industry, political strikes, the June 12 errors of strategy, the gulf between rhetoric and action, the relationship between the leader and the led, the dichotomy between sentiment and clear philosophical (ideological) commitment and many more are issues on which lessons must be learnt.

We must, as usual, always endeavour to begin from the beginning without boring the reader with unnecessary details. For this is not a mere chrono logical record of the events of that time but, rather, an attempt to locate the chronicle itself in our social consciousness.

The much awaited but hurried declaration of government by Basorun M. K. O. Abiola on Saturday June 11, 1994 in one remote corner of Lagos was predicated on certain assumptions. Among these, we must count first the readiness of the labour unions to embark on political strike, the mobilisation of the people for civil disobedience by pro-democracy and human rights bodies, the winning over of the mass of the soldiers and officers of the Nigerian Army to the side of June 12 and the realisation by Abacha and his cohorts that the most honourable thing to do would be to handover peacefully to the winner of the June 12 elections. History has proven these to be

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none but fatal assumptions. We have seen how the July 13 civil disobedience was checkmated in the street, how those officers and men of the Nigerian Army exhibited their patriotism over bottles of beer and pepper soup plates in the mammy market rather than spill their entrails on the altar of nationhood, how the police, destined to aid rather than ha rass the people, had at the last minute reckoned only with wither their daily bread flowed. And have we not also seen the dilly-dally of the labour movement, the struggle to adjunct the pro-June 12 demands to some more immediate economic demands on the part of the worker? And has it not come to pass how, disillusioned and desperate for a new comedy to the circus, the Basorun had come out of hiding on June 22, was arrested in the small hours of June 23rd and hauled off to the calaboose to the dismay and disillusionment of our helpless and hopeless masses? For what was June 12 if not the hope of the hopeless and heart of the heartless. June 23 did not put the Basorun in jail. What was imprisoned was a people’s collective willing ness to put an end to three decades of misrule and despotism. The ability of the people to break out of this prison would determine whether or not their fate is once and for all settled.

But it turned out also that June 23 was another fatal assumption. All labour unions that had earlier threatened heaven and hell if the Basorun was ever harassed much less arrested by the Junta kept mum. All politicians who had tried to make the corpse of democratic institutions disbanded in the wake of the November 17, 1993 Abacha coup walk the streets again, Zombie-fashion, had either been spirited to the calaboose or had scampered for cover; the students movement was in disarray; the pro-democracy bodies had not yet recovered from the paralysis and mass impotence of the days immediately following the declaration. This done, it would only have required

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a self-deluded simpleton not to see that an early death had been pronounced on the second act of the June 12 circus. Now the June 12 opposition must prepare itself for the post-defeat ridicule accruing to every defeated opposition irrespective of the loftiness of ideas professed.

Then came NUPENG. July 4 not only rekindled the hope of the hopeless but also practically shook the Junta to its foundation. The gains of popular struggle in those July days were doubtlessly gains predicated upon the foundation laid by the NUPENG strike.

For the purpose of this discourse we shall recognise three [3] periods in the NUPENG strike, each differing in its purpose, intensity and the enthusiasm that greeted it and as such in the mass psychology of the time. The first period spanned the period of preparation for the strike before July 4 and the early days of the strike ending with the ‘arrest’ of NUPENG General Secretary, Comrade Frank Ovie Kokori, the second period embraced the period of Kokori’s ‘incarceration’ ending on July 23rd. The third and the last period enompased the period from July 23rd to the time of the official breaking of the strike.

[i] Preparation and Pronouncement of the StrikeAs earlier mentioned, this was a period when the hope of the hopeless was rekindled. But at the same time a period of doubt. The days before July 4 had seen the NUPENG leadership mobilising its members at all levels for the strike. The fact that the strike was meant to be a political strike aimed at achieving the objectives of June 12 did not prevent the NUPENG leadership - good tacticians that they were - from introducing all kinds of mobilisational subterfuges. For the oil workers the actualisation of June 12 would be meaningless without the

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amelioration of their economic hardships. The struggle for wage review by the tanker drivers must be joined with the June 12 agenda, a place must be created on the June 12 platform for the struggle against mass retrenchment, the question of condition of service and the danger of total collapse looming over the oil industry - all these must find expression in the mobilisational slogans of the June 12 Struggle. And they did.

But it must be said that these points were never raised to the position of dominance over the substantive issue. As Chief Kokori himself would later articulate on the Voice of America [VOA] on the eve of the strike “NUPENG wont go back until June 12 is met, because military rule has paralysed the economy, and the Constitutional Conference cannot solve the problem.”

For those who had seen the effect of NUPENG involvement in NLC strike in 1993 during the first act of the June 12 Struggle there was definitely no doubt as to what NUPENG was capable of doing. And there was no doubt as to the panicky, last minute fire brigade attempt of the Junta to ‘settle’ the NUPENG leadership against commencing the strike. This also informed the attempt by the government, when persuasion, settlement and threat had failed, to resort to disparaging connotations and defamation of character. Rumour mongers went to town - the NUPENG leaders had taken millions of Naira from Abiola to prosecute a political strike against all labour ethics; the NUPENG leaders were using their union to further ethnic agenda; the strike was an attempt to make people suffer unnecessarily; etc.

Indeed, sycophancy is the cheapest of trades and sycophants must abound in every immature ‘political zoo’. Abacha set to work with his own agents within the first few days among the so-called Northern NUPENG - a rebel faction had

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emerged. It only required the NTA to orchestrate this, air some protracted, well -rehearsed press interviews and the deal was done. We have seen how far this went in breaking the spirit of the oil workers, how far it went in detracting from the fact that it is not the desire of any NUPENG in the Sahel or Guinea Savannah that would determine the impact of the strike but the determination of the workers involved in refining and pumping the fuel at the source down south.

July 4 was a nightmare for the Junta, though the strike got off to a faltering start with a number of rebel factions either claiming that the strike was superfluous, given that the Nigeria Association of Road Transport Owners [NARTO] had agreed to new wage agreement, or others obeying some inexplicable authorities beyond their comprehension, thereby withdrawing from the action without actually knowing why. By Wednesday, July 6 NUPENG was already in a position to tell the world that the union had survived the initial opposition experienced on Monday and was determined to sustain the strike. The same day soldiers were deployed to depots, as members of Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria [PEGASSAN] warm up to join the action. It was also at this time the Nigeria Labour Congress [NLC] made a shamefaced statement of its readiness to join the strike if the June 12 crisis persisted. On the night of the same day the State Security Service [SSS] suddenly woke up to the realisation that it must immediately move in to cut the wings of NUPENG by incarcerating its leaders. Chief Kokori narrowly escaped their midnight call, disappearing from public view. Thus began the era of confusion in government circle. By now, social and economic life in the country had started grinding to a halt.

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The fire brigade attempts to create emergency fuel outlets did not help, fuel depots continued to grow by the hour - it was a dress rehearsal for the situation that would become the order of the day in the months to come. As news of Kokori’s disappearance filtered out to the outside world, the mood of the strikers, their sympathisers, the masses and the government automatically changed. The struggle had entered a new more qualitative stage.

[ii] The Period of Kokori’s Purported ArrestThis was also a period the effect of the strike intensified and general panic gripped the government. On July 9, a statement from Kokori’s family expressed anxiety over his continued detention, the NLC gave 12 days ultimatum to the government to release Chief Kokori or face a nation-wide strike, just as PENGASSAN gave July 12 date for the commencement of its own action. By July 10th the Delta State NUPENG, earlier reported to be against the strike, achieved a hundred percent action in their zone and on July 11 the Warri plant oil depots were shut as more local unions joined the action.

The government was in a double crisis - one was politico- economic, namely the economic hardship and social confusion occasioned by the intensifying strike and the other a moral crisis, as it could not explain the whereabout of Chief Kokori and different arms of the state’s instruments of repression began to suspect each other of being responsible for the arrest. In fact, in their lousy manner, some government bureaucrats even had occasion to defend the ‘arrest’. Never before had the State so doubted itself. Meanwhile the strike continued to bite.

For the NUPENG and their sympathisers the ‘arrest’ now became not only a weapon for mobilisation of sentiment in support of its demands and highlighting the high handedness of the state

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and its disrespect for the peoples fundamental rights, it also became in itself the source of a new demand -a kind of ransom - Kokori must be released before any negotiation.

By Monday July 12 when PENGASSAN commenced its strike, a clear week after NUPENG commenced its own, the beleaguered regime had become tempered and was now ready for negotiation. All sectors of the economy were already groaning under the weight of the strike, NEPA was in trouble running its gas powered plants, banks had to prune operations, streets around petrol stations had become parking lots - negotiation! negotiation! negotiation!.

But what would be the content of the negotiation. The transport Minister Retired Brigadier Sam Ogbemudia was deemed the best candidate for the tough job, being a veteran of several military juntas and a short-lived civilian junta. Expectedly PENGASSAN and NUPENG refused the negotiation offer. They equally indicted the NLC of double agency. For the NUPENG any negotiation must be predicated upon Kokori’s release or else... That was July 14. In the following days four oil terminals would be shut thus cutting export of crude oil drastically.

In the case of PENGASSAN the government was further put in dilemma as a result of the myriad nature of their demands which summed up a whole lot of ills in the oil industry and the Nigerian society at large, now using the June 12 issue as a string to tie these together into an ant-ridden faggot for the regime to carry on its survival trek. As articulated by Chief M.A Dabibi, General Secretary of PENGASSAN in a newspaper interview [Guardian, Monday July 11, 1994, pp.11]:

“…the military government has devastated and abandoned the oil sector, the backbone of the nation’s economy. Greed, graft and crass corruption have rendered the

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government unable to meet its own share of the operating cost to its joint venture partners [in the oil sector]. Consequently, thousands of our members have lost their jobs over the last one year with no hope of securing new ones.” The union gave the government ultimatum to pay the owed partners. This was indeed an impossible demand, especially when dropped on the lap of a regime peopled by a gluttonous pack of hounds who, like the proverbial leaky purse, only takes in money without fattening up. And PENGASSAN knew this.

It was now clear that the oil workers had some other things in view, reason why they kept evading negotiation on the strike. There was equally no doubt as to their realisation of the fact that their strike alone would not completely break the regime. What indeed NUPENG had counted upon was sympathy strike on the part of other unions [not the NLC per se]. In the early days of the strike many unions had threatened to join it. As at the end of the first week not less than 18 industrial unions had indicated such. But we have seen how these strikes never got beyond the pages of newspapers - paper tiger unions that they were, and how those that took off had been largely opportunistic moves calculated to ride on the back of NUPENG for gain ing selfish concessions from the employer [see the 40 Hours Strike]. Except few unions, among them, the Lagos Taxi Drivers Association, the Airport unions, the Iron and Steel Senior Staff Association [ISSSAN], and a couple of others, all the strikers of those days were double-tongued op portunists, and one way or the other played into the hands of the regime. Their inertia assisted the Junta’s recovery and eventual clampdown.

Towards the end of the third week of the strike, at the time the oil workers/government negotiation ran into a deadlock as a result of disagreement on procedural issues and lingering

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uncertainty over Kokori’s whereabouts, the Lagos NLC was celebrating its successful negotiation and asking its members to go back to work having won concessions for them in the form of allowances and welfare packages that would ameliorate the impact of the strike - [opportunism of the basest order no doubt]. That was July 22. It must be said, however, that whereas the labour unions had blatantly betrayed the oil workers and the peoples’ struggle for genu ine democracy - the same thing cannot be said of the pro-democracy organisations as represented by CD and NADECO. The role played by these two bodies in facilitating and coordinating the oil workers action with the general pro-democratic agenda must be mentioned, if only for historical reasons.

It also has to be pointed out that the intensification of the strike and the worsened socio-economic conditions it occasioned was rendered more relevant to the process. The mass anger and fury in those July days- the violent resistance and civil disobedience that spattered the second period of the oil workers strike and which became intensified in the latter period were catalysed by the preceding strike itself. The use of delay tactics and subterfuge to evade negotiation and prolong the strike played a most revolutionary role in advancing the course of June 12.

It was little surprising therefore that the regime, apparently incompetent and un-coordinated, gleefully breathed with relief when Chief Kokori appeared to the world hale and hearty on Saturday July 23rd, 1994 ushering in the last period of the NUPENG strike according to our own delineation.

[iii] The Appearance and Aftermath

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Kokori appeared on July 23rd to tell the world that his disappearance was nothing more than a prank aimed at putting the Junta in bad light. In his words “I was in a place without coming out. You see how the government was in a mess. They said they were experts in propaganda we said okay if it is propaganda we will give it to them. They met their match in NUPENG”.

And if anybody had thought, as indeed the government had done that Kokori was coming out to negotiate an end to the strike it was a wrong assumption. For at the press conference officially announcing his appearance NUPENG reiterated its commitment to the strike until all its demands were met. This posture NUPENG and PENGASSAN would maintain till the junta regained the strength to bring the circus to a close.

The first few days following the reappearance and declaration of willingness to continue with the action occasioned renewed enthusiasm among the people to continue the struggle. But as days went by it became clear that the strike would likely peter out on its own. The third period was characterised by an initial intensification of the effect of the strike and increased civil disobedience as Chief M. K. O. Abiola continued to be brought to court without his release or bail up to the NLC 40-Hour Strike which, though calculated to save face and negotiate a watered-down concession, actually brought the nation to a standstill within its short span. From the end of the 40-Hour Strike the people had already gotten used to the hardships, the government had succeeded to a considerable degree in getting independent outlets for supply of petroleum products in such quantity as to ameliorate the hardship considerably, and the rank of individual tanker drivers compelled by economic hardships to break the strike had grown considerably while many more continued to pressurise the leadership for a rethink or at least a suspension of action. The third period is therefore that of

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decline in terms of the popular ity of the action as well as the capability of the workers to go on with the strike. This explains also why in the last week of the strike the regime did not appear to be too keen on negotiation. The August 17 speech by Abacha which declared the executive councils of the NUPENG, PENGASSAN, and NLC dissolved in the interest of the nation was a hol low ritual. It is like a dwarf hacking at the remains of an already fatally wounded giant and claiming to be itself a giant by virtue of its action.

The third period of the oil workers strike actually came to a close before Abacha made his speech. All the farcical rehash called popular support and the calls by this band of popular supporters for the trial of NUPENG/PENGASSAN leaders in the days following August 17 were actually insignificant to the breaking of that strike, for the strike had already broken long before then. Such farcical displays could only make meaning if understood as part of the dress rehearsals for the consignment of NUPENG and PENGASSAN leaders to the calaboose in one moment of vengeful fascist fury.

The part II of this essay will address some specific tactical issues as well as matters of principle concerning the oil workers strike.

II

That the oil workers made a good showing of themselves during their pro-June 12 political strike is no longer a matter for debate. Nor is it even to be of any service to them and the struggle in general to start singing their praises. What such time as this requires is to objectively scrutinise the objections raised by the opposition in power against the strike in their unre lenting attempts to

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disparage the people’s contribution and also to point out areas of shortcoming in the way and manner the strike was conducted - that is, the limitations inherent in the strategy and tactics of the oil workers.

Exhortation has outlived its purpose, for the play is ended and the good and bad actors alike, confined for the time being to the fatiguing greyness of the dressing chamber must ruminate on their roles. Bad plays indeed offer more materials for improved scripts than acclaimed performances. The argument raised by Abacha and his cohorts, both dubiously and ign orantly, that political strikes went beyond the bound of trade unionism has been dealt with elsewhere [see the NLC 40-Hour Strike]. We are therefore more interested in the specific limitations of political strike from the standpoint of the wielders of the weapon. The strike-derailing role played by all the treacherous trade unions that mouthed their supports for the NUPENG action but could not transform their verbal buckshots into cannonades cannot be underestimated. But the question must be asked that even if they had joined the strike, would the Junta have collapsed? And also that was it even right to have thought they would join the strike?

The fact exactly is that in those days no amount of strike and civil disobedience could have sent Abacha packing because he was still in con trol of all the organs of the State, to which there were no alternatives. History has never known strikes not backed up by rebellion from within the rank of the State or an assault from without leading to the overthrow of an incumbent power. Political strike, whenever the question of political power is at stake, is only a part of the weapon but not essentially the entire weapon itself. If indeed Abacha had ran away because of mere strikes without dis sent in his own apparatus he would have gone down in history not only as a

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most lily-livered tyrant but also a deplorable fool - a disgrace to the institution of statehood.

All this is being said taking into cognisance the fact that the June 12 opposition must also have counted on dissention in the military rank induced by degeneration in social condition as a result of the strike. But this in itself is a naive assumption - a question of once beaten twice shy. For this was exactly what happened in 1993 during the first act of the June 12 drama. And we have seen how it ended, we have seen how it took away power from the hands of a more refined fascist (a machiavellian) and gave it to an uncouth primate instead of actualising June 12. The fact is that history has never failed to lump impotence with illusions. Political impotence is the mother of believe in some imminent political miracles. Once this is established, it is of little significance whether or not the political eunuch realises his infertile state. The June 12 struggle suffered much infertility. Its frigidity is not limited to its instrument of manhood alone, but also its porcupined skin and insensitive lips.

On the question of betrayal of NUPENG and PENGASSAN by the NLC one must really be interested in some meaningless (un) intellectual discourse to carry this too far, for the history of the NLC prior to the event has been that of treachery and strike-breaking-it raises the hope of the people, then enters into some secret mutually benefiting agreements with the regime and comes out fire brigade-fashion with water hose to douse the fire of the hope. It did it several time before the first act of June 12 circus and it did it even many more times during the circus. After all, minimal opposition is the surest means of ensuring that the name of an opposition power features in the payroll of a fascist order. Thus far with the question of political strike.

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The argument by Abacha and his Northern NUPENG that Kokori and his people were prosecuting an ethnic agenda, an argument later to be raved with foaming mouth in the post-August 17 days by the Abacha Popular Support Party, is one deserving of particular attention. To start with, the June 12 Struggle is a national struggle so far as the mandate being defended is a national mandate. It does not matter if in breaking down this mandate to its constituent parts it is discovered that a particular ethnic group, tribe, clan or collection of sub-tribal communes have no share in it. A mandate is national under the present dispensation so far it is a mandate backed up by the majority. For if the minority denies the national essence of democratic will of an overwhelming majority one thing and only one thing alone can be rightly concluded: that the nation itself is due for a break-up or that an Oligarchic rule of the minority is being instituted. Nigeria, it must be said, is torn between these two extremes. The final resolution of this is the historical duty of June 12.

Still on the nationalness of the mandate. In defending such a mandate as expressed in June 12 it does not matter whether or not some elements that voluntarily voted for this mandate with their thumb prints now see reason to back out. The mandate remains national still. One other thing that has to be pointed out without fear of contradiction is the fact that nationality struggle is legitimate. In fact, it even becomes a duty when nationality oppression and discrimination reaches a frightening level such as we presently have in Nigeria. The attempt to always cringe back to their hovels whenever progressives are accused of prosecuting nationality struggle plays into the hands of the opposition in power. There is no fetish about the country Nige ria. To continue to insist that the unity of the country and the survival of

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its people are paramount is to also persistently bear in mind that equality of opportunities must be ensured to all the peoples of the nationalities constituting the nation. To place unity before the fulfillment and attainment of meaningful existence is to be guilty of establishing an imperial order. If John F. Kennedy had admonished his people to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” it was to the extent that he recognised that every citizen of the country, being a part of that country is also doing something for himself as well as for others who in turn reciprocate, resulting in a sort of balance. In short, at the end of the day the society contributes something meaningful to the life of the individual.

It is only right therefore that those members of NUPENG from the oil producing areas, seeing the devastation of their communities as a result of oil prospecting, the destruction of their environment, poisoning of their lives, the destruction of their culture, the devastation of their ancestral cradle all in the name of Black Gold, should rise up and take the challenge to fight for a meaningful existence. They are right in feeling more aggrieved against the Junta than any other people. For them the June 12 Struggle represents a step forward, for it would afford them the ground of bargain as equals. And they are not to be held responsible if somebody in Ogbomoso, Minna or Sokoto could not fathom why they put their political interest before a certain national interest. In the words of Bob Marley “He who feels it knows it all”. As for those in power and their civilian cohorts outside screaming hell about ethnicisation, they are merely exhibiting that well known stock-in-trade of their breed - giving the opposition a bad name in order to nail it to the inquisitional pillory of despotic rule. And what is more, that history knows fully well that these elements, these motley collection of ‘nationalists’ never failed for one

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moment to fall back into their ethnic shell to rouse their deprived kindred in inaccessible hamlets and villages to ethnic rebellion whenever they felt marginalised in their traditional game of cake sharing and treasury-looting. We owe no duty to consider them seriously for they are merely politicians playing politics. At the auspicious moment, they would come back begging cap-in-hand for one vote here, one mandate there. But then the people must tell them “we have seen through your lies like the glass in the showroom; off with you and your carpetbag”.

Now we must turn away from those objections invented by the opposition in power, the Junta, with the aim of disparaging the contributions of the oil workers to those which are founded on truth, albeit with certain distortions. The debilitating effect of the strike is not for us to recount or lament. The endless queues, the grounding of production and commercial activities, the disorganisation of domestic life, the several fire disasters occasioned by hoarding of fuel in inauspicious places, the return of the entire social life to stone age equivalent and many more horrendous realities. But has it not been said that ‘you cannot eat your cake and have it’. If the people must have freedom, they must also be ready to pay the price of freedom. More so that the people have always suffered, the only difference being that the agony of several years is being lumped together in a sudden inferno to cleanse the heart in preparation for a better future.

This side of the fact does not, however, discount from the other side of the fact - that the moment it became clear that necessary supports were not forthcoming from expected quarters the NUPENG leadership ought to have worked out a face-saving arrangement for calling off the strike ‘in the interest of the people’. This in the realisation

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that the oil workers themselves were already battle weary and were being compelled to make extreme sacrifice by continuing with the strike after Kokori’s appearance.

Though the question also comes to fore whether or not even if NUPENG had done this, the regime would still not have gone ahead to hatch its evil ploy against it? Whichever way, the regime would still have been the ulti mate victor as it turned out to be, at least so far as the particular battle was concerned.

The last major question of tactics we shall touch is that of Kokori’s disappearance and reappearance. In fact, this is one major question of tactic. The decision of the NUPENG executive council to put their General Secretary in hiding while accusing the Junta of keeping him in detention without hearing was most ingenious. As earlier mentioned, nothing could have been more demoralising and confusing for the regime than this, just as it did mobilise mass sympathy to the side of the strikers. What indeed made nonsense of the ingenuity was the way and manner of the ‘detained’ General Secretary’s reappearance. Kokori made a fool of himself and all those people who had clamoured for his release and inveighed against the Junta when he came back on his two feet hale and hearty beaming with smile to say that he was in hiding. By this singular act he contrived the swapping of role between the Junta and his supporters. Then it was the Junta that was confused and demoralised; now the strikers and strike backers donned the cloak of moral crisis and confusion. Then the strikers mobilised support, now it was the turn of the Junta to mobilise sympathy.

What indeed NUPENG ought to have done would have been to present Kokori to the world in the garb of a detainee dumped somewhere in the bush along the express road by a

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desperately despotic Junta. This would have been a more mobilising and more novel climax to the drama of disappearance than the deflating humour rendered on July 23. It has to be pointed out though that such a humorous ending would have been most welcomed were it to be that the strike had successfully consigned the Junta to the waste bin of inglorious history and the occasion was the celebration of victory.

All this said it must equally be recognised that the argument on the part of the strike supporters that at least NUPENG should have given them a benefit of information regarding the actual state of things is either uniformed or opportunistic. For who can be so trusted in such time as those turbulent July days? The implication of NUPENG error in Kokori’s reappearance, is first and foremost, that such prank can no longer be repeated and, secondly, that the regime henceforth could also engineer disappearances without trace and blame such on some trumped-up propaganda motive. That reappearance will go down in history as one of the gravest blunders of the June12 strike and the one with the most far reaching implication for the people’s struggle against fascism in the nearest future, more so when a most bestial regime is in power.

***Since the second act of the June 12 circus was officially confiscated to the cooler with one Herculean speech on August 17, 1994 and the Junta un leashed fascist gangsters on the people and their leaders, the NUPENG and PENGASSAN leaders have been hauled off to some remote Sahel concentration camps and ‘normalcy’ has returned, if only for a while. But does this discount from the unique contribution of the oil workers to the June 12 Struggle? Or does it even mean an

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end to the struggle itself? Definitely not. The struggle of our people has become even richer since the strike than before it. June 12 is a spirit that will continue to haunt the memory of the nation until the contradictions it reflects are resolved. The struggle of a people cannot be confiscated to the waste bin of history by confiscating their leaders to the calaboose, or by defeating one nascent phase of it.

-30/31 January, 1995.

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THE 40-HOUR STRIKE: A CONSUMMATE EXPRESSION OF TOTAL DECAY

IThe 40-hour NLC’s Political Strike of August 3rd and 4th, 1994 has helped answer more ques tions than it bargained for but left many unanswered - at least so far as the burnt out will of the pawny mass is concerned.

But need it be said that only RUSE itself reserves capacity for springing up unsurprisingly predictable surprises as had been demonstrated by Pascal Bafyau’s NLC. At no other time in the history of both the trade union and the labour movement in Nigeria has honour and dignity been consigned to the refuse dumps of Lagos streets than the period under examination.

And to hear that this 40-hour strike, this lame strike, half heartedly embarked upon by an equally lame labour movement, has been seen as totally uncalled for, as a step too gigantic for the fabric of the sick (not weak) Nigerian system to absorb! And what is more, that these objections, these complains, and NTA Network-orchestrated grumbling and side-talks predicate themselves on the mere (inexplicable) argument that trade unions are not bodies set up to participate in politics - why then must trade unions embark on political strikes? Short memory - short memory indeed, sickeningly glaring demonstration of lack of memory!

But far more important is the fact that if all these woes have been the result of lack of knowledge, our problem (or rather their problem) would have been half solved. Before us, however, is a classical species of mischief-makers and dishonest labour confronting an equally mischievous opposition. That is why no

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matter how boring or unpleasant this story of infamy may appear, we have no option but to go over it. And if we have chosen to do this, then it must be done with the thoroughness it deserves. The rotten Congress is not to be helped by sparing it the agony of bashing its rotten essence against the brick wall of reason. The rottenness of the Congress cannot be masked from reality, just as it cannot be magnified in our imagination beyond the reekiness and foul of its reality. It is the duty of revolution theory in our time, no matter how unpleasant this may be, to kill in images and vivid pictorial details the rottenness of the Congress as it is today in order that a space may be created for the rejuvenation of the labour movement. Pascal’s Congress must necessarily come under the barrel of our revolutionary pen ala Ngugi. Then and only then will it be possible to properly locate and appreciate the arguments of the accused and accusers alike in their utter nudity. The congressional political strikers and their congressional and non-congressional non-political strike advocates are identical twins of the same pair of monstrous beings-a consummate expression of the opportunism characteristic of our social life. We must begin from the beginning.

II

To begin from the beginning, so far as the 40-hour NLC strike is concerned is to invoke the ghost of the unenthusiastic spirit of the 1993 involvement of the Congress in the June 12 Struggle.

The pro-June 12 strike of August 27th, 1993 was forced on the leadership by the rank-and-file workers. The CD’s demonstration of the feasibility and ease of calling an effective strike in spite of the influence of the traditional Labour cannot also be overemphasized. The July 5, 6,7 street

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protests and August 12, 13, 14 sit-at-home protests made meaning to Pascal’s labour in so far as they were a practical challenge to its false image, as the sole repository of knowledge of mobilisation of the people for mass action, that the domain of mass action and strikes belong to the working class alone. And for Pascal to reclaim his mandate, he must ride on the back of the exigencies thrown up by the June 12 mandate and would have no other way of doing it than to resort to that weapon he had so mastered -scientific trade unionism - (scientific indeed). And there was a huge deal of science in Pascal’s ways. What, indeed, could be more scientific than a strike that commenced on a weekend through two days of public holiday? And by the peculiar logic of his science a strike need not neces sarily be mobilised for? Reality must be made to stand on its feet.

This strike lasted six days, three of them holidays, and were it not for the NUPENG initiative, which necessarily paralysed transportation, rank-and-file workers wouldn’t have known there was an action in the real sense. But this was not all as far as scientifism in trade union struggle was concerned. Pascal and his cohorts subverted NLC’s historic August, 18 Enugu demand for the installation of the winner of the 12 mandate on or before August 27. These scientists settled for a rather dubious demand for a return of the country to constitutional rule and hand over of power to the Senate President. And just as they had begun this psychedelic dance, the chicken-hearted rebel, Uncle Chukwumerije, furiously thumped the drumbeats of an impending fuel price hike. Pascal’s men fell for it in a manner that suggested a sort of secret agreement between them and the government. For NLC became wholly pre-occupied with the Interim Government’s hike of fuel prices by 700%, that it abandoned June 12 and actively sought to yank its institution off the national agenda. Another

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evidence of criminality of these scientific unionists was their practical recognition of Shonekan’s universally derided puppet complex. By affording that fumbling contraption the benefit to negotiate the prices of fuel with NLC, Pascal and his followers invariably conferred some legitimacy on it. It is now part of history that the November 17 midnight putsch by Abacha and his gang was helped to legitimacy at a time when the ruling clique had almost completely lost all initiative and capacity of further surprises when Pascal’s Congress relegated all democratic demands to the background, got 350% increment in the prices of petroleum products as against the government intended 700% and came out to hurrah before our wearied people- “we got three quarters of what we bargained for”, isn’t that excellent? This was a congress many people had thought would play the leading role in the June 12 Struggle. Indeed, on the 23rd of June, 1993, the day of the annulment, of University of Lagos students stormed NLC’s Secretariat to impress on Pascal’s ‘people’ the imperative of taking over the struggle as becoming of a trade union centre. Ironically, the same stu dents invaded the building on the 30th of June, 1993 in an attempt to put to rest Pascal’s Congress self-denigration after it know-towed before IBB and agreed to betray June 12. From grace to grass could be less than a week’s journey indeed.

From the foregoing it could be seen then that the 1994 half-heartedness of the Congress in responding to the renewed struggle for the mandate’s actualisation was not a new thing. That it had to take ten key unions including NUPENG, the Dock Workers Union, the National Union of Bank, Insurance and Financial Institutions Employees, the Civil Service Technical Workers Union, the National Union of Local Government Employees among others to threaten the NLC with independent action before the leadership even took the decision to address June 12 concretely

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only goes to show this. Then what about the demands?. Initially the NLC merely insisted that the president-elect, Chief M. K. O. Abiola should not be arrested should he go ahead to declare himself as president. Arresting him, NLC felt, would lead to ‘tension’. Later, a clause was non-committally added, viz., that the military should disengage from politics and return the country to democratic rule as soon as possible. So that it would appear that if the perpetration of injustice would not lead to the heightening of tension Pascal’s NLC would tolerate it. The same thing also goes for the second demand; how ‘soon’ is ‘soon’ remains to be defined, and what is meant by democratic rule outside the context of June 12 which has been agreed upon by both the people that voted and those who did not vote out of contempt for Babangida’s endless transition, and the world community at large as the fairest and freest in the history of Nigeria remains a mystery before every Nigeria with a speck of sincerity left in him.

But even on these half-hearted demands the Congress remained as inconsistent as ever. Several times the declaration of ultimatum was postponed and several times the psychology of our people was assaulted with undulating hopes. If there had ever been an organisation in this country that has promised heaven and hell and raised the people’s hope with its verbal ejaculations, it was the Congress. And if there was an organisation that has ever dashed the hope of its membership or rather an organisation whose membership allowed the centre to pull the wool over their eyes it was this same Congress.

Against that background, the general expectation of people in the streets and rank-and-file workers was that state branches of the Congress and those affiliate unions that had opposed the centre on its decision to shun pro-June 12 strike would immediately catch in on mass sentiment and the

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awakening of the masses by CD to join the June 12 train and once and for all rid themselves of the collective muck the centre had invited on the mass. But the reality was that the Congress fish - and this was indeed a big fish - was not only rotten in the head but right through to the tail. And so it was that it had to take the decisive, patriotic action of NUPENG, once more, to restore sanity to the rank of labour. The demands for the release of President M. K. O. Abiola and the immediate actualisation of the June 12 mandate made by the NUPENG, though initially scorned by the Congress at large, was what saved the face of the entire labour. It has to be said, however, that even at this decisive moment, opportunism was never for a single moment discarded as the major stock-in-trade; one union after the other, one local branch after the other, sporadically and trickishly declared indefinite strike action - not in solidarity with NUPENG, not because of the need to actualise the June 12 mandate, but solely for the fact that the NUPENG action which had disrupted transportation made it impossible for their members to go to work.

In a country with a genuine central labour organisation the series of mass protests that accompanied the NUPENG strike and the attendant paralysis of social life would have provided the whole of labour in conjunction with other pro-democracy organisations the impetus to push the Abacha Junta from power or at least wrest meaningful concessions from it. But the NLC kept convincing itself and others who would still listen that the domain of pro-June 12 strike was for rabble-rousers and those who wanted to tear the country apart [let’s pray that the NLC itself does not tear apart before the nation does].

It is interesting that all through this period, the NLC Secretariat was always in flight between Aso Rock and 29, Olajuwon Street, Yaba - Lagos. But as the saying goes, “nothing

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in this world can stop an ‘idea whose time has come’. The air-borne crisis-ridden Secretariat eventually landed. And when it did land on Saturday July 30th at Olajuwon, every soul present had thought it would declare a strike from Monday the 1st August. But it picked mid-week again, giving the Abacha Junta four clear days of negotiation. Even this, I later learnt from good authority, was arrived at only after the rank-and-file in the corridors of 29, Olajuwon Congress headquarters had threatened the leadership with physical and esoteric assault. The same au thority also had it that when one of the reporters present asked Pascal to clarify whether or not the strike was only for the release of President Abiola or for the actualisation of the June 12 mandate, the Congress president went into something like a fearful mock-fit reminding all the pressmen he could see around that the Congress was only interested in the release of ‘Chief Abiola’ and nothing more. He begged not to be misquoted. Pascal Bafyau promptly signed the document declaring the strike action before, once again, fleeing the Congress headquarters.

And so it was that we had the 40-hour strike. And what a particularly strategic time it was to fix the commencement of a strike? NUPENG had already made the country ungovernable and, the masses, suffering under the impact of the NUPENG action and conscious of their historical respon sibility as the ultimate power that could determine how long the Abacha Junta would last, were already psychologically prepared for an open revolt and only leadership was needed. Only a semblance of credibility and they would shake out their gourds of gunpowder. And what is more, CD activists were always at hand to forward the ‘season of pro tests’ agenda at every opportune moment.

The colours that attended the [indefinite] 40-hour strike were the handiwork of proficient CD hands and the ever-ready

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mass of our people. The declaration alone was what belonged to the Congress. Or how do we explain the fact that while the Congress leadership had four clear days of grace between the declaration and the commencement of strike action, some local union bodies still came out to say that their non-participation in the 40-hour event was due to breakdown of communication between them and the centre, a fact [fact indeed!] which COMRADE Pascal Bafyau himself confirmed on NTA Network news within the first 18 hours of the action? Meanwhile, during those four days, four days within which the Congress must put everything in place for its rebirth, it still had the time to answer an ‘urgent’ call from Aso Rock.

It has been said over and over again by people of varying political persuasions that a Congress’ strike was not a thing to be taken seriously, and really not many conscious politicians [at least those familiar with the workings of the Congress] really took Pascal Bafyau and his lieutenants seriously when they declared their action. Many progressives, including this writer, saw in the Congress strike only an attempt to kill two birds with one stone- i.e. save face by acting but at the same time dousing the fire of the NUPENG strike by calling off a strike it never began in the first instance. It was an old trick of the labour aristocrats.

But even then one would have expected that the face-saving act would be done in such a meticulous manner as not to end up scalding this moon face in the hot water of mass fury. Or what is to be said of that labour leader who because of breakdown of negotiation commenced an industrial action against the employer [and thereby oppressor] only to turn round and call off this action on the mere strength of assurance that such suspension of action would facilitate the renewal of negotiation? If Pascal Bafyau had assured 30 million Nigerian TV viewers 18 hours after the

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commencement of action that in the next 48 hours he expected more success if not a total strike, a hundred percent strike, then the question must indeed be asked why he did not wait for this Zero Hour before seeking argument in favour of suspension of the action. With the indecently hasty suspension, every observer had expected that the Congress-orchestrated circus show should have come to an end. But Labour’s capacity for laborious comedy seemed inexplicably strong. A few days earlier, and for the first time in recent years, comrade Pascal Bafyau had travelled by road [!] all the way from Abuja to Lagos - a fact that drew strong notes of commendation from foes and friends alike. Now another no less commendable feat was also performed - he hung in the corridors of Aso Rock for hours all in the interest of the NATION: definitely not a material for cynical reproach! So it was that Pascal Bafyau and his labouring delegation got some ‘positive assurance’ from the ‘Head of State’ that the ‘Basorun’ was going to be released and the fatherland shall forever know nothing but peace and tranquillity. So it was that the court had to commence sitting after closing hours, and granted bail behind the backs of counsel and accused alike. Who would say then that labour did not try? Who would claim that labour’s ‘positive assurance’ was not positive enough? Or that the 5th of August dusk judgement was not a positive indication of the thoroughly positive essence of the positivity of this ‘historic’ assurance? And who would say such a case has no precedence in history? No matter how short the memory of the nation is it has to be said in testimony to the ‘honour’ of our judiciary and the ‘competence’ of the presiding judge that one year is not too long a period to obliterate an event such as the midnight [or rather midnight-minus 3 hours] judgement by Justice Ikpeme less than 48 hours to the June 12 elections which attempted to stop the

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elections. The only unique difference was that then the key actor in the first circus was the Association for Better Nigeria [ABN], a fascist organisation with millions of spurious members across the country and an arms ‘trader’ as Capone.

From the foregoing it must have become clear to the reader that Pascal’s Congress never intended going on a political strike in the first place, nor did it ever embark on one. The Congress had a strike forced on it by the exi gencies of our time and it betrayed it and also betrayed itself. Any trade union that mismanages the weapon of strike opportunistically must be ready for an unpalatable repercussion when it will desire this instrument in its sharpest, most dependable form. Thus far.

If we have had to go through this tortuous and convoluted thought process in order to highlight the role played by the central labour in the June 12 event up till the great victory of unsigned bail bond, it is for no other reason than that the event before us is as much tortuous, convoluted and unthinkable in a society of people of honour. And once we have embarked on this tortuous road, once we have tasted of the craze of this crazy route, we must follow it through to the end, so that we may be able to learn from experience and may not by any stroke of ill-luck find ourselves lured back like junkies to the convulsing appetite of this convoluted route. The Congress’ opportunistic load of yam must be emptied to the rounded bottom of the pot and eaten hot without delay, for to tarry is to risk eating a tasteless, sickeningly cold dinner of pounded yam. This is the domain of the next part of this scrutiny.

III

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In the analysis so far made, so much has been ascribed to ‘Pascal Bafyau’ and ‘Pascal Bafyau’s Congress’ to the extent that the error of over-personalisation of concrete social issues on the part of the reader cannot be completely ruled out. It is, therefore, of utmost importance, before going further, to make clarifications, namely that: Pascal Bafyau, in spite of his many and nonetheless boring appearances in the ongoing analysis, makes meaning in so far as the leader of the NLC in its most inglorious era is concerned, the other elements within the Congress, be they members of the Central Working Committee (CWC), members of the National Executive Council (NEC) or the National Administrative Council (NAC), are no less responsible for the present state of affairs than Pascal Bafyau himself. And finally that all these people, all these individuals, are products of a particular historical development of the labour movement, not as a body existing independently of and outside of the society at large, but rather as that constituting a highly consequential component of a whole.

It suffices here to mention however that neither the history of the labour movement nor that of the NLC constitutes an objective of this work. The domain of history belongs to chroniclers and palace griots. Chronological record of the activities of the Congress must be sought outside of here and at some other time. The links in the chain of events that led to the kind of NLC that found it difficult embarking on a successful political strike is the focus of this section.

The NLC along with the National Association of Nigerian Students [NANS] which in its programme and agitation proved itself too hard to be crushed by Buhari/Idiagbon’s sledge hammer, wet the ground for the ex-dictator, IBB’s ride to power when they exposed and fought the fascistic tendencies of that regime. IBB’s gimmicks about respect for human rights and

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military democracy and the orchestrated IMF debate gave his regime the much-needed time to consolidate in office. The “Ango-Must-Go” student protest of May/June 1986 which swept the whole nation like harmattan fire in the savannah grassland exactly nine months after IBB came to power and the lackadaisical attitude of the regime to the crisis was what first brought the NLC and the regime together in an open confrontation. If the regime had not recognised the decisive and revolutionary potentials of the proposed 4th of June, 1986 nation-wide protest by the Congress, then under the leadership of Comrade Ali Ciroma, and moved in to crush it even before it took off, perhaps the history of the Congress and the nation could have acquired a significantly different colouration from what it is today. More so that this was a regime that had just carried out the execution of purported coup plotters 3 months earlier without any considerable popular support.

For a conscious dictator like IBB [a Machiavellian] the June 4 confrontation was a shave too close. If the kind of fascistic programmes he had in focus for the people must come off as planned, then the wings of the Congress must be clipped. His earlier hurried attempt to prop up a Ben Shamang [nevertheless an old time opposition] shortly after the June 4 event did not come off well enough perhaps because it was rather hasty. But by February 1988, the NLC convention held at Benin City featuring Shamang and his gang under the exotic name of ‘the democrats’. Meanwhile before February, IBB had suffered more Congress bashing which convinced him more than ever before that the body must be tamed. Throughout 1986 and 1987 the relationship between Comrade Ciroma led-NLC and NANS [though purportedly banned] waxed stronger. A product of this was the embarrassment elements within the Congress, and NANS, in league with progressives across the country, caused the

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regime when the pro-Apartheid British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher made an unpalatable visit to Ni geria on January 8, 1988.

That the regime should proscribe NLC following the crisis that attended the Benin Convention and after which the Shamang group, having lost out, at tempted to seize the secretariat, is inexplicable except that there was a government ‘hidden agenda’. It would appear [and this is being said without fear of contradiction] that the Shamang opposition was a calculated move on the part of the government to seek an opportunity to hammer the Congress. For if it was that easy for the State to have moved into the NLC and take over in order to restore peace, between the warring factions, nothing stopped it from using the same machinery to call to order the erring party in the conflict. The Babangida approach of jailing both the wronged and the wrongdoer is, to say the least, opportunistic and completely criminal.

In the 9 months of the Michael Ogunkoya Caretaker [undertaker if you like] Committee set up to administer the NLC following the state take over, what was left of progressives in the NLC was either decimated or turned into trade union eunuchs. In 9 months the ‘progressives’ in the Congress had their spirits and bodies tempered and sobered. For who could wait any longer to see the work of several years destroyed and washed away! Of course if these progressives had been revolutionary progressives in deed as in word, Ogunkoya could not have been able to administer anything, for the leadership would have fought resolutely the government intervention. But it has to be acknowledged that these progressives were also a pack of labour aristocrats. They were learned in all the methods of articulation and sound theoretical grounding from the East while from the West they borrowed liberalism. The Congress since its inception,

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even in the days of esteemed Comrade Hassan Sunmonu, has always been a bureaucracy, sometimes mistaken for a government parastatal by the man in the street - at least its creation and organisation was also backed up by decrees. This reminds me of an account by a friend. Sometimes in 1993, shortly before the June 12 event, he came across a perfectly dressed and apparently educated fellow standing in front of the Olajuwon headquarters of the NLC, awe-struck as though seeing this unexpected ‘edifice’ for the first time. My good friend, a curious fellow, wanting to know what had struck this man, moved closer to him - only for him to see that this man not only gaped at the edifice but was also thinking aloud. ‘N-L-C’ he spelt out, then asked genuinely “what can it be that goes on this house? Nigeria Labour Congress, may be an unemployment office”. At this point their eyes met and the soliloquising man came to his senses, obviously embarrassed, and left. To this man, the Congress could have been another government institution where strange things aimed at making life difficult for the masses take place. There is also the problem of the general secretaries in whom are vested so much powers constitutionally and by convention such that in most unions without the support of the General-Secretary, an employee of the union and a professional trade union bureaucrat, nobody can hope to become the union president. The consequence of this is that in the last three decades, the trade union movement has produced a crop of trade union chieftains, some Capones, whose whims and caprices determine the strategic direction of their unions. One only needs to go to the factory floor when a ‘GS’ is coming ‘from Lagos’ to see the cringing reverence they accord him. The General Secretary was [and is still] the Alpha and Omega. There is no doubt that if the Colonial District Officer [D.O] were to be

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around in one of our post-independence factories on such occasion, he would readily become green with envy.

The labour aristocracy constitutes a privileged social group within the labour movement. As such, when the NLC came under IBB’s hammer, the aristocrats could not have been expected to put their lives on the line and concretely mobilise the workers against such ban in a revolutionary way. Their instinct was to protect their job, their privileged position, especially by unprincipled compromises. Throughout the time the aristocracy was in the cooler, little was done in respect of the conditions of workers. All hands were on deck to ensure a speedy return to normalcy. The aristocracy, working with the government-imposed administrator, was more interested in regaining its position. Labour’s involvement in the April/May 1988 protest over the removal of oil subsidy initiated by NANS was a product of the effort of elements outside the mainstream aristocracy. However, most of the key organisers of the Joint Action Committee (JAC) idea were never part of the negotiations and compromises that rescued IBB from the frustration occasioned by the workers’ nationwide action. Irrespective of whether it realised this fact or not, the April/May JAC action helped the aristocracy in regaining the Congress. For it was only after this that the IBB regime took seriously the issue of restoring normalcy to the Congress. The regime was quick in realising that with the NLC there would always be a place to run to whenever negotiation became necessary and that it would be more difficult dealing with individual unions p and there were 41 of them] given the vastness of ‘settlement” the whole exercise would entail.

But the aristocracy too was equally temperate and ready for compromise. The compromise eventually led to the emergence of Pascal Bafyau as a consensus candidate of both the

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progressives and the democrats in the December 1988 mock elections. In the states too the same compromises, consensus and horse-trading obtained.

That Pascal Bafyau was sponsored by IBB is open to debate. But what is absolutely clear is the fact that IBB found in Bafyau’s NLC an organization he could work with in the pursuit of his fascistic programme for the nation.

The covert and, later, overt opposition of Pascal’s NLC to the mass revolt of May/June 1989 [anti-SAP riot], NLC acceptance of the ban on the Labour Party among 12 other political groups in September 1989, the corporate participation in SDP, its non-participation in the September 5, 1990 National Conference organised by democratic organisations under the umbrella of the National Consultative Forum NCF and its nonchalance towards the just and democratic agitations of the students movement in the period spanning the May 1991 Academic Reforms [ACAREF] students protests to the events that led to the historic June 30th 1993 storming of the 29 Olajuwon Congress headquarters are but a few of the helps rendered to the IBB regime by Pascal Bafyau’s Congress.

Fascism cannot rise to power without taking effective control of the trade union movement. Liberalism in trade unionism makes the unions a fertile ground for fascist take over. Where the trade union movement re fuses to be settled or assimilated into the system, then it must be smashed. But every wise fascist knows fully well that he can never completely smash trade union agitation - he settles the union or raises inconsequential cronies and nonentities to the position of relevance. IBB was a wise fascist. His regime alone witnessed more government backed labour workshops and seminars than all the seven regimes before him put together. Before the Babangida years labour seminars were meant

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to sharpen trade union agitators ideologically and expose the worker to his true condition of exist ence as a representative of an oppressed class. But the IBB years taught labour leaders that seminars, apart from being a forum for churning out junks on ‘industrial harmony’, ‘scientific trade unionism’ and ‘collective bargaining’ could also be dollar-making ventures for a privileged few. The hustling that attended Labour functions in the last two years of IBB were indeed legendary beyond that which could be explained by selfless love for union cause. The culture of settlement in Babangida time and as it is today [1994] know no class barrier.

It is equally on record that the elections that returned Pascal Bafyau to office for a second term was fully financed by the State. Every other person in the street had thought that time was up for Pascal. In fact for the more optimis tic ones, December 1992 was a magical date during which affiliates would not only voice out their anger against the leadership but also show the leadership out in a democratic fashion. But were the affiliates disgruntled? Or rather, were they disgruntled beyond being disposed to some bundles of oil money? It is on record that only NUPENG did much as speak out against Pascal Bafyau’s 4 years at the helm of affairs. The remaining 40 affiliates were not ‘disgruntled’.

What other evidence do we need, therefore, to show that Pascal is not the problem of the NLC, but rather that we have before us the case of a cancer-afflicted system through the length and breadth of which malignant cells have metastasised. Pascal Bafyau’s Congress has done more work for fascism in Nigeria than a hundred thousand completely loyal national guardsmen would probably have done. The generation that stormed the Congress on June 30th 1993 would be building upon its past effort by immediately going to the drawing board and putting together

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plans for the seizure of political power from that class that has created the conditions for the emergence of the treacherous central labour organisation. The destruction of the present Congress and the realisation of a better Nigeria in which social and economic justice, fair play and moral uprightness shall be the watchword are paramount.

The generation that stormed the Congress must repeat its action at some other time, some other place and some other level. Combative intellectual assault is part and parcel of this much needed generational ac tion.

IV

When a government for which subterfuge, petty intrigues and misinformation are official instruments of crisis management and an official state religions suddenly declares that political strike is outside the domain of trade union politics and this declaration is echoed and parroted by a degenerate labour movement, nothing can be better than to ignore them to the fate of all tailers behind time. The rabble-rousers in power and bandits in labour are better allowed to steep in the murky waters of their self-afflicted delusion. Their footless imagination must of necessity be left to the test of the wind tunnel of history that it may sort itself out.

The notion that propaganda is blatant lying can only gain currency in a society where people have not developed the mental faculty to enable them differentiate between falsehood and truth or where they have already lost it. In Nigeria, strangely enough (and this is true for most other things), it is difficult to estimate whether we suffer from the latter or from the former. Hitherto, we have learned to live with government lies, laugh them off, take them for granted and

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tragically enough, shape our realities according to these lies. The damage done to the psyche of the Nigerian person under 100 years of colonialism, 25 years of irresponsible ‘self’ rule and another 8 years of Bonapartist rule is a material for further research in social psychology and philosophy.

But for now what can only be done is to take up issues as they may affect the resolution of immediate problems at hand. And as such, if not for the purpose of immediate import but for the purpose of historical record so that coming generations may have a point of reference in the struggle against opportunism and in trade unions, it is important to theoretically combat the erroneous notion that political strikes are inimical to the national interest.

The basis for political strike in general and a pro-June 12 strike by the NLC are to be sought partly in the economic interests of the workers. The constitution, ethics, decrees, orders and epileptic judicial proclamations of a state that has played itself out of favour with the mass of our people cannot at the same time be used to assess the correctness, effectiveness and, more importantly, the objective necessity for the action of our people or the working class.

What does the recent history of the NLC show other than that the arena of politics, more so partisan politics, is not the exclusive prerogative of the so called political class, that it is not in the interest of the workers organised in the trade unions to offer themselves as pawns on the various political cheese boards of the ruling class known as parties, but also for them to create their own chess board, or at least define within the existing parties their own collective class interest. The formation of the Nigeria Labour Party in 1989 following the lifting of the ban on partisan politics by the IBB regime was the handiwork of the NLC in conjunction with progressives and left forces across the

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country. And the fact that the party crossed the many hurdles created by the regime to become one of the political associations approved by the National Electoral Commission (NEC) is a prove of the conscientiousness with which the task of party building was carried out - at least within the limits permitted by labour opportunism and government hypocrisy.

If, however, the NLC had failed to oppose the banning of the NLC along with other approved political associations by invoking the instrument of strike, it goes only to show the compromising and opportunistic nature of the then one-year-old Pascal Bafyau leadership and not necessarily that political strike goes beyond the calling of the trade unions.

The Northern NUPENG and those northern branches of the NLC that dissociated themselves from the 40-hour strike on the basis that it was a political strike can only be guilty of same - opportunism. Not even their northernness can explain the parochialiness of the views they held. For where were these workers when the NLC sent representatives to the Social Democratic Party [SDP]? Where were they when the political commission of the NLC officially called on workers to join the SDP. If only we learn from our past, our present would definitely be more glorious. But we fail to learn. Honour, dignity and glorious deeds, we can only speak of in the past tense. The involvement of the Nigerian working class in partisan politics in the late 80’s and early 90’s are but a parody of the glorious deeds of our fathers in the colonial era, just as the attempt of those surviving actors of the glorious deeds of 1940’s and 50’s to make advances over their past by creating exclusive working class parties in the 60’s paved way for the emergence of left opportunism in practice.

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Even then, it cannot be considered beyond our brief to call the attention of our disparate working class to the political essence of the two greatest strikes in our history.

The COLA Strike of 1942 and the General Strike of 1945 were at the same time economic and political strikes. The demands for better conditions of service for ‘native’ [Nigerian] workers were, more than their immediate economic essence concrete challenges to the political domination of our people by the colonial power. It is on record that the 1945 General Strike, the participation of the Nigerian working class under Papa Imoudu in the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon [NCNC] and other fronts of political struggle not only gave impetus to the struggle of our people at home, but also earned the struggle international acclaim. The 1945 5th Pan-African Congress, which has been said to be the most important in the history of African people, did not fail to give a place of pride to the Nigerian working class. Though the Nigerian working class delegation was not in London for the Congress, key organisers of the Congress were in constant correspondence with the Nigerian working class under the leader ship of Pa Imoudu. The Nigerian working class enjoyed the attention of George Padmore and W.E.B. Dubois among others.

The role of the Nigerian working class in facilitating the fund-raising for the delegates of the NCNC on the Pan-Nigerian delegation to the colonial of fice in 1946 cannot also be over-emphasised. And what is more, that the Pan-Nigerian delegation was really Pan-Nigerian in essence, not a Southwest delegation. The 13,481 pounds Pan-Nigerian delegation money bore no regional/ethnic mark. Ilorin, Bida, Adamawa, Minna, Owerri, Port Harcourt , Bonny, Calabar, to mention but a few, gave their mandates and money to this delegation. We were indeed once a great people.

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The political role of the Nigerian working class movement in our struggle for independence is on no where better captured than in that epochal book “Imoudu Biography: A Political History of Nigeria [1939-50]” by Baba Olumide Omojola, a renown economist. Baba shows how the involvement of the working class in the struggle for independence gave a national meaning and impetus to the struggle and how its exclusion from it earned us the type of flag independence we got.

The 1964 General Strike was part of the quest of the Nigerian working class to call the attention of the ruling class to their obligations as rulers. As Baba rightly put it “the 1964 General Strike was kicked off by Imoudu as a strike against the enemy of democracy and social welfare. The Marxist Socialist Workers and Farmers Party and the Nigeria Labour Party of 1964/5 are a product of this political effort”. Thus far with political strikes in history on a national scale. We shall definitely have cause to return to this particular issue on a more universal scale before rounding up this piece.

The attempt to draw a hard and fast line between an economic strike and a political strike is a product either of half-knowledge or dishonesty. Often times, in the case of the bulk of the fellowship, it results from half-knowledge, while on the part of the leaders and the government, it is more of dishonesty and fraud, an attempt to mislead innocently ignorant rank-and-file workers. And in our case they exist in large numbers.

The erroneous view that politics is all about standing for elections, campaigning, sitting in parliament, lobbying, and scheming, often times gentleman fashion but intermittently in open violent battles involving thugs, hired assassins and mob is that which must be corrected.

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So long as politics boils down to how the society shares among its members the product of social production, then the workers cannot shy away from politics and reserve the right to use any instrument at their disposal to advance their collective political aims.

It was not the name or the flag of the SDP that attracted the NLC to it. Granted, there are no significantly fundamental differences between the programmes of the SDP and NRC, the fact that the SDP had the semblance of a welfarist programme, especially in the areas of education and health, reflect more the economic interests of the worker than the NRC’s avowedly conservative programme. While it is true that the most immediate economic interest of the worker is served by wages and allowances and other conditions of service in which case he relates to his employer as against relating to the government, it is important to note that the most far reaching effect on the economic condition of the worker is not the correctness or not of decision taken by the employer at factory floor level or sectoral level.

Government policy-politics on a provincial, state or national scale or international scale put the final seal on the economic fate of the worker. If majority of Nigerian workers therefore had voted for an economic programme as represented by their overwhelming vote for the SDP and such a programme has been scuttled by scuttling their votes, they reserve the right to challenge such infringements.

Economic struggle of the working class as represented by struggle for wage increase, leave bonus, transport allowance, lunch ticket and rebates of all shades are reflective of a comparatively low level of consciousness. To challenge fundamental programmes of government as they affect the workers is to operate at a higher level. To recognise the

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inflationary effect every wage increase would have on the overall economy and as such on the welfare of the worker is for the worker to have realised the limits of this so-called economic struggle, which of course appeals more to the appetite of opportunists in labour and reactionaries in government.

To be partisan, to take position in partisan politics, is for the working class to have come to realise itself. It is a recognition that the interest of the class coincides with a particular overall programme of politics and social economics. The arena of politics is not a stage for the exclusive use of politicians to demonstrate and act out the oddities, absurdities and intrigues characteristic of that category of people deeming themselves the natural ruler over the people by God’s grace.

If anything at all, far from having more than its own share of politics, the Nigerian working class is guilty of too little partisan politics. This again is traceable to the opportunism in the labour movement. We cannot here, however, afford to put the reader through the pain of recounting this woeful tale of the main issue at stake.

From the point of view of simple logic and morals, the fact that the Nigerian workers are part of the Nigerian society against which an injustice has been committed, presupposes that the labour movement must also lend a voice to the people’s effort. In so doing all forms of legally recognised and hitherto illegal means are open to application. For if the constitution in the first place does not recognise the application of the weapon of strike as a means of resolving political crisis, the same constitution also has no place for an act of annulment which equally constitutes illegality in more than a way. Firstly, in the sense that the annulling government is that without the people’s mandate, a government that stole its way to

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power brandishing the bayonet under the cover of darkness, and has maintained itself in power trusting the bayonet in the people’s heart. Secondly, not even the decrees promulgated by this regime created any room for such annulment as it carried out.

The argument that the Abacha Junta was not responsible for the annulment of the elections and/or that it must not be held responsible for the deeds of its predecessor is equally untenable. A Junta is a Junta. The Abacha Junta rode to power on the wave created by the peoples struggle for the actualisation of June 12 mandate. The best such regime could do for itself and for the society at large would have been to actualise the mandate. But the Abacha Junta has demonstrated more than anything else that it only came to help sweep the ‘remains’ of June 12 from the memory of our people through cosmetic changes in the command structures of the army, a caricature conference of ‘his’ [not our] representatives called Constitutional Conference and the laying of bayonets in waiting for brutish blood letting in moments of ‘irresponsible’ popular anger.

Abacha was the one who sent out the bayonet and tanks to crush the June 12 movement in its infancy when Lagos witnessed its biggest demonstration in history on July 5, 6, and 7, 1993. This same regime could therefore not have been taken seriously when it spoke of opening a chapter different from its predecessor.

The rejuvenation of the June 12 Struggle in May, 1994 is a testament to the fact that our people, at least a section of our people, have realised themselves [woken up from time immemorial slumber] and come to recognise the need to defend their honour and dignity. The refusal of a people to crumble before the bayonet is not an act of stupidity as a trader ‘friend’ of mine once pointed out, but rather a declaration of the human element in such a people. There was the aspect of honour and

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dignity to the June 12 Struggle, which indeed in the final analysis determines the extent to which any people can pursue their struggle. This, more than any other thing, propelled the Vietnamese; it pushed the Palestinians just as it did the Koreans to mention but a few. The 40-hour strike, far from being an overzealous act on the part of the Congress, in fact shows the wretchedness of the lots of which the Congress is made up. The declaration of the 40-hour strike was an act of cowardice in politics and reaction in thought rather than too much radicalism, as the opponents of political strike would want us to be lieve.

Ours is a country of uniqueness and several absurdities. What else can be expected of a country of 250 ( ala Abacha) nations and nationalities (and of course tribes) fused together by the order of the British Crown into a nationless Crown Colony, and later, a nationless state, other than absurdities in 250 different shades?

Today, thirty-five year after independence, and on the threshold of the twenty-first century, the ghostly figure of the working class once again dons the misty shroud of cowardice, in a particularly reverted fashion. The working class was marginalised from the struggle for independence; today the working class marginalises itself from the struggle for democracy-what a colourful addition to our many self-identities. 251 absurdities! - To score 100.4% is to a genius in the field of the absurd.

The fact that Pascal Bafyau’s Congress carved for itself the role of being the pall-bearer of our pro-democracy struggle to its final resting place must not blind us from locating this struggle in a world perspective vis-à-vis the glo bal working class movement. Rather, it is this that has made it even more imperative that Pascal’s Congress be seen through a global

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pro-democratic prism before its final confiscation to the evil forest to join other untouchables preceding it and prepare the place for other untouchables soon to come - our untouchables are countless and the season of cleansing has come. No matter how unpleasant it may be and no matter what role the imperialists have carved out for themselves in the present pro-democracy wave that started sweeping across the world since the last year of the 80s, the objectivity of the changes going on in the world cannot be underestimated. For the countries of the former Eastern bloc it was a radical, disorderly, yet the only possible retreat from a communism that has rendered itself useless to the human person because it had purged itself of humanism or doled out too much of humanism where bestiality and moral decay - a legacy of more than three millennia - determined that socialist humanism be spiced with such Western barbarisms as strip-tease, drugs, gun-totting and the likes. For us (that is the whole of Africa) the pro-democracy movement, promoted by the imperialists for whatever rea son, is a training school to give back to our people their humanism, which a hundred years of colonialism has stolen from us, a condition which another thirty years of neo-colonial independence has perpetuated and compounded rather than obliterate, unsurprisingly though.

This humanism - no matter how it comes and no matter on whose instigation - is necessary so that our people will be able to enter the race for human development as human beings and not a park of toothless hounds behind a handful of ancient whining lions. The oppressed strata of our society bear the heaviest burden of this.

Perhaps this is why the pro-democracy dove, wherever it has landed, never resumes flight until it has infested the working

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class with the enlivening rhythms of strikes, street protests and, inevitably, riot - bloody r iots.

We must here recall the role played by the Polish Dockworkers in the Solidarity under the leadership of Lec Welesa in enforcing the disor derly retreat-nay, flight-of Polish Communism; the role played by the Soviet workers in crushing the August, 1991 hardliners’ coup and a host of other Caucasian contributions to the pro-democracy experience.

In Africa the picture is even more glaring - Zaire, Benin, Togo, Zambia, everywhere, the workers have been at the vanguard of pro-democracy movements, introducing their own inventives and colours.

Only at the same time as the Pascal Bafyau’s Congress got its much needed state- bashing for its half-heartedness, in Lesotho, the working class seized the gauntlet by plunging headlong into a strike - a bloody strike-to protest the King’s unconstitutional dissolution of the Parliament. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), an umbrella body of trade unions just like our own NLC, played by far the most significant role in the process leading to the convocation of the CODESA and was never ex cluded, overtly or covertly, from the CODESA effort when it eventually took fuller shape. Everywhere in Africa, the working classes are waking up to their strength as a political force to reckon with. And this is in order.

At this juncture, to continue to rummage in the jungle for reasons why the opponents of political strike should be confiscated to the waste bin of a famished present and an unenviable future is to continue to speak to the deaf. He who has not seen reason here and now can never again see reason - he must be spirited out of existence to make place for new test

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specimens. Pascal’s Congress belongs exactly here.

August, 1994Lagos, Nigeria

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POSTSCRIPT

Since the foregoing lines were written, one unbelievably horrifying event has tumbled over the other, and with June 12 always impressing its indelible mark on it, cropping up over and over again like the proverbial bad coin.

There had been the unconvincingly rendered coup-plot charade, the series of sporadic bombing incidents, attacks on journalists and media houses and a host of other no less disturbing events, all pointing to the fact that Nigeria is slipping into anarchy. On the labour scene, events have become even more dramatic. Pascal’s Congress’ opportunism never saved it from the axe of the regime, which is presently, by decree, restructuring the NLC into 29 unions and plotting to install its agents in power. But we are glad that if this would make it more “manageable” for the regime, it would save the progressives of the Congress’ epileptic interjections in the people’s struggle. Good riddance!

Sylvester Odion-Akhaine, CD General Secretary was hauled off the CD Secretariat Rambo fashion on January 17, 1995 and was never charged to court until he was released on the eve of New Year of 1996 under cir cumstances leaving no one in doubt as to the intention of the state to eliminate him by “accident”. His case mirrors those of countless others currently languishing in jail or constantly on the run, away from fascist terror.

But no event has further demonstrated the extent the clique holding Nigeria hostage would go in sustaining its hold on to power as did the conviction and subsequent execution on November 10, 1995 of Ken Saro- Wiwa and eight other Ogoni minority rights activists. The bestiality of the regime is not only demonstrated by its timings of this atrocious

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act to coincide with the Commonwealth meeting in Auckland, New Zealand and the visit of FIFA president, Joao Havelenge, but also in the frenzy of fascist “popular support” it unleashed using the instrumentality of settlement and coercion. The state governors who addressed the frenzied rallies of these inglorious November days were fascists in the making. The 20,000 Nigerians who on November 21 converged on Abuja in the “national interest” were a “fascist mob” in dress rehearsal. The sudden recourse to anti-imperialist lampoon on the part of the Junta’s ministers is a slip into quasi-pan-Africanism and caricature nationalism in the face of global anti-fascist uproar. The creation of the Federal Character Commission and the National Reconciliation Committee last December is an attempt to do the unfinished work of the defunct Constitutional Conference and institutionalise fascism. Ditto for the creation of the ‘Elder’s Committee’.

All this points to one fact: that the only way the Nigerian ruling class can sustain itself in power under its current state of economic debauchery is by political brigandage - by fascism. The people must therefore learn to fight fascism. The people, in fighting fascism, must avoid the recourse to “rowdyism”, which is the most potent weapon in the hands of the fascist. Popular (mass) action, led by popular organisations is the soul of every popular struggle against fascism.

The large turnout at the December 19, 1995 NADECO rally, coming closely on the heels of Ken and other Ogoni leader’ state-murder and the December 14 disrupted “politicians summit” is an indication of the readiness of our people to defy fascism. The January 4,1996 Ogoni Day rally even further demonstrated this. The people must learn to defy and never tire, fight and never tire, until the fascist tires.

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January 29, 1996Lagos, Nigeria

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june 12 struggle for democracy

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