Mariam Mariam
I had let ( the first part of this write-up for publication, before I travelled to Mali for ten days on the 26th of April, 2006. It was expected to be a platform presented in the spirit of the International Day of Working Class Solidarity, May Day, and it was a reflection of my deep-seated worry about the position of the leadership of Nigeria’s labour movement on the unfolding political issue in the country, related to the third term agenda of President Obasanjo.
It was therefore very satisfying to read on the internet, from the remove of my hotel in Bamako, that the Nigerian working people in their May Day manifestations had emphatically rejected the agenda of the Obasanjo clique to subvert our nation’s constitutional order with the third term maneuverings going on in the National Assembly. From Lagos to Abuja, Ilorin to Enugu, and different parts of Nigeria, the Nigerian working people again proved instinctively that they had a greater appreciation of the class forces at play and in such circumstances can be more militantly expressive than the leadership might be willing to go. As the militant lawyer, Femi Falana rightly summarized at the Lagos May Day rally, “the majority of Nigerians should not be worried that the leadership of labour is once again moving along the dangerous trend, when the chips are down, they will be isolated.”
This quotation from a longstanding and committed fighter for the rights of the working people, Femi Falana, underlines the fact that between the leadership of the labour movement and its allies, a gap of mistrust has appeared that is related to the attitude of the labour leadership to the struggles by the Nigerian people to defeat the Obasanjo clique’s illegal, unpatriotic and immoral steps to subvert our constitutional order.
Of course, given the nature of the event and the groundswell of feeling amongst the working people, even the leadership of the labour movement had to come out to reject the third term agenda, which in fact was a reiteration of an earlier position of the Nigeria Labour Congress. This was not where the problem was located.
The members of the mass democratic movement have become worried that the leadership of the labour movement suddenly became lost in its appreciation of the political process, and became unable to appreciate the gravity of the unfolding events in the country. This position of the labour leadership seems to be a contrived one, and a very self-serving and opportunistic vacation of duty in the real sense of that word. “Comrades, let us also watch it. Nigeria has now been reduced to either pro-third term or anti-third term,” cautioned Adams Oshiomhole, in his May Day speech.
He then rightly remembered those who joined workers in protest, defended its leadership in court or stayed with theworkers m parliament when the Obasanjo regime was a tempting to proscribe the Nigeria Labour Congress. These i eluded Iav.yerGani Fawehinmi and Senator Uche Chukwumerije. These were fact of the situation. but Adams Oshiormhole as not done. Those who rallied against the NLC must also be denounced.
“When NLC was to be de-registered,” Adams reminded the working people, ”Chief Audu Ogbeh called a meeting of PDP members in the Senate and the House of Representatives to tell them that the Bill prepared by the President to de-register NLC mu t be supported by all senators and honourable members of the house and he personally went to the National Assembly to ensure that nobody voted against the bill as proposed: Again we cannot fault the tact· of Adam s’ statement; but his conclusions are ridiculous.
What is political analysis if not the ability to make a concrete analysis of concrete situations as Lenin used to tell his comrades? At a point, it was true that individuals like Audo Ogbeli took very wrong positions vis-à-vis the interest of the working people. But we know that when the chips are down, such individuals would defend their own class interest and that should not surprise anyone, least of all the leaders of the working class movement. However, the imperatives of politics invariably push us to tactical considerations, which often bring strange bed-fellows together in times of crises to fight a common enemy and save the democratic process or the country as the case might be.
Let me illustrate. During the l930s, the Communist Parties and other left wing parties were bitter enemies of the main bourgeois democratic parties in Europe. In the same way that the main imperialist countries; Britain, France and the United States were bitterly opposed to the Soviet Union. But the rampaging evil of fascism brought these enemies into an alliance which fought a bitter war against Hitler, Mussolini and the fascist forces. The world was saved by this alliance, at the cost of over thirty million lives; fascism was beheaded and the post-war order of social democracy which gave many rights to the working people and the poor in Europe was instituted.
Today, Nigeria faces a similar situation. The Nigerian people are locked in battle against the Obasanjo clique: the most unpatriotic, criminally-inclined and authoritarian regime in our recent history. The effort to subvert our constitutional order would open the route to the dictatorship of a man whose policies have systematically eroded our sovereignty; whose social offensive has ruined the working people and the poor; a regime whose economic policies are run by an economic team doing the biddings of imperialism and are nurturing a bandit, crony capitalism which is brazenly stealing our national patrimony. This regime has declared war on our country and its productive forces; this explains why it is so hated by the Nigerian people of all classes; the working people and the poor, the middle-class professionals and even the patriotic sections of the bourgeoisie.
It is therefore incredible that the labour leadership cannot read this reality on the ground. It baffles me that Comrade Adams Oshiomohole feels so bitter about Audu Ogbeh, yet supports Obasanjo who is actually the originator and driver of the policies that ruin the working people and the architect of the Bill that was presented to de-register the NLC! What can be more absurd than that?
The situation in Nigeria today calls on all the patriotic forces to mobilize in order to stop the constitutional subversion process in its tracks as the first step in the more systematic battle to defeat the unpatriotic Obasanjo clique. Anybody reading the political temperature in the country today would be alarmed at the desperation of the Obasanjo clique. They are VERY, VERY DESPERATE to achieve the aim to subvert our country’s constitutional order; and it appears obvious to the discerning observer that they would go to any length, even if the nation burns, to achieve ”tenure elongation”. As I have argued consistently on this page over the last few months, Obasanjo has no exit strategy; the man and members of his clique have committed too many crimes against the Nigerian people to vacate Aso Villa peacefully.
We have all talked about the serial rape of the constitutional order; the incorrigible flouting of court orders and sundry crimes of politics such as the forgery of the Electoral Act of 2002 and Obasanjo’s massive rigging of elections in 2003. Nigerians know that the man has spent money without appropriation, including the most recent fourteen point two-eighty-four billion dollars ($14.284b) or the N1.857 trillion that The Punch newspaper of Tuesday, May 9, 2006 exclusively reported. Obasanjo has sold many of our national assets to his cronies and this unpatriotic dictator has systematically run down some other institutions such as NITEL in order to sell them cheap to cronies.
What we have seen is a tip of the iceberg of monumentally fraudulent practices at the heart of the operations of the Obasanjo clique. I have the feeling that when we would have defeated them and chased them out of Aso Villa at midnight on May 29th, 2007, Nigerians would discover a deep-seated rot that would make us wonder if Abacha was not a saint! It is this fear of being exposed, de-mystified and ridiculed or maybe being sent back to Yola prison that is driving Obasanjo’s desperate ambition to stay on as life president. Boy, that cowardly dictator is scared of the retribution he could get from the Nigerian people!
This background of inflicting a defeat on an unpatriotic, anti-people government is the reason why the Nigeria labour movement must be positioned at the heart of the struggle against the third term agenda. It conforms to the objective interests of the working people to help defeat a regime whose policies are constructed to destroy the working people and their organizations (Obasanjo has just sent a Bill to parliament seeking to proscribe) and whose authoriatarianism constricts the nation’s democratic space.
Comrade Adams and the labour leadership must realise that the issue is not about Audu Ogbeh and whatever position he took in the past; it is fundamentally about getting the minimum basis for the flowering of the democratic space. If the argument has been reduced to “pro-their term and anti-third term” as Adams posited in his May Day address and in his interview on African Independent Television (AIT) on Tuesday, May 9, 2006, it is because that captures the essence of what faces us today in the country – the Obasanjo clique is using stealth, blackmail and Nigeria’s money to bribe legislators to change the constitution in order to get the opportunity to be in power for another 12 years. In real terms, that is a life presidency, because the man is over seventy years old, despite the lies he told that he is just sixty-nine years (at least his son, Gbenga, told the nation so the other day).
The leadership of the labour movement has a huge responsibility to the working people, the poor and Nigeria our country, to shake off whatever anger it has against elements of the political elite like Chief Augud Ogbe; it must realise that the issue has grown beyond the pains felt from yesterday’s battles. We have to carry the historical responsibility of helping to defeat the master of third term through a broad patriotic coalition of the working people, its organizations and leadership on the one hand and the patriotic section of the political elite on the other. Today, Audu Ogbeh, whatever mistake he might have made in the past and these are several, stands in the patriotic trench with the Nigerian people. It is in the trenches of patriotic struggle that the Nigerian labour movement must be positioned by the labour leadership. Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, this is basic politics.
The present circumstances in Nigeria, especially in seven years of practice of democracy, has largely exposed the inadequacies of Nigeria’s political elite. It is elite with bandit propensities and devoid of the historical sense of mission to build a successful democratic and modern state. It has tended to under-develop the capacities of the Nigerian people with its metaphysics and subjectivism and unending appeals to base sentiments; elite that cannot appreciate the strategic needs for education, development of human capacities and the building of the national productive forces of the country.
The Nigerian political space is in crying need of genuinely patriotic political parties to galvanise the energies of the Nigerian people, to build popular democracy and to construct a truly modern state. This is an opportunity for the labour movement to give a greater visibility to the Nigerian Labour Party through a deliberate presentation of an alternative vision of politics and its placement at the heart of popular struggle against the third term agenda. This is the type of politics that Comrade Adams Oshiomhole should graduate to, not the cloak and dagger politics of the PDP, Mister Fix-it and President Obasanjo. These people can never trust you given the roles you have played in the labour movement; or they might co-opt you if you fit an agenda, and in the process help to destroy the credibility you have built through the generosity of the working people and their trade union movement.
