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No other
recent single occasion or a lecture
packed so much punch as the 50th
birthday anniversary of Comrade John
Odah, the General Secretary of the
Nigeria Labour Congress, (NLC) and Dr.
Festus Iyayi’s masterful lecture there
on August 24th, 2010 at Hilton Hotel,
Abuja. It was neither one of these
woolly or pointless polemics from a
rabble-rouser nor the do-gooder’s
doomsday messages of the imminence of
the collapse of Nigeria that are issued
regularly by our patrons in Washington.
Rather, it was a grounded treatise on
the problematic called Nigeria. There is
a sense in which all shareholders in
Nigeria and both genuine and fake
friends of the country need to read
Iyayi, not because it has any comfortble
messages for their ego but because it is
an early warning input. The Nigerian
ruling class owes Ambassador Babagana
Kingibe a lot of gratitude for being at
the occasion and speaking very
effectively for the establishment in the
face of the most stinging reprimand of
his own class in contemporary times.
Unlike NPN mandarins who decided against
attending any seminars at ABU, Zaria
because of the ‘fear’ of Bala Usman’s
mouth, Kingibe sat through the entire
proceedings, took the heat and offered a
consensual counter to the radical
alternative to the ruling class.
The signs
that the day and the birthday lecture
weren’t going to be one of the empty
celebrations around Nigeria of today
came from Labaran Maku, the Minister of
State for Information and Communication
who, as the Chairman of the occasion,
spoke of John Odah as part of the squad
that led Nigerian students’ onslaught on
military dictatorship throughout the
eighties as well as the defence of the
dignity of the African and the idea of
standing up for democracy. John,
according to Maku, is not someone who
puts himself in the front but a key
operator behind the massive action you
see in the front. He was an activist
whose sense of commitment could cut
through any mountain, a real product of
communal upbringing in the rural society
and its high sense of value, propriety
and culture.
NLC
President, Comrade Abdulwaheed Umar,
re-enforced the image of his General
Secretary as a radical combatant who
“From the labyrinthine trenches of
struggle against military despotism to
the gruesome marches in defiance of the
antagonists of the working class,
Comrade … has remained a consistent
comrade, patriot, progressive and
defender of human rights and dignity.
The NLC President followed this with
verbal missiles at Nigerian politicians
whose body language towards 2011 he
described as worrisome. Comrade Peters
Adeyemi, Deputy President of the NLC and
Chairman of the Committee of Friends
that put together the birthday bash
justified the bash in terms of Comrade
John having made the kinds of
contributions that needed to be
acknowledged, saying the occasion
provided an opportunity to continue to
reflect on the state of the nation.
Into this
discursive temperature was Dr. Festus
Iyayi invited by MC of the occasion,
Cyril Stober, to deliver his lecture
provocatively titled, “Assassins of
Nation Building, 2011 Elections and
Electoral Reforms in Nigeria: Chronicle
of a Death Foretold”. Iyayi’s leading
argument is that Nigeria is not yet a
nation because the Nigerian ruling class
whose responsibility it is to build a
nation neither understands nor accepts
the responsibility for building the
disparate groups in Nigeria into a
nation.They are, instead, assassins of
nationhood and nation building in the
sense that every ruling class that
succeeds at nation building offers some
specific and spectacular achievement
that feeds upon and promotes a sense of
national pride and hence identity. The
British bourgeoisie not only built roads
and industries, it also built an empire.
So also the Americans. But unlike the
British, American, Japanese or China,
Singaporean or Brazillian, Cuban or
Indian ruling class, the Nigerian ruling
class has none of the tangible and
intangible elements towards a unifying
image of the national communion. So, the
ethnic paradigm reigns supreme. And
poverty too.
But painful
as these evidences may be, they pale
into insignificance when it is noted
that Nigeria is about the only country
which celebrates its slavery of the
British and American empires. It is such
that with very few exceptions, the word
resistance is not in the vocabulary of
the members of the Nigerian ruling class
at all.
He gave other
examples of ruling class decadence,
citing the Nigerian ruling class as the
only ruling class which does not produce
toothpick, yet, its members insist on
eating caviar for breakfast and ride
around in hummer jeeps and private jets,
the class which does not know how to
forego today’s pleasures in order to
achieve longer term rewards tomorrow, a
class so corrupt it has to rely on
foreign collaborators to consolidate
corruption as the national culture, to
the extent that there are, for example,
no meters installed at the terminals
where crude oil is taken by global oil
companiesInstead, it is the buyers who
tells the seller how much has been sold.
Why, he asked, does our excess crude
account remain around N3b even when oil
is being sold above the projected $57
per barrel? Why has oil production
remained between 1.6-1.7 even with the
amnesty programme whose success, he
said, had been celebrated the way of
miracles? Where else in the world will
members of a ruling class be buying jets
when there is a major downturn in the
economy and unemployment has attained
crisis proportion? He queried sharing of
billions of Naira to captains of
industry in the name of bail outs, even
though there are no industries and even
though these were the same people who
argued and crafted the gospel of
liberalization, deregulation and the
free market. Above all, this class will
be spending money celebrating Nigeria’s
50th year of independence without caring
that if the country has to survive in
the modern world, she cannot exercise
the choice of not building a real nation
out of the current cynicism, chaos and
despair, this being what, for him, makes
the 2011 elections and preparations
towards them so important. “The
elections may turn out to be the last
that may be held in Nigeria as one
country with the potential of becoming a
nation”.
The poser was
why this ruling class cannot redeem
itself even though, as Iyayi framed it,
“the rulers of Nigeria have been told in
dreams, market places, pulpits,
conferences, newspapers, beer parlours,
barber shops … that unless there is a
change in their practices and attitude
towards politics, elections and
corruption, the nation will not survive.
Even a date, 2015 has been prophesized
as one when the country may well
implode. However, in spite of repeated
warnings from sages and prophets, the
ruling class in Nigeria continues to
drive itself to perdition”. Why? Why?
Why? A very important question since,
according to the lecturer, the Nigerian
ruling class is not only driving itself
to perdition but its collapse will also
bring down the rest of the country with
it. This, he said, is the history of all
failed states as the example of Somalia
shows. So, something has to be done to
take the country out of the hands of the
ruling class. That task he gave to the
working class as a counterweight to
ethno-regional parochialism.
He was done.
The audience gave him a revolutionary
song and the discussants took over.
Comrade Ali
Chiroma who had by now taken over as
Chairman went full Throttle.
He yielded
the floor to Comrade Sylvester Ejiofor,
who said Iyayi had reminded all of us
that any system that is dysfunctional
has a terminal date and that our ruling
class does not know its mission. The
problem, for him, is that unlike when
behind the AG was an alliance of
intellectuals and the party or when
Okpara’s party would oppose Awo’s
Democratic Socialism with Pragmatic
Socialism or the NEPU would pose
Democratic Humanism, today, the field is
barren today in terms of ideologically
based political parties. He put the
blame squarely on prolonged military
rule, clarifying though he was not
intrinsically opposed to military rule
because there have been cases of
liberatory military but not the military
that imposed SAP on Nigeria. He endorsed
the celebration of John Odah because it
is the celebration of a position he took
at a critical time by going underground
with the caucus at the height of the
military’s assault on Nigeria, linking
up externally and keeping faith
generally.
Other
speakers such as Dr. Yima Sen, Abiodun
Aremu, Ngukwase Chia Surma, Ene Edeh and
Frank Kokori basically agreed with Iyayi,
with Kokori saying, among others, that
“There are no nationalist parties in
Nigeria in the way that there is SWAPO
in Namibia or ANC in South Africa or
FRELIMO in Angola”.
Then enter
Kingibe, aka ‘sai Baba’. He had sat
through until his assumption of the
Chairmanship of the segment. Using the
Chairmanship position to make a few
comments, Kingibe said he had known John
Odah for the only three years, beginning
from the 2007 oil price hike
negotiations between the FG and the NLC.
For Kingibe, John represents an
effective trade unionist, “one who
didn’t shout, who eschews cliches and
didn’t use ideologically tainted words
“that mean nothing”. “John as a
negotiator presents you little windows
so that you can escape, an approach
which creates opportunity for dialogue.
With John, there is no confrontation, no
bravura. I hope you would evolve common
grounds which will recognize that
something which is wrong is wrong, which
is false is false”.
He said that
everything Iyayi has said could be said
differently in a less alienating
language. If you say we don’t have a
nation, then we cannot have a ruling
class, I heard Kingibe say in response
to Iyayi’s thesis. It was an issue he
didn’t pursue beyond his argument that
part of the problem is that slogans have
a way of acquiring the authority of
truth when used repeatedly. His own
strategic response to the challenge of
nation building is the option of what he
called ‘informed debate’, insisting that
there should be a movement from mutual
disdain to mutual respect such that a
statement like “people who think it is
their birthright to rule” would not be
made.
It was a
whole huge debate, very much in tune
with the spirit of man in John Odah
whose capacity for making trouble earned
him the name, *JohnTrouble*from the
legendary Mr Athanasius Angereke, the
principal of St. Michaels, Aliade in
those days. It is only a John and a
trouble maker who will bring together
faces of the varied interests and forces
that came to debate nation building at
his 50th birthday. Comrade John must be
fulfilled even if only for providing a
rallying point for the left in Nigeria
to find its confidence and voice again.
Since the collapse of the USSR, that
confidence has not been there and the
left has, at best, been murmuring.
Mr. Onoja is
Media Adviser to Gov Lamido of Jigawa
State
(
adagboonoja@gmail.com)
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