Nigeria: Deepening Crisis and the Imperative of Popular Resistance¹.

The Origins of the Current Crisis

Very few serious citizens of Nigeria will disagree that the country is entering yet another era of the very deep crisis of neocolonialism which was inaugurated on October 1 1960. There is deep crisis and violence within the ruling elite and between the ruling elite and the generality of the Nigerian people. In spite of the massive crisis within the ruling circles, however, its capacity to violate the humanity of the Nigerian masses has not diminished a bit! The ruling circles have managed, at all levels since May 1999, to use their alleged electoral mandates to sustain and intensify the central programs of imperialism and programs of re-colonising Nigeria.

It is surprising (or is it?) that many of Nigerians do not expect that the post-military "civilian" administration would turn out to be what it is in 2006. The general lack of reflection, or is it the collective amnesia, in the polity needs to be overcome and we need to work hard along with patriotic organizations to prevent the deepening of this malady of forgetfulness and myopia. We make bold to re-iterate that the remnant of General Abacha's regime, which itself was the remnant of Babangida's military regime, orchestrated the hand-over of power to the Obasanjo regime in May 1999. The same class, the same agenda, the same victims, the same beneficiaries!

In 1998, discerning Nigerians openly accused the western powers and their friends of complicity in the murder of M. K. O. Abiola in Abdusalami Abubakar's military custody. Similarly, various western and Nigerian media have implicated imperialist western powers in the emergence of Obasanjo as the President of Nigeria in May 1999. Indeed Impact International (Washington, 1999) characterized Obasanjo as "Washington's Gift to Nigeria". And the present renovation of SAP in the form of what Obasanjo's henchmen and henchwomen call economic "Reform" was previsioned in one of Obasanjo's first appearances on CNN where he insisted that there is no opposition to IMF in Nigeria. Neither is anyone surprised that our Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank of Nigeria etc. are superintended by IMF and World Bank ideologues and agents.

But then, the present stage of Nigeria's re-colonisation was supervised by the force of arms wielded by many generations of generals and lesser officers of the Nigerian armed forces since 1966. The most visible of these are, of course, those whose forces occupied Nigeria since Obasanjo's first coming after the murder of General Murtala Mohammed. Since 1979, Nigerians have been kicked around, humiliated and disinherited while the triumvirate of western imperialist forces (through IMF and the World Bank), military top brass (heads of state, governors etc.) and their civilian bureaucrats and acolytes helped themselves to Nigeria's wealth. Consequently the twenty years between 1978 and 1998 was a period of armed "softening up" of Nigeria for imperialism and its Nigerian agents. To be sure, during that period, the crisis of accumulation and allocation of looted wealth created massive violence inside the ruling circles occasioning coups, counter coups, fanthom coups and reprisals including the one which Obasanjo and his friends suffered under Abacha. This legacy of intra-class violence has not, and will not, abate.

The upshot of the foregoing was that in 1998 when it became clear that Abacha's regime was endangering imperialism and its Nigerian agents, some way of continuing the bleeding of Nigeria had to be found. Between imperialism and critical elements of the Nigerian ruling class, and in spite of Abiola's connections with imperialism, the Abiola option was not acceptable to the forces of recolonisation. For, at the point when MKO Abiola became a serious contender for the presidency of the largest black nation in the world, he started raising critical questions about issues like reparation and the manginalisation of black people. These were questions and issues that Obasanjo repudiated consistently since May 1999. Consequently, when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) emerged in 1998/99, the generals were the most prominent funders of the party. Indeed, they decidedly tilted the scale in favour of Obasanjo. An observer opined correctly:

"The generals who.... plundered the country for 28 years ... were said to be secure in the knowledge that Obasanjo would not start a which-hunt of his old comrades-at-arms as much as Ekwueme could ..." (Tell, February 22, 1999: p. 20).

It was also widely reported that one of the generals who became Obasanjo's Minister of Defense actually threatened (at the Obasanjo fund-raising dinner on Thursday 28 January 1999) to go on self-exile if Obasanjo was not elected president (see Sunday Vanguard, Jan. 31, 1999: p. 1).