 |
| Koku Anyidoho |
Mr
Koku Anyidoho, Deputy General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress
(NDC) has warned that if “the dastardly and beastly acts of lawlessness” under
the Akufo-Addo government are not brought to an end, there would be a social
revolution in Ghana.
He
said the “scary aspects” of the acts of lawlessness is that “rascal and rogues”
bearing arms have become an integral part of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Mr
Anyidoho who was speaking in an interview on Pan African Television said “these
goons” have attacked senior police personnel, state agencies and their
personnel and the judiciary.
“It
is time to say enough is enough and to send a signal that we will use all legitimate
means to mass up and demonstrate against lawlessness”, he said.
Mr
Anyidoho claimed that since 1993 no government or president apart from
Akufo-Addo has carried rebels from opposition into government.
“Not
President Rawlings, not President Kuffour, not President Mills and not
President Mahama. None of them carried rebels into government”, he said.
Mr
Anyidoho said the problem with the “Delta Force” and “Invincible Forces” is
that their actions would be emulated by other groups.
“If
they are not checked others may come to the conclusion that it is alright to
take the law into your own hands”, he said.
Mr
Anyidoho commended the Ghanaian media for refusing to put a veil on the acts of
lawlessness of the NPP surrogates.
He
was confident that if the NDC pays sufficient attention to its reorganization
exercise it will win the next election.
Editorial
DONALD THE TRUMP
US
President Donald Trump has perhaps gone too far this time with the whole world
condemning him for attempting to abandon the Paris Accord on climate change.
Clearly
the President of the United State of America does not know what climate change
is and its consequences for human kind.
At
a campaign rally, Donald Trump described climate change as a hoax invented by
China and told his supporters that he could not understand the talk about
global warming because he was feeling so cold at the time.
It
is amazing how after this, the American people still managed to convince
themselves that he was worthy of the White House.
It
is refreshing that many states and their governors have distanced themselves
from the recklessness of Donald Trump.
We
can only hope that more and more citizens of the United States of American will
come to the realisation that Donald Trump does not mean well for them and the
rest of the world.
Donald
Trump is destroying even the very little Barack Obama managed to achieve.
Local
News:
BAN “ATSIAKPOR”,
Ada
Salt Winners Demand!
 |
| Members of the Ada Songor Salt Women's Association |
By Duke Tagoe
The
Ada Songor Salt Women’s Association (ASSWA), an association of salt winners
from the Ada traditional area, has renewed calls for the ban of mini dams or
dykes around the Songor Lagoon popularly referred to as “Atsiakpor”.
“Atsiakpor”
is a system where rich private individuals acquire portions of the area around
the Songor lagoon for wining salt and employ the women to win the salt at one
Ghana cedi (Ghc 1) per a big pan of salt won.
It
is not only private rich people but also the chiefs and foreign individuals
have acquired and shared the lagoon as their private enterprise.
So,
the Songor lagoon which before the introduction of the Economic Partnership
Agreement (EPA) and Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) of the Provisional
National Defense Council (PNDC) in April 1983, was a free gift of nature for
all the communities living in and around the Songor lagoon, providing a source
of livelihood and income to cater for the women and their children, has now
become a private property of a few privileged persons.
ASSWA
explains that whilst “Atsiakpor” restrains the production of salt in an
environmentally friendly manner, it also subverts the communal values that
recognise the collective ownership of the resource.
They
made the call for the ban of “Atsiakpor” at a ceremony to mark the 32nd
anniversary of death of Margaret Kuwornu, a salt winner who was shot dead by a
stray bullet in a police raid on salt winners in the Songor Lagoon at Bonikope
in Ada on Friday 17th May 1985.
Pictorial
evidence from the area reveal huge hectares of land around the Songor lagoon
have been forcefully grabbed by both local and private businessmen in collusion
with some chiefs of the area.
Edith
Osabutey Akumo, Secretary to the association explains that with the aid of
sophisticated pumping machines, these private businessmen draw brine or sea
water out of the lagoon to produce salt privately. Water levels in the lagoon
have dropped and the communities cannot fish in it or win salt from it as they used
to do.
 |
| Atsiakpor |
According
to her, this method of salt production impacted adversely on the natural salt
producing character of the lagoon and lead to the marginalization and
enslavement of many women who are left without an option but to work in these
small dams for the owners for paltry sums of Ghc 1 per pan. Cases of sexual
abuse have also been reported by the women. It is alleged that unless a woman
sleeps with a private businessman or agent, she cannot have access to even work
at salt winning.
INTERGENERATIONAL
EQUITY
Questions
about how to use the fruits of the lagoon in a manner that benefits future
generations have been raised by ASSWA. According to the association, large
scale salt producing companies exploiting the lagoon are not interested in the
buildup of social and capital infrastructure to support future generations.
ASSWA
contends that if the current approach to the exploitation of the resource does
not change, Ghana will lose control over salt as a resource.
Salt
is a required product in the oil and chemical industry and Ghana will be forced
to buy salt with its scarce foreign exchange from outside the country.
LIVELIHOOD FOR ALL
ASSWA
is taking the bull by the horns with the launch of a “Songor Plan for
Livelihood for All.”
The
process advocates a return to equitable communal access to the Songor lagoon
and a right to use the lagoon as a communal resource. It also demands
participation in decision making affecting the communal rights of the people.
Edith
pointed out that although “We are non-literate because of poverty and cultural
barriers we are deeply knowledgeable about the developments, laws and agreement
on the Songor”
ASSWA
is calling for a return to the communal values that recognised that the lagoon
must be for the benefit of all through the rigorous implementation of a Master
Plan for salt production prepared in 1991 referred to as PNDC Law 287.
According
to ASSWA, twenty five years after the passage of the law, it only remained a
model of how to undertake community-inclusive development planning.
As
members of the contiguous communities of the Songor and as women who nurture
all aspects of life in the Songor, said Edith, we have a right to be part of
every decision on or about the Songor adding that this principle is drawn from
the heart of the Sustainable Development Goal that calls on the Ghanaian
government to “ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative
decision making” at all levels of society.
SALT IMPORT
COMPOUNDS PROBLEMS
Mary
Akuteye, President of ASSWA is deeply worried over the huge volumes of imported
salt into the country. According to her, local production by artisanal salt
miners suffered a double agony when it had to deal with “Atsiakpor” and compete
with the huge volumes of imported salt.
According
to her, the local salt winners at the Keta and Songor lagoons can produce
enough salt for industrial and domestic use but are affected by government
policy that fails to create a conducive environment for the growth of their
industry.
ASSWA
believes that the lagoon hold the key to the socio-economic challenges the
bedeviled communities around the lagoon. It called on the youths and members of
the contiguous communities to take a keen interest in the protection,
sustainability and the development of the lagoon.
“The
Songor lagoon is an avenue for employment. It can also provide the funds needed
to provide infrastructure and aquaculture development. It can also serve as a
tourist attraction given the long history of the lagoon and the role it has
played in many Western African economies,” said Ms Akuteye.
AMANDZEBA
SPEAKS;
Full Text of His
Statement on Palestine
 |
| Amandzeba Nat Brew |
Ladies
and Gentlemen of the media, I will like to welcome all of you to this press
conference on behalf of the Planning Committee of the musical concert, “African
Voices for Palestine”. It is indeed a pleasure and a great honour that all of
you have turned up to hear our message.
We
wish to announce that on Friday, July 14, 2017, many artists from different
parts of Africa will hold a musical concert in Accra to express our solidarity
with the people of Palestine struggling against harsh colonial occupation. The
people of Palestine have for more than 50 years suffered detentions without
charge or trial, exile and assassinations. Their lands have been stolen for the
construction of illegal settlements. Their farms have been destroyed and they
have been denied access to water.
Palestinian
refugees have also been denied the right to return to their homeland.
It
is in protest against these crimes against the Palestinian people that a number
of musicians including me decided to organise this concert which is sponsored
by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (Ghana).We are encouraged in this
endeavour by the history of the struggle against apartheid, racism and
colonialism. We recall that musical concerts around the world contributed
significantly to bringing apartheid rule in South Africa to an end. Indeed the
Reggae king, Bob Marley and his band “The Wailers” held a concert to herald the
independence of Zimbabwe in the heady days of the struggle against racism.
Ladies
and Gentlemen of the media this is not a commercial event and entrance to this
concert is absolutely free. It will provide an opportunity for Africans from
all walks of life to see their favourite African artists and enjoy their music
whiles expressing solidarity with an oppressed people. Some of the artists who
have so far confirmed their participation are; Knii Lante Blankson, Jackie
Ankrah, Miata Fambulley from Liberia, Gyedu Blay-Ambulley , Blakk Rasta,
Kwabena Kwabena, Rocky Dawuni, Edem, Pozo Hayes, Besa Simons and Naa Amanua. A
full list of participating artists would be released ahead of the concert.
We
are inviting all the leaders of political parties in Ghana, Members of
Parliament, Trade Union leaders, youth and students’ groups, the gender
movement, chiefs, members of the Diplomatic Corps, progressive and Pan African
movements and the general public to participate in this great event. We should
be reminded of the saying of Martin Luther that “injustice anywhere is a threat
to justice everywhere”. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,
tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all
indirectly”.
We
thank you very much for coming and you may now ask questions.
Africa:
Organisational failure of the
Socialist movement and its interventional impotence
By Osaze Lanre
Nosaze
As in many post-colonies, the Socialist movement in
Nigeria has failed due to the organic divorce of the movement from the
struggles of the oppressed. Revolution is no longer seen as a practical
necessity, largely because of the movement’s petty bourgeoisie class origins.
To revive the movement, this class needs a deep and radicalising experience of
privation and oppression out of which it can find no escape but revolution.
By organisational failure of the Nigerian Socialist
movement we mean its inability to sustain itself as a body of independent, more
or less stable and coherent organisations capable of effective effort to
connect with, learn from and influence the oppressed social forces in their
struggles against the bourgeoisie and imperialism in pursuit of Socialist aims.
Quite a few groupings of Socialists exist, some of which self-delusionally
describe themselves as “the Socialist Party” or “the Communist Party” of
Nigeria. However, the brutal truth is that all of them fail by the crucial
criterion of possessing sufficient interventional capacity for sustained and
broad-based influence over the agenda, course, pace, and outcomes of the social
conflict between the oppressed and the oppressors.
There is certainly no more eloquent
testimony of this than the extremely odd phenomenon of the social conflict in
Nigeria being at this time primarily of a system-safe and system-reproductive
character despite the devastating attacks on the interests of the oppressed
occasioned by the bourgeoisie’s programme of neoliberal restructuring of the
economy. That an otherwise objectively radicalising material situation has not
resulted in a subjectively radicalised mass of the oppressed is, of course, primarily
a function of the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie. That this hegemony
itself has remained unchallenged, however, is in significant part a function of
the organisational failure and impotence of the Nigerian Socialist movement.
Nigerian Socialists have sought to explain
this failure and impotence by one or a combination of the following: the
repression of the Socialist movement by the bourgeois state; the outbreak and
consolidation of opportunism within the movement; and the movement’s ideological
collapse following the fall of existing Socialism in the late 1980s and early
1990s.
It is indubitable that these factors have
indeed featured in the organisational failure of the Nigerian Socialist
movement and in its impotence in the social conflict since at least 1966. [1] Repression
by the bourgeois state – under colonialism as well as under the military
dictatorships of Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida – repeatedly decimated
the movement as an organised structure by degrading its capacity to reproduce
itself. Employing measures including the detention of activists and leaders
without trial, the outright banning of Socialist organisations, and the
suppression of public activities by these organisations, these campaigns of
decimation have sought to prevent the process of organic interaction and
interchanges between the movement as an organised social force and the
oppressed social forces, the very process that builds them into a unified
social force in the class struggle against the bourgeoisie and its own allied
forces.
For the Socialist movement – the possessor
and material embodiment of the most advanced and best-organised consciousness
of the proletariat in its pursuit of its immanent and transcendent interests –
is effectual in the social conflict only to the extent that it transforms in
its own image the consciousness and practice of the class and its allies. This
transformation cannot take place except by this organic interaction between the
movement and the oppressed; theory cannot grip the masses and become a material
force in the social conflict except by the two-way interaction of the two. By
preventing this interaction, the bourgeois state sought to prevent the
establishment of the organic relationship between the movement and the oppressed,
which is necessary for the interventional capacity of the former; it sought to
prevent theory from becoming a material force. The effectiveness of this
campaign of repression is certainly a key factor in the impotence of the
Nigerian Socialist movement.
The cancer of opportunism in the movement
is similarly a key factor. If state repression aimed to incapacitate the
socialist movement by preventing its interaction with the oppressed masses,
opportunism functioned objectively – i.e. irrespective of the intentions or
rationalisations by its agents in the movement – to subject the extent and
terms of that interaction to the accumulation and career interests of these
agents.
 |
| Jacob Zuma |
Sacrificing the interests of the whole
working class and other oppressed groups for their own sectional interests,
these agents built a Socialist movement whose organisation, operation and
intervention in the social conflict was governed not by the dictates of the
struggle of the oppressed but by those of their personal interests. Thus, “the
struggle” meant for these agents and the Socialist movement they created not
really the engagement of the oppressed with the oppressor but the conflict with
rival groups (of other opportunists in some cases but also of genuine
revolutionaries in others) over control of power and the resources of the
movement’s organisations.
In other words, the dynamics of conflict
in the Socialist movement found its basis, just like those of conflict in the
bourgeois polity, in the contradictions of the process of accumulation of power
and wealth. This, rather than any serious ideological, programmatic, or
strategy differences, has been the principal source of the long and pernicious
history of factionalism and splits within the movement, even to this day. Driven
by the imperatives of personal accumulation, a leader (and the group built
around him or her) who cannot gain control or adequate access to the resources
of the organisation would rather destroy it or split off to create another that
would be under his or her own control.
Similarly, as the demise of the 1964 Joint
Action Committee demonstrates, these leaders prefer to lead tiny organisations
over which they have personal control – although such organisations have little
capacity to intervene in and influence the social conflict – than to merge them
into a larger and more effective organisation over which, however, they would
have no personal control or over whose resources they would not have
unrestricted access. This has been a key factor in the organisational failure
of the Nigerian Socialist movement.
Finally, there is the ideological collapse
of the Nigerian Socialist movement, by which we mean the more or less complete
disintegration of its organic body of premises, methodological principles,
theories, concepts, practical goals, ethics, and strategies that receive their
logical coherence and social rationale from the transcendent interests of the
proletariat and that constitute the movement’s instruments of ideological
intervention in the social conflict as an organised social force. This collapse
involved any one or combination of the following in the political practice of
the organisations or individuals that previously constituted the Socialist
movement and many of which still considered themselves socialists:
1. Rejection of a proletariat-led Socialist revolution in
Nigeria as a socio-historical necessity whose realisation should be the goal of
immediate political practice;
2. Abandonment of the perspective of the proletariat in
the analysis of social reality;
3. Abandonment of Socialist propaganda among the
oppressed classes in the practical social conflict.
Crisis
of existing Socialism
Babangida’s war on the Socialist movement
left its organisational structure in tatters and severely degraded its
interventional capacity. However, the movement would probably have recovered
subsequently and begun to rebuild its organisations and capacity, especially in
the less repressive environment that came with the demise of General Sani
Abacha in 1998 and the advent of bourgeois civilian rule in 1999. That it did
not do so was due primarily to its ideological collapse following the fall of
existing Socialism in the last years of the 1980s and the early ones of the
1990s.
This ideological collapse of the socialist
movement resulted directly from the crisis and collapse of the formations of
existing Socialism and of the ideology of their ruling classes. In its history
having attained a generally high degree of theoretical development, Socialist
thought in Nigeria – especially in its dominant tendencies – always was susceptible
to a sterile dogmatism that equated existing Socialism with the only socialism
possible in existing world conditions and took the ideology of its ruling
classes to be the true Marxism of the epoch. Thus, for the dominant sections of
the Nigerian Socialist movement, the crisis of the countries of existing
Socialism translated more or less directly into the crisis of Socialism and of
Marxism, and the eventual collapse of those countries meant for these sections
the collapse of Socialism as a historical project and of Marxism as a worldview
and a science of society.
The ideological collapse paralysed much of
the movement and threw it into disarray. Having lost its own ideological
bearings, the movement could not provide enlightenment and ideological leadership
as an organised body representing a viable alternative to the variety of
bourgeois ideologies present in the mass of the oppressed. Indeed, in many a
case, the Socialist organisation simply collapsed and expired, or, what amounts
to the same thing, lost itself in bourgeois ideologies in the self-delusion of
radicalising them.
These are the principal explanations
socialists have offered of the organisational failure of the Nigeria socialist
movement. However, deeper thought reveals these to be only immediate and
contingent factors in a mediated causation with deeper and in fact structural
roots. This becomes obvious as soon as we consider the fact that many Socialist
movements across the world and particularly in the capitalist periphery have
experienced these same conditions without then suffering organisational failure
in such a sustained and apparently intractable manner as has the Nigerian
movement.
The socialist movements in Brazil and
other South American countries in the 1960s and 1970s and in South Africa and
other Southern African countries all through the 1960s to the late 1980s
suffered repression of such brutality, intensity, duration, and totality as the
Nigerian socialist movement has never experienced. Yet they were able to
sustain themselves in most cases and for most of these periods and after as a
body of more or less coherent and effective organisations with the capacity to
intervene in the social conflict on a class-wide basis. Even granting for a
moment that the Nigerian movement has experienced repression with similar
features and that this has played a key role in the persistency of its
organisational failure, it still remains to explain this failure in periods
relatively devoid of such repression. The movement has experienced the sort of
repression capable of incapacitating it and decimating its organisational
structure only under the Babangida regime (and to a much lesser extent under
the military regime of Obasanjo). Before, between, and after these episodes of
repression–which in all cases were relatively brief–the political conditions
were relatively benign (even if not conducive) and the Socialist movement could
have reconstituted itself organisationally, even if only operating illegally.
Why could it not do this?
The problem of opportunism does not answer
this question satisfactorily. Many Nigerian Marxists have given a correct
explanation of opportunism in the movement. The question is why it has produced
organisational failure in the Nigerian movement when it has not in many others.
For opportunism has been a global problem in the world Socialist movement since
the rise of imperialism in the later decades of the 19th century. It has not,
however, had the same organisational result in all the national Socialist
movements: some have disintegrated under its influence but others have not.
What differentiates the first group from the second? Why has opportunism
resulted specifically in organisational failure in the Nigerian Socialist
movement when it has not in many others?
Similarly, the ideological collapse of the
movement cannot be taken as given datum but must itself be problematised. This
collapse only took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s; yet the problem of
organisational failure has been with the movement since its inception in the
1940s. While it is certainly a factor in explaining the current organisational
state of the movement, this collapse itself still needs explanation. For not
all national Socialist movements experienced ideological collapse due to the
fall of existing Socialism. Why was the Nigerian socialist movement so
ideologically susceptible to the fall?
This indeed is the crux of the matter: why
has the Nigerian movement been so susceptible to the organisationally
destructive effects of repression, opportunism, and ideological collapse when
other socialist movements have not? Why have these important but nonetheless
contingent and immediate factors resulted in its organisational failure when
they have not in other movements?
Organic
divorce from the oppressed
As we already said above, the causation of
this problem is mediated and has structural roots. These consist in the organic
divorce of the Nigerian Socialist movement from the oppressed and their
struggle, i.e., the fact that its organisations have functioned not as organic
instruments of the struggle of the oppressed, but either as interventional
instruments in that struggle by an affinitive but nonetheless extraneous social
force or as instruments for the internalisation of alien conflicts. [2]
As an organic instrument of the struggle
of the oppressed, the Socialist organisation is called up by the objective
necessities of the domestic struggle of the oppressed and is given both its
purpose and reason by those necessities. As we have said above, the organic
interaction and interchanges between the Socialist organisation and these
oppressed social forces build both into a unified social force in the class
struggle. On the one hand, this makes the organisation not just a necessary
product of the struggle but also a necessary instrument for furthering it,
which gives the oppressed a stake in its survival and effective operation. [3] On
the other, the interests of the oppressed and the demands of the struggle for
those interests become the governing imperatives of the organisation’s
operation and self-reproduction, defining what practices, attitudes, and
beliefs are acceptable and what are not, i.e. defining its organisational
morality. Thus, the necessities of the struggle provide not only the being and purpose
of the organisation, but also its morality and the enforcer of that morality.
 |
| Nelson Mandela |
As either interventional instruments of
extraneous social forces or instruments for the internalisation of alien
conflicts, the Socialist organisation is called up by the necessities of an
alien struggle or of the ideological persuasion of an extraneous social force,
and it receives both its purpose and reason from those necessities, which
become the governing imperatives of its operation and self-reproduction. Unless
it somehow transforms into an organic instrument of the domestic struggle, such
a Socialist organisation has little need for the organic interaction with the
oppressed that we have described above and its interaction with them remains
entirely theoretical, perfunctory, and decorative; for its real driving force
is external to their struggle. Thus, the oppressed have little stake in it and
no reason to take an interest in its survival and proper operation, and the
organic interstices created by its divorce from the necessities of the domestic
struggle become room for the sprouting and flourishing of practices, attitudes,
and moralities other than those disciplined by those necessities.
Thus, the organic socialist organisation
is disciplined by the necessities of the struggle of the oppressed of which it
is an instrument; those necessities define the mores of the organisation,
provide the enforcers of the mores, and furnishes them with a powerful
incentive for action to enforce them. The non-organic organisation lacks this
disciplining force and the disciplining mechanism it creates. Its discipline is
only as strict as the personal discipline and morality of its individual
members and no external force exists to control its internal conflicts.
The foregoing provides the basis for
understanding the structural susceptibility of the Nigerian socialist movement
to the devastating organisational effects of opportunism, repression and
ideological collapse.
The dominance of opportunism (as opposed
to its mere presence) and its resulting in organisational failure in the
Nigerian Socialist movement are a structural function of the absence of an
organic relationship between Socialist organisations and the struggle of the
oppressed masses. Freedom from the harsh discipline of the necessities of this
struggle invites into these organisations persons who cannot bear that
discipline and provides liberty for opportunism to flourish in them and to
overwhelm them. For, here, the governing principle in every discussion and
manoeuvre is not the implications for the interests of the oppressed as a whole
but the implications for the personal or factional interests of the leaders and
members of the organisation. This freedom from the discipline of the struggle
at once also prevents the development of any mechanism that can counter and
correct the flourishing of opportunism. Since the organisation is not to the
oppressed a necessary instrument in the struggle to achieve their goals, they
have no reason to become part of it or, if they are members, to enforce the
morality of the struggle in its theory and practice. Either they shun it or
themselves become more or less willing instruments of the opportunism of its
leaders. Thus, where this opportunism is not only an ideological one but also
involves the pillage of the resources of the organisation – as it has often
been in Nigeria – there exists no mechanism to control the avarice of the
leaders and to subject it to the dictates of the struggle. The conflict over
the pillage of the organisation, therefore, knows no bounds and it spirals
until it destroys the organisation.
This absence of an organic relationship
between the socialist organisations and the struggle of the oppressed masses
also explains the absence of organisational tenacity and durability in the
Nigerian socialist movement in the face of repression, why repression so easily
results in the failure of its organisations. A socialist organisation that
functions as an organic instrument of the struggle of the oppressed is a
practical necessity, one that drives Socialists who are committed to this
struggle: if the organisation does not exist, they must create it; if it exists
but is under repression, they must protect it; if it existed but has been
destroyed by repression, they must re-create it. Thus, they invest every
ingenuity they possess into creating and sustaining the organic socialist
organisation. Although repression could be so severe as to cripple such an
organisation and to make its open operation impossible, it has hardly ever been
so severe anywhere as to make absolutely any operation impossible. Even in the
face of the most severe repression many Socialist movements have been able to
undertake measures to sustain their organisations and to maintain some level of
operation, including going underground, relocating their command and control
organs beyond the reach of the repression, etc. That the Nigerian Socialist
movement has collapsed under repression in most cases – i.e. dissolved its
organisations – is a function of the absence of an organic relationship between
those organisations and the struggle of the oppressed masses, a function of
their structural superfluity in the struggle.
Ideological
dependence
The ideological collapse of the Nigerian
socialist movement in the face of the fall of existing Socialism was
immediately a function of the ideological dependence of the bulk of the
movement on the states of that Socialism, which itself was due to the absence
of an organic relationship between Nigerian socialist organisations and the
struggle of the oppressed masses. Governed by the necessities and challenges of
the struggle of the oppressed, an organic socialist organisation develops its
theories, programmes and strategies under the imperative of achieving the goals
of that struggle. Although it may borrow ideas, lessons, and insights from
another Socialist movement, its perspectives and borrowings are determined in
the final analysis by the needs and realities of the struggle in which it is a
necessary, organic instrument. [4] This is because its performance – in terms of
the correctness of its perspectives, programmes, strategies and tactics, and of
their effectiveness in the struggle – determines not only the fate of that
struggle but also its own fate as an organisation; for it will quickly lose
relevance in the struggle if it keeps failing in it. It, therefore, cannot
afford to depend blindly – i.e., uncritically – on a foreign socialist movement
for its theories, programmes, and strategies.
This imperative does not exist for the
non-organic Socialist organisation, which can therefore afford such ideological
dependency. That the bulk of the Nigerian Socialist movement was so
ideologically dependent on foreign Socialist movements and for so long is supreme
evidence of its organic superfluity in the struggle of the oppressed. That is
why with a very few exceptions it has made little contribution of any great
significance to Socialist theory but has engaged mostly in wooden and deadbeat
academic Marxism, or in merely exhortatory and declamatory popular Marxism.
Lacking that organic interaction with the practical struggles of the oppressed
that at once grounds theory in concrete reality and yet challenges it to
soaring flights of creativity and insight, Nigerian Marxism has mostly just
waddled and hopped along the ground after Soviet Marxism like a quacking
duckling after Mother Duck.
Now, how do we explain this organic
divorce of the Nigerian socialist movement from the struggle of the oppressed?
The movement has failed to establish an organic relationship with the
oppressed, not simply because of its predominantly petty bourgeois class
origins, but because the Nigerian petty bourgeoisie as a class has until the
advent of neoliberal structural adjustment generally escaped the extreme
privation and oppression that the labouring classes have experienced. It has
yet to have a deeply and generally radicalising experience, an experience of
privation and oppression out of which it can find no escape but revolution.
The class was generally comfortable and
upwardly mobile in the pre-SAP period, receiving a good share of the surplus
from the exploitation of the labouring classes and the dispossession of the
oil-bearing communities. Although the neoliberal restructuring of the
neocolonial formation has occasioned a drastic reduction in state-mediated
transfers to the petty bourgeoisie, the class still receives a significant
portion of the social surplus through various sources. These include transfers
through expanded employment by foreign monopoly capital operating in Nigeria,
foreign and domestic grants to non-governmental organisations, and legitimate
and illegitimate enrichment through politics and political activities.
Occupational emigration (the brain-drain problem, American Visa Lottery, etc.)
and the booming music and film industries serve as important options and escape
routes for many of those who cannot find accommodation within these other
mechanisms. Although unemployment and underemployment are rife within the petty
bourgeoisie – as within the proletariat – a large and growing portion of the
class staves off complete destitution by entering into the informal sector.
The class has also experienced little
political repression. The period of its most intense and extensive repression –
Babangida’s and Abacha’s war from 1986 to 1998 to squash anti-SAP and
anti-military rule forces – ended in a bourgeois civilian rule that has
restored many liberties of the class almost completely. Thus, this general
absence of an objectively radicalising situation has enabled the bulk of the
petty bourgeoisie to still see options and escape routes from its situation and
to continue nursing hopes of actually escaping.
Those who have come to the struggle of the
oppressed have, therefore, not done so as of practical necessity but in most
cases as an expression of ideological conviction or as the necessary conclusion
of their theoretical analysis. Others have come out of occupational necessity
(trade union and human rights workers, for instance). In both cases, they have
come to the struggle of the oppressed as extraneous social forces and their
Socialist organisations have served as interventional instruments without
organic links to that struggle. This has also made possible the transformation
of these organisations into instruments of the internalisation within it of
alien conflicts.
Thus, Socialists who are absolutely
committed to the struggle of the oppressed have been few and far between. Their
efforts at forging organic links with the oppressed have been generally
hindered and frustrated by the majority who cannot or will not make that
commitment. That is why they are heroes.
It follows from the foregoing that the
structural basis for overcoming the organic divorce between the Nigerian
Socialist movement and the struggle of the oppressed – and, therefore, of
overcoming the organisational failure of the movement – is that the Nigerian
petty bourgeoisie (at least a significant portion of it) must undergo an
experience of privation and oppression out of which it can find no escape but
revolution. The movement’s history provides strong evidence of this.
 |
| Babangida |
It was surely no coincidence that the most
successful bottom-up organising effort of the Socialist movement – in which it
established a nationwide network of base and intermediate structures with good
links with the struggle of the oppressed – occurred during the 1978-1995
structural crisis of Nigeria’s neocolonial formation and during the worst years
of the structural adjustment programmes pursued by the bourgeoisie and
imperialism to resolve it at the expense of the working people and the middle
classes. While the problems of opportunism and infantile schism were abundantly
in evidence in the movement in this period, it is a telling fact that it took
the brutal campaign of repression by the Babangida regime to break the
developing organic links between the movement and the oppressed masses and to
decimate the movement itself as an organised force. The privation and
oppression suffered specifically by the petty bourgeoisie in the period was
such a radicalising experience for the class that it was driven increasingly to
revolution and increasingly to make efforts at forging organic links with the
urban working masses, in the realisation that it could not make revolution
without them. In addition to Babangida's war against the movement, the momentum
toward an organic socialist movement was frustrated by the de-radicalising
effects of, on the one hand, the massive infusion of funds from countries of
the capitalist centre into the growing civil society movement and, on the
other, the corruption-fuelling introduction of “free money” into the economy by
the military regime.
Similarly, we find that in South Africa,
Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and many other
countries, the radical petty bourgeoisie predominantly formed an organic link
with the oppressed masses in the social conflict when and where they suffered
such privation and oppression as they could find no escape from but by the
revolutionary path. To the extent and as long as they saw or thought they saw a
way out of their situation, they tended to pursue a reformist approach and
built alliances with the oppressed masses only to harness them to their
reformist programme.
More directly relevant to the question we
are dealing with, those who in these circumstances nevertheless chose a
revolutionary path tended to intervene in the struggles of the oppressed masses
as extraneous agents acting on their behalf, as messiahs bringing salvation to
the hapless multitudes; and their organisations tended to remain insulated from
the masses. In other words, although they intervened in the struggle of the
oppressed masses and in many cases made great sacrifices in aid of that struggle,
they did not build organic relations with the oppressed masses and their
struggle. They did not themselves become one with the oppressed and their
organisations did not become the oppressed themselves organised for their
struggle against their oppressors; they remained an extraneous, alien social
force intervening in the struggle of the oppressed on their behalf.
A
radicalizing experience
Any meaningful prospect, therefore, of the
Nigerian socialist movement becoming organic, i.e. developing organic links
with the oppressed masses on a structural basis, depends on the petty
bourgeoisie – or at least significant sections of it – having a radicalising
experience of privation and oppression so severe, total, and implacable that it
can find no way out but through revolution. It is, of course, in the very
nature of historical things that we cannot predict them with exact scientific
rigour. It is, therefore, not possible – and in fact not necessary – to fix
exactly when and exactly how this radicalising experience will occur. Yet
Marxism would not be the revolutionary science that it is of society in both
its diachronic and synchronic dimensions if it did not consist in analytical
tools enabling thought to grasp the material premises and logic of social
dynamics and statics.
We are, therefore, able to offer the
prognosis that the current immiseration and pauperisation of the Nigerian petty
bourgeoisie will worsen in the course and immediate aftermath of the next
structural crisis of the neocolonial formation if it is grave and long enough.
As we have said above, we believe the probability of such a crisis to be very
good in light of the current structural crisis of global capitalism and given
the structural vulnerability of the Nigerian formation to the vicissitudes of
the global capitalist system.
Already, the crisis in the countries of
the capitalist centre is occasioning deep cuts in development aid for
sub-Saharan Africa, with the result that the externally-dependent civil society
is experiencing a funding crisis that is causing many CSOs to downsize
drastically or even to suspend operations. The crisis is causing a slowdown in
the economies of the centre, thus limiting their capacity to absorb migrant
labour from the periphery and especially from Africa. If the analyses of
Marxists like Samir Amin and Istvan Mészáros are correct, we should expect the
crisis to be persistent and to grow worse over time, with any recovery being
weak, short-lived, and followed by another long and intractable crisis.[5]
Should the Nigerian neocolonial capitalist
formation go into a prolonged and severe structural crisis in these
circumstances, the situation will indeed be most dire for the working masses
but also for greater sections of the petty bourgeoisie. This will block off the
routes of escape for more and more of the latter and almost certainly drive
more of their numbers to revolution, creating simultaneously objective and
subjective grounds for the forging of organic relations between them and the
struggle of the oppressed.
This is not to say, however, that all
effort at building a socialist movement with such relations with the struggle
of the oppressed must wait until the next structural crisis. That would be to
subscribe to the most brutish sort of mechanistic determinism; it would be to
reject the Marxist notion of the dialectical determination of the
superstructure by the substructure. For such crude determinism is completely
alien to Marxism, a scientific worldview that accords full recognition to the
creative and thus active role of the subjective factor in the historical labour
process both of reproducing the existing social relations and of fashioning a
new society.
That is surely the import of the first of
Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: “The chief defect of all hitherto
existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality,
sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation,
but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively...” [6] Thus,
all through its history there have been individuals and organisations in the
Nigerian socialist movement who have tried to build organic links with the oppressed
and their struggles, even in the periods of greatest affluence ever enjoyed by
the petty bourgeoisie.
The task of building an organic socialist
movement in Nigeria must commence today even as we anticipate the next
structural crisis of the neocolonial formation and the infinitely more
favourable circumstances it will create for success at the task. The question
is how to do that.
* Osaze Lanre Nosaze is formerly Executive
Director of the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO). This article, part of a
larger work, was written in May 2013.
End notes
[1] Edwin Madunagu, The Tragedy of the
Nigerian Socialist Movement and Other Essays (Calabar, Nigeria:
Centaur Press Ltd., 1980), p.2.) dates the impotence of the movement from 1966,
but this is tenable only if one accepts his implied conflation of the socialist
movement and the workers movement (Ibid.). We insist, however, on
differentiating them from each other. We therefore define the socialist
movement as that body of organisations and individuals engaged in the struggle
to abolish the social relations undergirding Nigeria’s neocolonial capitalist
formation and to replace them with socialist ones. This at once differentiates
between the two movements. For it is obvious that not all organisations of the
workers movement are engaged in the struggle for socialism, some of them
limiting their goals only to achieving the immanent (bourgeois) interests of
the working class. They reject its transcendent (communist) ones – the latter
however being precisely those that demand the abolition of capitalist social
relations and their replacement with socialist ones. Based on this distinction,
it becomes possible and indeed necessary to reconsider the question of dating
the impotence of the socialist movement. For instance, was the 1944 General
strike or even that of 1964 evidence of the potency and interventional capacity
of the socialist movement as such or of the workers movement under the
influence of bourgeois radicalism rather than socialist ideology? This is one
of the very few flaws in Madunagu’s otherwise splendid (although too brief)
study of the Nigerian socialist movement.
[2] For instance, the global struggle between
the USA and the USSR, or between Maoism or Trotskyism and Stalinism.
[3] Fanon said something relevant to this in
connection with the nationalist party in the decolonisation struggle. See
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Middlesex, England:
Penguin Books, 1982).
[4] We see this clearly in the case of Maoism,
for example. See Isaac Deutscher, “Maoism: Its Origins, Background, and
Outlook,” The Socialist Register 1, no. 1 (1964): 11–37. The
South African Communist Party furnishes an interesting case of a socialist
organisation that experienced a measure of ideological dependence on the Soviet
Union but survived the collapse of Existing Socialism and struggled to
re-establish its own independent ideological bearings. See “Focus on
Socialism,” South African Labour Bulletin 15, no. 3 (September
1990); and “Towards a New Internationalism?,” South African Labour
Bulletin 15, no. 7 (April 1991). See also the continuation of the
debate in the pages of The African Communist.
Source: Pambazuka
Boko Haram ‘Actively Planning’ to Kidnap Western Nationals in
Nigeria
The UK Foreign Office says it had been alerted
to a plot by the Boko Haram militant group to abduct western
nationals in Nigeria.
"Boko Haram is actively planning to kidnap
western foreign workers in Bama Local Government Area of Borno state,
along the Kumshe-Banki axis," the ministry said in an update
to its travel advice for Nigeria.
The Foreign Office added there was a potential risk
of kidnapping for financial or political gains in Nigeria’s
northeast and other areas with Islamist presence.
Boko Haram is a violent militant organization
affiliated with the Islamic State (Daesh) terrorist group, banned
in many countries, including Russia and the United States. The group is
notorious for having abducted hundreds of people, including some 200
schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in 2014.
South
America;
The “Most Dangerous
Spy you’ve Never Heard of”
 |
| Ana Belen Montes |
By Prof Susan Babbitt
Ana Belén Montes gave classified information to
Cuba for 17 years before her arrest in 2001 for espionage. Pleading guilty, she
avoided conviction for treason, which carries the death sentence. She is called
“the most dangerous spy you’ve never heard of.”
She deserves to be known now.
Her story shows the personal cost of some truths. I
don’t mean suffering endured in prison, predictable result of breaking US law.
I mean the cost of believing, as US citizen and government employee, truths
about US state terror, supported by evidence. The truths are well-known, or at
least readily available. But they’re not easily believed, even when known to be
true.
By the time Montes began spying for the Cubans, the US
had been carrying out a ruthless “war against subversion” across Latin America
for decades. The targets were anyone who resisted, or might resist, US hegemony
in the region. Operation Condor, formed in the early seventies, enabled
multinational death squads to carry out state-sponsored cross-border political
repression.
Unionists, peasant leaders, party activists, students,
teachers, priests, nuns – indeed, whole social sectors – were targets. The CIA
provided new forms of torture. In Uruguay, for example, a “parallel apparatus”
used homeless beggars for torture training. In a soundproof room, instructors
demonstrated the effects on the body of electric voltage and chemical
substances.
The test subjects
died. 2.
In 2005, a special conference was organized in Havana
on terrorism. Speakers from Latin America, the US and Europe presented
research, often drawing upon declassified US documents, about CIA-inspired
terror tactics of Operation Condor. The recurring theme, in presentation after
presentation, was impunity: The data piles up. It is widely diffused. Yet somehow,
in the public mind, it doesn’t matter.
The occasion for the conference was the entrance into
the US of Louis Posada Carriles, was arrested and jailed in Venezuela (he
escaped) for master-minding the shooting down of a Cuban plane, killing all
aboard (1976). Posada confessed his responsibility to Ann Louise
Bardach (New York Times). He walks free in the US despite the evidence. He
celebrates his birthdays on camera, before the media.
In John Pilger’s documentary, War on
Democracy, Pilger interviews Sister Diana Ortiz, a US citizen raped and
beaten by US servicemen protecting the dictatorship in El Salvador. Ortiz says,
“When I hear people express surprise about Abhu Graib
[site of US torture in Iraq], I ask myself ‘What planet are they living on?
Don’t they know the history of our country?’”
It’s not that they don’t know the history. It is that
they possess the facts, know they are true, and don’t assimilate them.
They want to think the US is “leader of the free world”. It is not
hard to see – thanks to books, documentaries, declassified documents, journal
articles, and conferences – that US foreign policy has nothing to do with
freedom and democracy. However, we have to care to know.
Ana Belén Montes says she doesn’t want to be treated
as a hero. True, she shouldn’t have to be a hero. What she did was believe the
obvious. She told the sentencing judge,
“I engaged in the activity that brought me before you
because I obeyed my conscience”.
In 1960, apolitical Beat poet, Leroi
Jones went to Cuba “determined not to be ‘taken’”. Returning to the US, in
his famous “Cuba Libre”, he denounced the “thin crust of lie that we cannot
even detect in our own thinking”.
Jones detected that “crust of lie” because of what he
felt, in Cuba. He expected Cubans to be indoctrinated, even evil. Instead, he
experienced them as happy, interesting and smart. He describes a feeling, a
human connection. It contradicted his beliefs. He gave up the beliefs.
Jones could have dismissed his feelings as crazy, and
maintained his web of beliefs. That would have been more comfortable, even
praiseworthy. Instead, Jones returned to the US radicalized. The “thin crust of
lie” was just that: a thin crust. There was more. Jones didn’t want to be
living the entire hidden iceberg of lies.
The “thin crust of lie”, undetectable, explains a
slogan of the anti-war movement: “There are no innocents”. It means that a
comfortable white life was collusion in the slaughter in Vietnam. Lifestyles
generate and nurture values and beliefs. They support myths making it easy to
explain away truths, even obvious ones. We offer our daily consent, quietly,
comfortably.
Ana Belén Montes could have dismissed what she knew to
be true about the US war on democracy. She is, in the end, a hero just because
of what she believed, because she has believed it, and because she continues to
do so.
Fidel Castro said about Che
Guevara after his death that Guevara insisted on the power of example.
There’s a philosophical point here: We are interdependent creatures, always
giving to and receiving from the beings, human and non-human, with whom we
interact. It was Marx’s naturalistic vision of who we are as human beings: part
of nature, dependent upon others even for thinking.
Such naturalism is expressed also by smart, sensitive
thinkers across the ages. The Buddha was one, as was José Martí, leader of
Cuba’s last independence war against Spain. It is simply a scientific fact that
how we think depends, in ways we often do not know, on the people and stories
we surround ourselves with. They speak to us silently, continually, at myriad
levels. We don’t think alone, contrary to the liberal/libertarian myth that we
live “from within”, hearing an “inner voice”.
That “inner voice” is always the voice of others,
indeed whole histories of others.
It’s why certain examples matter so much and why
they’re worth working for. They may be all we have to see through the lies,
well-known lies that they are. The hidden histories matter to what can be
imagined, morally. It’s no surprise we haven’t heard about Ana Belén Montes.
Such a significant example is hidden deliberately. The press, without evidence,
suggests she was mentally ill.
Ana Belén Montes must no longer be hidden.
Speaking truth to power is relatively easy. Believing
it is more challenging. Murdered Honduran activist Berta Cáceres said
North Americans are too attached to our comfort. It affects moral imagination.
For those of us who benefit from the US Empire, it is not possible to believe
what is clearly true about that Empire without personal cost. It’s just the
nature of reason and its dependence on surroundings.
The “thin crust of lie” gets ever thicker. We need the
example of Ana Belen Montes more than ever.
Venezuela achieves
nationwide health coverage
 |
| Nicholas Maduro |
By Alina Perera Robbio
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro described this
April 20 as a happy day, after announcing that the Bolivarian Republic had
achieved its goal, set out 14 years ago, of providing nationwide health
coverage for all its citizens through the “Barrio Adentro” (Into the
Neighborhoods) Mission, a feat only previously accomplished by Cuba.
At the María Eugenia González Comprehensive Diagnostic
Center (CDI), located in the capital’s El Valle district, the first facility of
its kind to be inaugurated by Comandante Hugo Chávez, Maduro thanked Cuba, Raúl,
and the doctors from both the island and Venezuela who have made this
transcendental achievement possible. “Thank you, a thousand times thank you,”
he stated.
Also participating in the act were other government
officials, Cuban Ambassador to the South American nation, Rogelio Polanco; the
Coordinator of all Cuba’s missions in Venezuela, Víctor Gaute; as well as
health professionals from the island and the sister country.
Rogelio Polanco, who was invited to speak by Maduro,
noted that having achieved such an important goal in the field of health is a
miracle made possible by the hard work of both peoples. This is the most
important mission that a country undertakes in the world for the benefit of
human beings, while others make war, stated the Ambassador.
“No one can stop Barrio Adentro,” stated President
Maduro, who made a special point of sharing with the press figures which many
global media outlets fail to report: thanks to the mission, which emerged 14
years ago, 71,900,000 medical examinations (from taking blood samples to
computerized axial tomography) and almost three million surgical procedures
have been performed, all free of charge. Meanwhile, 179,191 lives have been
saved; and 830 medical students from indigenous communities have graduated as
doctors (while maintaining their ancestral practices and knowledge), and
thousands more are currently being trained.
Maduro noted that despite the difficulties faced by
the country in April of last year, the government decided to continue working
toward the goal of providing 100% nationwide medical coverage, which was
finally achieved on Friday, April 21. Barrio Adentro, he explained, is a
product of three key concepts shared by Bolivar, Marti, Fidel and Chavez:
cooperation, solidarity and the complementarity of our societies.
“We are now entering the perfecting stage,” of this
mission, stated the President.
“If we don’t build the Venezuela of the future, who
will?” he asked, noting that the oligarchy, whose “interests only go as far as
their ambitions,” would never embark on such a feat.
Maduro also mentioned the historic march which took
place this past April 19. He noted that not everyone who turned out to march
was able to fit along Bolívar Avenue, with scores overflowing into the
surrounding streets of Caracas.
Enemies of the Revolution spent over 100 million
dollars publicizing the opposition march - which also took place April 19 - on
social media, the very same which paled in comparison to the red tide of the
people which swarmed the streets in support of their Revolution. Maduro noted
that this was the first time in the history of the war against Venezuela that a
campaign of such magnitude had ever been waged on social networks.
The President repeated his call to opposition sectors
for dialogue: “I hope,” he noted “that they have the courage to take the
step…Enough of this criminal, coup plotting violence, enough,” he stated,
highlighting that these must not be times of hate, and only that which is made
from love succeeds, that there will never be a civil war in the Venezuelan
homeland.
We must take care of peace, love peace, value peace,
because only through peace will we be able to realize achievements like that
which we have accomplished in health, highlighted Maduro. “For us peace is the
foundation on which to build the good, the useful, the great,” he stated.
In the face of difficulties, in the face of a war
being waged against the Revolution from all sides, Nicolás Maduro recalled an
undeniable truth this Friday: There is a team of health professionals ready to
serve every 250 Venezuelan families. This is what 100% medical coverage means
in the land of Bolívar. This is the news which, Maduro himself pointed out,
many media outlets do not want to report.
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