(A two parts youths advocacy series by, Comrade Ogbu A. Ameh, National Convener, Generation for Change Africa)
Ojireto’s political platform “Generation for Change in Africa” in its advocacy draws its inspiration and motivation from the work of past African revolutionaries, writers and activist as a powerful call to action. A call to action for the oppressed and exploited of the world to organize together against tyranny and injustice that we feel well expresses our own motivations.
We must rise like lions after slumber in irrepressible number and shake our chains like dews, which in sleep had fallen on us. We are many, there are few as we are so many voices and so many struggles scattered across the planet, “Generation for Change Africa” attempts to gather these voices in irreprehensible numbers by providing a platform of hope and inspiration for action.
The obstacles activists face today like those faced by workers and the oppressed since the brutal attacks by imperialism are great, but our number and anti-imperialist struggles are greater. With solidarity and unity, we can hope to begin to make changes in the system we opposed.
Ojireto’s quest for change has been a precursor to his latter quest for political power. He chooses early in his life to walk the strange path hitherto known to his peers, relations and acquaintances. He likes standing out in the crowd not as an extrovert but by jettisoning bandwagon syndrome prevalent in his society. In his conviction to walk the strange path, he finds fulfillment in Marxist Socialist Ideology. He has consistently imbibed ideological issues, commentaries and discussions in political classes at both levels of Anti-Imperialist boot camp and socialist workers leagues’ ideological discussions.
Ojireto never rests on his laurels as he studies across disciplines, focusing majorly; on “the concept of Global Rights”, introduction to international labour standard”, Supervision of international labour standards,” freedom of Association and collective Bargaining”, “Access to rights for workers in internal and precarious employment, “Company’s responsibility to respect ILS, Works standard and principles”, Trade Union Strategies in global supply chains.
Ojireto always considers the period of Nigeria Civil War as symbolic based on what his late mother told him. She gave birth to him the day Ojukwu’s war planes came to drop bombs in Otukpo. She was never specific on the date therefore, Ojireto extrapolates his age around the period rather than specificity. As the month of September draws closer at the end of the preceding month, he knows he has to mark his birthday though in his own way. He just chooses a topic of interest and writes a poem, essay or article for publication in national dailies.
He sets his pen flowing with rapidity on a writing pad as he flows with his train of thought to mark his birthday once again. This very year seems special because he has been writing a book, which he wishes to publish as part of the celebration of life. He starts; “since the days in the last forty something years are gone forever and those that are to come may not come to me in my present state of being, I employ the present state without regretting the loss of that which is past or too much depending on that which is to come. For I cannot say of my next state of being except as struggle which I have chosen to be in the vanguard. This instance is mine the next is in the womb of the future”.
As he ends the short philosophical piece intended as a synopsis for a lengthy article to mark the beginning of his revolutionary struggle, he heaves a sigh of relief. In his forty something years, he has been a living witness to plethora of injustice, inequality, corruption in high places, oppression, conflict and crises arising from religious intolerance, ethnic rivalries, hypocrisy and deceits by religious leaders, mediocrity and mendacity in leadership and the public space, looting of public treasuries, nepotism and tribalism.
He grimaces as he reels out the long list of social ills in his society. He concludes that the reasons for the military coup in the mid-sixties, pales in comparison to what became prevalent during the oil boom. It baffles him that successive military rules after the January 15th 1966 coup premised their misadventure into the corridor of power on their messianic role to rescue to country from corrupt politicians.
It becomes more funny and appalling that their counterparts political elites, always celebrate them queuing with their resume for appointment into a military government. Some of them preferred the junta in power that they conspired and abetted their government. That goes to show the dearth of principle, patriotism, and collective will to work towards the general good for all citizens.
He therefore urges every educated African especially, the youths whose future is actually being negotiated to join in this great crusade to rescue the great promise of the lost African glory. Only collective effort can resolve these complex setbacks that ignorance, betrayals, religion and ethnicity have used to derailed our dream, and which have put our stability as a people of a continent to serious question.
The serious part of Africa’s problem today consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying, and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptom appears. In virtually every country on the African continent, the experiment with democracy is locked in the deficit trap. The people do not understand the functions of the legislators, this includes the legislators themselves, if they realize that the legislature is the first arm of government, the real essence of democracy, the moment they realize this, democracy will be stabilize.
Democracy is not just about good governance; it is a principal tool for economic growth at the secondary resource or knowledge phase of development that many countries of Africa have entered. Understanding the intrinsic capacities of true democracy is the actual key for success in the new economic height. Like the human beings, democracy is a package of good and bad, when its clothed with effective system, it will produce development; if it is naked, it will produce chaos. Democracy is basically concerned with liberty, justice and truth. All informed individuals, cultures, creeds and societies love and cherish these values. However, if left naked, it will be induced by the nature’s laws to activate the intrinsic evil in man to undermine the right of others leading to chaos. It will in turn undermine the economy to produce the leverage that separatists tendencies will need to push the country into disaster.
African countries since independence have been experimenting with naked democracy. This deliberate practice of naked variance of democracy has ensured that no one of the countries knows no peace or real progress. “Nigeria”, the giant of Africa as a case study here in the first republic, the overzealous young military were new to the trend of democracy and innocently struck. This act of messianic misadventure leads the country into a civil war that the secessionist termed genocide. These young overzealous officers will turn in their graves to day when they hear or see the depth of the abyss Africa and the giant of Africa Nigeria have fallen into.
The real issues unknown to those young overzealous military officers and many of them long after are; Africa adopted and operates the false variant of democracy, not just the “giant” Nigeria. The error is not as a result of deliberate perversion. It did so by adopting the false variant as a result of ignorance of the true nature of democracy caused by the deficient development education that the continent adopted as colonial legacy. This ignorance is also responsible for the comatose life of it states and the seeming intractable economic growth crises even in the face of tremendous natural and human resource.
Today, Africa and her nation states must definitely chock the guts out of those innocent young military messiahs who were appalled by ten percent bribery as part of Nigerians official corruption level then. If they are to rise from their graves and walk the face of the earth today in any part of the continent, they will be shocked to their marrow that they will prefer the life beyond than alive. Since their demise, African states and its actors have gone mad and berserk with treasury looting in reckless abandon.
When political leaders cocoon themselves in illusions of grandeur, they lost touch with reality and the urgency of the public mood. Nigeria’s political leaders always have it wrong because of the electoral process that throws them up. Bourgeois party politics is controlled and manipulated by the capitalists who dictate how the state can be governed or run as a business corporation.
The pre-independence African revolutionaries and their messianic coupists would have wept for African states and Africans in the post-independence rape of democracy and abuse of power in reckless abandon. In Nigeria, the sleeping giant of Africa, politicians and the military took their turns in denuding the economy. The flow of oil in the Niger Delta serenades in a siren voice that lures the high and mighty into crass accumulation of oil money to the detriment of governance.
The gush of black gold continued as government became blind with the curse and the region that is host to it comes under ecological despoliation. The people cry out in pain and lamentation as they watch their sky goes up in flame. Their water turns poison as fishes die in school and farmland turns stranger to arable crops. This is just a snippet of the Niger Delta region and the raging storm of insurgency in the years ahead. Up north in Kano State where groundnut pyramids almost became another wonders of the world, when men built pyramids of it to buoy the pre-independence economy. In the south west of Yoruba land, the cash crop of cocoa found affinity with the fecundity of its soil and yielded bountifully. The greatest political sage of that era was grateful to God who blessed their soil with such fertility by shinning the light for his people to follow. It has been more than half a century; his people saw the light and have been in the vanguard of expanding the frontier.
In the South East, palm tree agrees with the soil that the region gained global lead and recognition as one of the biggest producers of palm oil. Malaysia came in the wisdom of her altruistic leaders to transplant the crop on their soil. Since then, it overtook Nigeria’s Eastern region to become world biggest in the production of palm oil. It also left Nigeria behind in technology and other human development indices.
These are just but few of the abundant mineral deposits scattered beneath the soil of Nigeria. In spite of the enormous economic potentials of all of these natural resources, the spirit of suspicion, greed and rivalry latent in Nigerians galvanized their leaders into scrambling for oil. The oil rush and boom, was a euphoria that one past military Head of States was quick to boast that; “Money is not our problem, our problem is how to spend it”. In his innocence and naivety to public administration and governance, he spoke the minds of his contemporaries. He and his cohorts squandered the oil fortune for nine years after which other cliques came in succession. In a seamless stretch, the military squandered the oil fortune for an accumulated period of Thirty-Three Years.
As the oil gushes and he demand soars from the industrial countries in the west, our political leaders threw away, all the economic management and theories learnt in business schools for the street and jungle wisdom of looting. In the looting spree, agriculture was neglected and became moribund. Policymaking and implementation suffer summersault as divergent sectional interests’ rivet attention on the black gold. Spending instead of investment became the order of the day.
While white elephant projects reared its head across the country as priority shifted from investment to spending. In the face of huge oil revenue, the Federal and States governments compete to outdo each other in borrowing galore. The debt keeps mounting as one successive government comes and goes. In the end, these debts are given different names coated in World Bank and International Monetary Fund semantics to be passed to future generations.
The Nigerian leadership crises have made a journey of forty days to become forty years as the people grope in darkness until today. This self-inflicted curse has boomerang on virtually every sphere of human endeavor in the society. Even the religious institutions, are not spared of the decadence prevalent today.
As the political elites in connivance with their economic bourgeoisies strangulate the economy, the entire land went up in colophony of restiveness, insurgency, rebellion all cloaked in different under tone to underscore its grouse and demands. A people who lived through half a century oil boom suddenly realized that, they have been beguiled by the leaders as they faced a night mare. Just before the oil wells run dry, a jolting rude shock woke the shortsighted leaders and the people to the hard reality.
The international oil price has fallen and as a mono-economy country that depends on oil foreign exchange, darkness has come upon the land. Today the Federal government’s current strategic re-focusing is on agriculture and other non-oil sector to diversify the economy. The focus appears to be shifting to Nigeria Youths. In Africa, the youths in their active years constitute the backbone of labour force, but their active youthful age have been neglected, wasted and abandoned.
Ironically, in the wake of economic downturn, the political leadership suddenly acknowledged the relevance of the youths again. Some of them have begun to admonish that; Africa would face a perilous future unless efforts are made by its leaders to integrate its youths into the new world technological culture. They urged the continent to invest in education, especially girl child education, healthcare, agriculture, technological development, infrastructure development, creative industry, tourism and industrialization.
They went further to enjoin African countries to sustain its democratization process and reduce political conflicts induced by British Colonialism. They conclude that the continent must also drive an inclusive African economy for sustainable growth and development. That Africans should not allow the rhetoric of “Africa Rising” to give us a false sense of comfort thereby distracting us from the real work that needed to be done to make it happen.
The later day youths advocacy narratives go further to eulogize and observed that the great potentials, dynamism, resourcefulness, resilience and aspirations of the youths are invaluable capital that can be harnessed and channeled towards a more sustainable future for Africa by refocusing efforts on education, cultural renaissance, agro business ICT, healthcare and the provision of capital for young entrepreneurs.
As the later day apostles of pro-youths advocacy, they lamented that Africa’s transformative agenda was being threatened by a high level of youths unemployment, stressing that the situation has been compounded by an increasing mismatch between the skills offered by workers and those demanded by the labour market. They now realized that having a lot of young adults is good for any country or continent if its economy is thriving. However, if the jobs are in short supply, it can lead to frustration and violence. Realizing the potency of the social media as a veritable tool for employment and empowerment of youts, some anti-people lawmakers lobbied to gag the people by sending a bill to the National Assemblies to the effect.
Other later day pro people politicians seeing the handwriting on the wall throw their support against the bill by urging stakeholders to resist any attempt to gag the social media. This group of politicians in a dramatic twist felt remorse that Africa needed more industrialization than finacialization. They argued further that although the service sector is doing well, the continent must stir growth in other sub-sector and the real sector, which is manufacturing.
Flowing from this narrative, the perspective of politicians with divergent viewpoint on social development issue, one can really discern how the system and the actors work at cross-purpose in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular. Cross sections of different political actors and groups on the platform of bourgeois political party are caught between the edge of the dagger and the deep blue sea. It is at this point of dilemma that alternative political force can rise to mobilize the masses towards a system change. A true change is almost impossible within the status quo of a bourgeois system.
The intense desire for change gave the only aggressive opposition political party platform (APC) the leverage to affect Nigerians emotions towards a protest vote to form a government. It is contestable that the desire change the people mistaken for the APC’s change mantra can only come from them (i.e from below). The APC variant of change is a reformist one not the revolutionary one that can only come from the people themselves.
No wonder, no sooner that the government of APC change came to power than the very people who voted en mass started crying foul. It is just because they were not part of the change process from the bottom-up but were caught in the web as it transits from top-bottom. This kind of change is not all encompassing as it often turns out to be one section of capitalists bourgeoisies competing with the others in a fierce power game of who control the state.
In the ever widening and escalating violence across African Continent, “Generation for change in Africa” has convened a seminar devoted to the link between terrorism and poverty. Young people left behind due to massive unemployment in regions of the Northern part of Nigeria would join the rank of Boko Haram. They would receive 100,000 France CFA a week much more than what they can procure in a precarious job. The very low level of education and culture would make them vulnerable to the ideological propaganda of the Islamic organization that has no difficulty recruiting them.
Observers are unanimous on the resolution of the Boko Haram equation. The military solution will not suffice. It must be in their foremost solving the social question in Northern Nigeria abandoned by the state where mass of people live in abject poverty. The inherent contradictions in the sociology of Arabic and Western values that fight for the soul of the people must be resolved.
The sociological contradiction since centuries of religious and cultural imperialism has created a vacuum filled by religious dogmas. The youths in this region who justify their abhorrence of western education find themselves trapped in the throes of anachronism in a fast changing capitalist world order
In the Niger Delta, Youths who joined the militant groups in the name of agitation for resource control gone criminal stand between the cross fire of state security operatives and death. These youths in their vulnerability to inducement from unscrupulous politicians were often used as political thugs to do the dirty jobs for those who prefer to desecrate the tenets of democracy and its electoral processes. In the North, South, East and West, youths are mobilized around ethnic, religious sentiments to agitate. These agitations often than not are prepaid or post paid for, without any cohesive ideological base. The bourgeoisies know too well how to manipulate this vulnerable segment of the society to its advantage.
The vitality of youth appeals to their malevolent anti social scheming, yet they hastily forget that such vitality when creatively harnessed forms the fulcrum for productive economy. As the youths on the African continent come under intense abuse and social pressure, their hope of providing leadership in the future becomes dimmer by the day. It is high time Africa went back to her ungenerated intellectuals locked in her youths to proffer solutions to all her problems. Foreign solutions have never worked and will never work.
Great minds before Comrade Ojireto who were pioneers of Socialism on the continent of Africa had other views precipitated by their time and social condition that affected their experiences. The great and legendary Prof. Eskor Toyo, fondly called “The Lenin of Africa” by his close associates would argue; “It is impossible to have genuine democracy on the basis of capitalism. What exists even in the most advanced democracies is nothing but “electo plutocracy” i.e., the government of the “Money and capital – powerful” few, which is legitimized with the façade of regular elections.
He proffered building a masses based socialist workers party, which would enlighten the working masses and organize to win power using both electoral and extra – parliamentary means.
Borrowing from late Toyo’s exposition and castigation of democracy on the basis of capitalism to the yearnings of the people which is socialism, Comrade Ojireto goes on memory lane. In 1986, the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida established the Political Bureau.
The Political Bureau initiated a debate on the social-economic and political system Nigerians wanted. The people’s answer was unanimously in one unequivocal voice; “Socialism”. However, in a dramatic twist on the international political arena, two years after the report of the Political Bureau was published, the Berlin wall collapsed along with the so-called Socialist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe. The ideas of Socialism suffered a major defeat and for a generation free market capitalism was seen as the way forward.
Over the years, as the world comes under increasing brutal assaults from capitalism, these ideas are being seriously questioned and millions of people across the world are turning to socialism as the ultimate “Alternative”. In Europe just like Africa too, people are looking for a socialist alternative. In the USA, there has been widespread anger about economic inequality and insecurity.
Other forms of explosive expression of class anger and another face are recurrent decimal within the American Societies. People are also looking for any alternative, not just socialism. In Nigeria, some are looking forward to a socialist alternative or the “Change” APC had ride on to power. Many others are looking up to Boko Haram, Biafra Republic or other ethnic politics of self-determination.
While the assaults on African youths continue, the successive political leaders in their insensitivities have succeeded in creating incremental leadership vacuum. Those who are said to be the leaders of tomorrow are being employed as election thugs. It has been one of the lucrative jobs since the total collapse of manufacturing industry. The youths cannot sit idle in the face of high-level unemployment and alarming corruption in government. It is flowing from this inherent contradiction that criminality escalated to threaten peace and stability in the country.
Ojireto also learnt to channel his creative energies to tell his story within the context of Africa and Nigeria. It is his story and it must come from within him. Finding that inner creative spark requires introspection, deep personal scrutiny and connection. He realizes that this is not what anybody could really teach him, so he goes on memory lane to weave his narratives.
This trend has continued unabated as elective positions are always up for the highest bidders from the bottom to the top across all tiers of government. It has helped to foist mediocrity on excellence as godfathers reigns supreme. People of questionable characters thrown up in elections that are clearly a mockery of democracy have been the greatest obstacle to growth and development on the continent and the giant Nigeria in particular.
The lawmakers who are the direct representatives of the people, no, sooner that they are elected than they lost touch with people. In times of severe economic down turn when the masses are groaning and gnashing their teeth under the burden of high cost of living, they are clamoring for wall drop allowance and imported official cars.
They, who through the mandates of the people go to occupy positions of leadership never, learn to understand “sacrifice”. In times like this, they must show concern by jettisoning personal aggrandizement and consider wearing uniform to sittings in the National Assemblies. On the African continent, especially Nigeria, the propensity for borrowing and spending more than the creditor is a virus. The social malaise at the root of underdevelopment in Africa stems from the social altitude of the people.
There are litany of these root causes which encompasses; indiscipline, rivalry, suspicion, ethnic jingoism, religiosity and intolerance. Absence of state ideology, tribalism and elitism. Bureaucratic redtapism, high-level corruption, criminality and state impunity. These ills are the direct consequence of bourgeois state system sustained by coercion and high-level corruption. The society is fraught with convulsion within this vortex of social anomie that threatens the whole gamut of the system.
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