Showing posts with label Nigerian Politicians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nigerian Politicians. Show all posts

Saturday, January 5, 2019

Nigeria: Letter To Our Politicians

By Tony Afejuku
What a Christmas it has been! What a new year it will be! And what future of our country confronts us! Where are our politicians to write and shape Paradise that our country wants? These were nagging questions, nagging thoughts that were versions and portraits and figures and images that were collectively part of my mental voyage as I spent ample time walking, thinking, meditating and trying to write about our country.

The source of my image-making power which is my sub-conscious mind moved and moved toward political action in our country as I paced about in the serenity of my wonderfully quiet abode of plain living devoid of material things that tantalize our politicians everywhere, materials things that our politicians crave, and which have turned them into exploiters, speculators, avaricious financiers who have unleashed in our country economic inferno preventing workers, including university lecturers and professors, from enjoying minimum wages corresponding to their labours.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Those Who Killed (And Are Killing) Nigeria

By Dan Amor
Every real nation state is an historical product. It is, in Marx's celebrated phrase, "the official resume of the antagonism in civil society", but under historically determinate circumstances. As such, it is the product of the historically specific constellation of class relations and social conflicts in which it is implicated. It may, therefore, indeed, it must, if it is not to rest on its monopoly of the means of coercion alone, incorporate within its own structure, the interests not only of the dominant but of the subordinate classes. In this quite specific sense, then, every real nation state has an inherently relative independence, including, as well, the independence to understand the dynamics of its made-made domestic crises. In consequence, therefore, the general characteristics of the Nigerian nation state today may be seen in terms of the enormity of its domestic crises and social contradictions. 

Therefore, those who murdered Nigeria, and are still killing its residues include, but not limited to: a big and comprador bourgeoisie that has abdicated its political aspirations and allied itself to semi-feudal interests; a discontented small and medium bourgeoisie made up of a certain class of professionals and intellectuals, potentially revolutionary, but which hesitates to renew the struggle for its national liberation. There is a sleeping working class which is supposed to be the prime revolutionary force but which cannot define clearly its trade union tasks and political aims. There is a large crowd of youths, the student body that constitute about 60 per cent of the national population, which has abdicated its responsibility of serving as light to the national ideal due largely to intellectual dishonesty, ignorance or docility arising from poverty of ideas. There is also, a peasant mass of small landless factory hands, artisans and motorcycle operators otherwise known as "Okada riders", who need a clear vision of their tasks and a framework within which to organize their own action in unity with the working class. Above all, a group of shameless, opportunistic and sadistic Generals (retired and serving), domestic tyrants and usurpers who, because of their prolonged crime against the people of this country, do not want political power to shift to its rightful owners for fear of being probed. And, of course, a handful of totalitarian Devils called traditional rulers who, having been aware of their gross irrelevance in a democratic society, strive to ally themselves with dictators, expired warlords and anti-democratic elements in power in order to entrench feudal power in the local government councils.

It is in this context that we must examine critically the way forward to the present logjam in the country. It would be recalled that the deepening crises that resulted in the Nigerian Civil War were the aftermath of the cumulative anger of the forces of real change against the reactionary superstructure that was the First Republic. After the bloody civil war, and thanks to the oil boom which provided them with the rare opportunity to line their pockets, the military rulers in collaboration with the agrarian mercantile big bourgeoisie, together with a small sector connected with industry, tied their future more and more to the semi-feudal structure inherited from the colonial system. Because of their quantitative and qualitative weaknesses and the fear of the workers' movement and the surge of the masses, they were, at the beginning, disposed to ally themselves with whatever was acceptable of foreign monopolist capital, then in the process of conversion to a neo-colonialist framework.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Aisha Buhari, Bags And Fleas

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  
A tragic irony that has imperiled our collective well-being and has indeed precipitated the nation’s current political and economic ruination is the readiness of the citizens to brook their leaders’ dereliction of duty while still wishing that they chart an uncommon trajectory of national development.
*Aisha Buhari 
We watch our leaders loot the treasury and appropriate our national resources as the extension of their private estates.  But let some years roll by, then we suffer collective amnesia and we launch into a revisionism that casts  national villains in the mould of heroes to whom  the citizens are eternally obliged.
If the President Muhammadu Buhari presidency fails to break itself from floundering and is unable to positively impact the citizens, there would still be people who would insist that he contributed immeasurably to national development. After all, he detained many public thieves and recovered their loot.  Already, the citizens are being told that they should be patient because the so-called dividends of democracy can only be brought to them after the current government has cleared the unimaginable rot left by its predecessor.
Although the camp of the supporters of Buhari is thinning out having been disillusioned by his ineptness, the citizens who are not amenable to this delusion of waiting  for good governance to manifest but insist on evident performance are easily branded as enemies of the positive change that is launching the country into prosperity. 
And this is why our shock at the lack of direction and the gaudiness of the lifestyles of our leaders at a time there is so much suffering in the land is muted. The list of the manifestations of the hardship is endless: Workers and pensioners have not been paid salaries for months; those who can no longer endure are taking their own lives and children can no longer go to school .Those who are in school abroad who can no longer pay their fees because of the foreign exchange crisis have turned into thieves, prostitutes and beggars. But amidst this, the children of our leaders are schooling overseas. No wonder they do not care that teachers are not paid at home and schools are being shut down. Are these the people we expect to think about how they would improve our education?