For the Nigerian Left My difficulties in this discussion began with how to construct a title for it. I could break down what I wanted to say into bits of statements and questions. But I could not agree with myself on how to craft a befitting title for the discussion, even a provisional one, in the manner of many writers. Before finally adopting the title that now appears, I had serially considered several alternatives. One of the earliest, the one I loved most, was “Marxism in our time”, which simply lifts the title of Leon Trotsky’s essay written in Mexico…
Author: Edwin Madunagu
Forty-five years ago, as I turned 30, I left Lagos for Ibadan. From Ibadan, together with a comrade of the same age, I left for a rural community somewhere between Gbongan and Ile-Ife in present-day Osun State. There we joined others, similarly inspired like us, about ten in number, male and female, excluding two kids whom we took turns to “baby-sit” in order to free the mother to participate fully in revolutionary duties. We assembled to inaugurate an underground Marxist revolutionary vanguard embedded in the peasantry. While some members were fully in residence, others were semi-resident, but continually in touch…
About three years ago, a young comrade of mine who was then a student of History and International Relations at the Federal University Lafia, Nassarawa State of Nigeria, asked me a loaded personal question. He told me he prepared the question after consultation with one of his lecturers who had been following my public writings. The part of his question that is of immediate relevance here can be reframed like this: Why is it that my published writings are mainly, if not exclusively, on “socialism”, “Marxism” and “revolution”? And why is my method “historical” and my style “pedagogical”? In response,…
My last article, “Further notes to the Nigerian Left” (late February 2021), was a deliberately condensed message. It was so because I feared that Nigeria was approaching another dangerous bend in its history. I therefore wanted to indicate, even for my own self-assurance, where the movement could stand and all that it could do and should do if it was forced to maturity. For, I have, for some time now, been convinced that the Nigerian Left will, one day, be pushed to maturity because Nigeria’s ruling class, as we see it today, cannot lead the country out of this national…
The last paragraph of my last published article for the year 2020, titled “Study notes on state and state failure” (December 22) started with a number of questions to the Nigerian Left. Please note that, our wishes notwithstanding, we do not see or present the Nigerian Left, as of today, as an undifferentiated entity. Rather, we realistically see it as a movement of various segments and fighting vanguards united by a common history of successes and failures as well as commitment, faith and hope. The questions were: “So, judging from the multitude of crises partially listed in the opening paragraph…
The importance and urgency of this subject to the Nigerian Left, at this time, demand that I begin the discussion with a series of clear propositions. And that is what I intend to do here. None of the propositions, in its essence, will be new to the movement or in the movement. What may be new will be the way they are articulated and brought together here. The over-flogged and yet not too-illuminated subject, the national question, may enter this particular discussion because of its connection with the question of national unity. The first two propositions will establish the link…
There is a contradiction between an enduring desire of the Nigerian Left (the aggregate of Nigerian Marxists, socialists, and fragments of radical democrats), on the one hand, and the actual history of Nigeria’s Left politics on the other. That contradiction can be stated like this: Nigerian Leftists have always hoped to found a substantial and respectable pan-Nigerian organization that is capable of permanently and continuously coordinating their revolutionary strategies and popular-democratic struggles regardless of the electoral agenda, time-tables and timelines presented to the nation by Nigeria’s ruling class and its governments. But what we have had in practice is that…
One of the earliest objections we encountered from our opponents when we entered the organized Marxist political activism in the early post-Civil War years was the one built around the thesis that Marxism, our ideology, was alien to Africa and to Nigeria in particular. We soon realized that this objection was not new, that it was as old as the history of the Marxist ideology in Africa and Nigeria. We found that our older Nigerian comrades (especially the intellectuals and academics among them) had confronted the objection for at least two decades and a half before our entry. Still, later,…
When my mobile telephone rang around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, April 15, 2020, I knew, before checking it, what news I would receive: the death, at the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH), of James Kolawole Kwame Crentsil, popularly known as Comrade James Crentsil in and outside Calabar and in and outside the Nigerian Socialist Movement. He died at the age of 63, a unique member of the set of classical “cadres” or “foot-soldiers” of the post-Civil War Calabar socialist formation. The general and particular meanings of these key defining terms –“cadre”, “foot-soldier”, “classical” and “unique” – will become implicitly…
Sometime in 1999, as both the 20th century and the second millennium were drawing to a close, the Pluto Press, London, released a book with the title: “The Lugano Report” and subtitle, “On preserving capitalism in the 21st century”. The author, Susan George, who shares this name with another well-known but the much younger woman, was born in 1934. The older woman, our own Susan George, is an American-French Leftist, a writer, a global popular-democratic activist and a public intellectual. Before writing the “Lugano Report” in 1999, Susan George had written several research-based books on world poverty (and its roots),…
One of the first definitive steps taken by General Ibrahim Babangida on displacing General Muhammadu Buhari in a “palace coup” and coming to power in Nigeria in August 1985 was to set up, four months later, a 17-member committee (two women and 15 men) to organize, conduct, collate and then report on a general national political debate. He called the committee the Political Bureau. The political debate was to be on the character, content and form of a future political dispensation expected to be the legal successor to both the Second Republic (1979-1983) and the military dictatorship that overthrew it…
Reflections on the current “insecurity” and “threatening state failure” in Nigeria – and what the Nigerian Left can do – recently led me, in a tortuous manner, back to a formulation on a revolutionary intervention which I thought I had transcended long ago. We shall first discuss the formulation and then come to “insecurity” and “threatening state failure”. The formulation was provided by a Leftist revolutionary about 115 years ago. The revolutionary was young (about 27), idealistic and romantic. But he was idealistic and romantic not simply because he was young, but essentially because he was brilliant and came to…
Nigeria’s ruling class has presented the nation with a number of issues around which the Nigerian Left can build an agenda of political engagement for the year 2020, or which, to use an old journalistic expression, the Left can use as “pegs” to construct an agenda of close and integrated engagement with the rulers for the year 2020 and beyond. The rulers of Nigeria regularly “oblige” us in this way. This time around, the issues on the table and on display include the movement of Nigeria’s presidency in 2023; the politics generated by the Western Nigeria Security Network codenamed “Operation…
Let me begin by saying that the term “idealist” is not used in this article in the philosophical sense. Were this the case, departed comrades to whom the piece is dedicated would not be considered as Marxists at all. But they were all revolutionary Marxists. I employ the term “idealist” here in the ordinary sense of a person that “cherishes or pursues high or noble principles, purposes or goals” but without giving sufficient consideration to objective, historically-determined reality. When this description is applied to departed Nigerian revolutionary Marxists, you begin to have a picture of the type of persons I…
This is not a tribute in the usual sense the word is used and as suggested by the title of this piece. Rather, it is an aspect of a story that has not been told in full, but which—I have now been persuaded—should, at least, be elaborated in some areas—for the benefit of the younger generations of the Nigerian Left. The opportunity I have now seized to do this partial elaboration, January 2020, is the start of the 75th year of existence, on earth, of one of the preeminent characters in that story and the 60th “birth-month” of an exceptional…
My most recent published article, “Recalling Tai Solarin’s prediction”, which appeared in the first week of this month, ended with a series of questions. I reproduce four of them that are most relevant to this sequel: “Why is it that despite the Nigerian Left’s insistence, at least since 1979, on the inevitability and irreducibility of a Revolutionary Party, the party has not emerged? Why should we find ourselves repeating the same theses and propositions after every bloody and farcical display called “election”? How has Nigeria’s ruling class been able to periodically renew itself, assume new organizational forms and continue its…
Nigeria’s 2019 elections, particularly the recent governorship contests in Kogi and Bayelsa states, have forcefully brought back a prediction which the late Tai Solarin made about 40 years ago in the aftermath of the 1979 elections. Of course, recalling this prediction is also recalling my response to it at the time. I was then 33. It is appropriate to begin any story I might wish to tell here by introducing Tai Solarin to young Nigerians who were not born when the prediction was made. This set of Nigerians now constitutes the majority of the Nigerian population. Tai Solarin was a…
In the 20 months since I wrote “Drafting a people’s manifesto” and “Further notes on the people’s manifesto” (February/March, 2018), a sufficient number of significant things have happened and are happening in our country, Nigeria, in the Nigerian Left, to the Nigerian Left and in the world to raise the level of the urgency of the broad suggestion I alternately called “draft” and “notes”. The use of these terms to describe my attempt was a cautious way of indicating that I was not, and could not be, publishing a manifesto on behalf of the Nigerian Left. I could only suggest,…
The word, “revolution”, is currently enjoying a political and lexical rehabilitation with Nigerians, especially the youths. Though still seen as treasonable, “revolution” is no longer easily associated with evil or lack of patriotism. The type of rehabilitation that “revolution” now enjoys reminds me of the euphoric celebration of “new democracy” in the last decade of the 20th century, allegedly following the collapse of Communist Party-led governments in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Unlike a “coup d’etat” against which the youths still react negatively—or at best, with mixed feelings—“revolution” no longer evokes fear. This piece is inspired…
About the middle of 1985, the tendency to which I belonged in Nigeria’s Marxist Left met somewhere on the campus of the former University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife. We met to review our programme and, in particular, to discuss what I may now articulate as “abstractionism” in the national platforms of the Nigerian Left. And what do I mean by “abstractionism”, a term in which, I fear, I may now have embedded unrelated “attributes”? Let me recall the dramatic procedure used by the comrade who introduced the subject. The comrade produced a current draft programme in…
In discussing the disparities in the distribution of “development,” wealth, power and poverty in Nigeria, many people—most of them young, but educated—seem not to be conscious of two important factors, namely: the factor of history and the factor of capitalism. We therefore begin these notes with five simple facts whose combined significance—as important as it is—should, however, not be mystified or distorted. They do not explain everything; but to refuse or miss to be actively guided by them is to leave the road to comprehension. The first fact is that the emergence of Nigeria as a single country was a…
In a couple of weeks Nigeria will begin another round of general elections. This coming round of the four-yearly ritual, re-started by Nigeria’s ruling class in 1999 to herald the Fourth Republic, will be different in at least two respects from earlier ones. In the first place, the number of officially participating political parties and candidates will be very much larger; and, in the second place, there are participating parties and candidates that are Leftist or socialist, and are officially named and listed as such. However, only about five or six of the participating political parties can actually be described,…