Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Femi Obayori
June 12 in Perspective
[Five Critical Essays]
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
Contents Page
Postscript……………………………………………..98
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
Preface to the First Edition
January, 1996
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
Preface to this Edition
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
NADECO-CD ALLIANCE: VANGUARDING JUNE 12
I
Every political vanguard organisation must continually make
critical appraisal of its strategy and tactics and alliances it is
objectively conditioned to enter in the process of the
struggle. The Campaign for Democracy can not be an
exemption and, of course, has never pretended to be such.
On July 5, 1993, Campaign for Democracy pulled the
wool from the eyes of self-defeating progressives, paper-tigerish
radicals, as well as cynics and opportunists of both the Left and
the Right by successfully mobilising the mass of our people for
street protests over the annulment of the June 12 election. This
feat was re-enacted in the following months in novel forms
including sit-at-home protests and neighbourhood rallies due to
the cold- blooded massacre of our people on the third day of
the July event. It was the leadership provided by CD that sent
Babangida sobbing out of Aso Rock in the dying days of August
1993, and later, the Interim National Government (ING) on the
night of November 17, 1993. Thus far with the first phase
of the June 12 Struggle. The emergence of Na tional
Democratic Coalition, NADECO, and by its side, the Eastern
Mandate Union, EMU, in the early days of May, 1994, ushered
in (in concrete terms) the second phase of the June 12
Struggle. This ‘great beginning’ also marked the end of all
illusory hopes of the half-hearted pro-June 12
bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeois, as well as the mass of our
deprived people, compelled under confusion and the pain of
extinction in a struggle whose main weapon stifles and
strangulates its bearer to finally rest their fate in a hope for a
change of heart by the Abacha Junta, a change which would lead
to the handling over of power to the bearer of June 12 mandate.
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
The role played by Eastern Mandate Union is now part
of history. The EMU dramatised its mission by giving an
ultimatum to the Junta to quit office and install the winner of the
June 12 election in power. But the Mandate Union finally
decreed itself out of relevance when in response to the Junta’s
threats it conducted a furious retreat. This notwithstanding, a
couple of mandators again made high-flown speeches
reminiscent of the last kicks of a dying horse but simmered down
shortly after. The rest of the mandators, home and abroad,
scampered for cover, their feathered caps beneath their armpits.
Thus far with the mandators and their mandate. But for now let
us be assured that at another moment, and as may be
opportune by fate, the mandators shall return to gather
their scattered mandates. In time we trust. So it happened that
NADECO became the undisputed vanguard of the second phase
of the June 12 Struggle. And it was with NADECO that CD had
to row in the same boat on the course of glory. NADECO
captained the boat.
Let us recall that during the first phase of the June 12
Struggle, CD co-opted a host of platforms and interest
groups into an alliance it was able to domi nate by dint of
its superior tactics and preponderant audacity. But when CD
entered the second phase of the June 12 Struggle it did as a
member of a coalition notwithstanding its status as a coalition of
about 42 affiliates. It is important to note that right
from the very first day CD’s rank -and-file became aware of
‘our’ role in NADECO only very few had any hope in the
coalition. Although one often heard, informally, that CD was at
the centre of NADECO, the rank-and-file had little confidence in
an alliance led by ‘these NADECO people’.
The ‘NADECO people’s’ approach to mass
struggle started coming to light when on May 22nd, 1994, the
eve of the Constitutional Conference elections, only very few
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
posters and leaflets appeared. It is now on record that while
people, especially in the South West and the Edo home state of
the NADECO stalwart and renowned nationalist Chief
Anthony Enahoro, answered the NADECO call for a boycott,
nothing serious was done about physical stoppage of
elections. Living history as recorded in police
statement pads, dungeon graffiti and court records would have it
that most of those arrested for electoral offences on that day
were CD activists, perhaps the NADECO people were more
tactical and successfully avoided security agents by using
esoteric power (?).
At the same time as NADECO openly rejected
mass action it devoted the bulk of its flabby strength to
exhuming the corpses of democratic structures butchered by the
Abacha Junta in the wake of the November 17th sneak to power.
It would appear that NADECO had predicated its eventual
victory over the Junta on mere threats on pages of newspapers
and its ability to make the corpses of the State and National
Assemblies, like Zombies, walk our streets, like ghosts out
of Hamlet striking fear into their foes who dis turb their
sleep by holding their wards, the people, captive. They wanted
to make these structures, in their shredded shrouds,
sprout to nature once more! But as it turned out, the ghosts
and sabre-rattling of NADECO notwithstanding, Nigerians
soon realised that May 30 wasn’t quite dif ferent from any
other day after all.
And have we not seen how these walking
corpses have faded before the slashing sabre of the Khalifa
like the mist before the rising sun and how the captains have
been dismounted from their cockroach horses and shoved into the
dampening recesses of dungeons, albeit, bourgeois, civilised fashion. And
the last of it was yet to be seen. There is much more behind six
than seven, say the Yorubas. Now NADECO was going to
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release its programmes piecemeal like jokers in a casino.
Meanwhile, the people must wait for the Big Bang. For when
the bearer of the June 12 mandate would finally announce his
government, the mere proclamation was bound to send the Junta
fleeing into the barracks where it belonged. These events
loomed and hovered like a ‘haunting’ Messiah over the
consciousness and being of our people than their real existence.
The magical pronouncement came after a couple of hide-and-seeks
theatrics and left in its wake a couple of no less monumental
appearances and disappearances. The scenario was so clear
that no activist was to be left in doubt as to what was left of
NADECO.
But more importantly, no event has ever provided us with a better
opportunity of understanding our ruling class and politicians as
well as our people than the events of the last one year, if only we
bother to take a keener look. What is the character of this
NADECO? What is its understanding of the June 12
Struggle? And did CD go wrong in allying with NADECO?
To use the words of a foreign electronic outfit, most
members of NADECO are “respected members of their various
communities,” and not one or two but quite a number of them
are known to be “basically honest politicians.” But need not
somebody tell them that the issue went beyond communal
respect and basic honesty; that the essential nature of these
people and their position within the political economy of Nigeria
made them the wrong specimens for the cap they
pretended to wear. NADECO chief tains, no matter how we
look at it, are members of the discredited ‘political class’, if
indeed class be the appropriate definition of this motley
aggregate of self-seekers and hustlers. And indeed, has
their history of hustling and political opportunism, nay, self-
delusion, not bloated our voluminous book of inglorious history?
Is the present generation not a living witness to how the
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political class endorsed the subversion of the Politburo
Report because of its socialist contents? Did not the political
class hail to the high heavens the implementation of SAP? What
about their connivance, open and covert, in the banning of mass
organisations, including the NLC, ASUU, and the NANS in
the blooming days of IBB’S fascism? And what is more, did not
the political class North, South, West and East, united by
opportunism and settlement, allow the dissolution of political
associations in 1989? What indeed stopped them from seeing in
the first place that they ceased to be the determinants of their
fates the very day they allowed these things to happen
unchallenged? And what is more, did they not, in the pursuance
of their opportunistic egunje line, start to scramble to ‘belong
somewhere’ the moment the Junta burst two parties into the open
from the blues? And are we not also living witnesses to the
scheming, infamy, vagabondage and vagrancy that streaked our
shredded history book in the last three years of transition before
the June 12 bubble burst?
As in Germany in 1919-33, Bulgaria 1919-23,
Spain in the 30s and countless other places, bourgeois
democratic illusions and liberal inconsistencies have always
oiled the wheels of ascending fascism. The movement to
full-blown fascism is always blessed with copious donations of
opportunism and vacillation on the part of the so-called political
classes.
This holds true for our political class, whether respected,
honest or dishonest. But at no other time has this manifested
more vividly than the short-lived existence of the
legislative assemblies whose corpses, as earlier
mentioned, and tried to walk our streets once again.
Imagine an elected legislative arm of government bearing the
peoples’ mandate (or rather with people’ mandate forced into its
hands) being sworn in by an unelected Junta! This National
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Assembly, could not even deliberate on matters to which it was
restricted - monuments, antiquities, motor parks. For
six months it deliberated on matters of its members’
welfare and salaries. And the Junta made sure the ‘new breed’
legislators got enough NICON-NOGA HILTON spoiling
treatment both bodily and spiritually as to make them forget
that they were indeed supposed to be legislators,
deliberating on the interests of our people and accountable to
their various constituencies. And have we not seen how these
assemblies-upper and lower houses alike - allowed
themselves to be turned into a Babangida’s weapon for stifling
the June 12 Struggle? Did some NADECO chieftains not aid and
abet the imposition of an Interim National Government [ING] by
60 to 30 overwhelming majority votes in the Senate? And what
is more, need not somebody ask why the legislators refused to
resist the dissolution of the Assembly but waited only to regal us
with some voodoo spectacle.
Enough of this nauseating political scenario. Let us now
take a look at the kind of economic arrangement that has made it
the lot of our people to be ruled by such an aggregate of
disparate lot.
There is no way the roll call of developing countries is to
be made without Nigeria bursting forth to seek for itself a first grade in the
rank, nor is Nigeria, though a neo-colony, to be passed off with a
mere wave of the hand in the gathering of capitalist countries.
But it remains to be seen how a capitalist country can stand
without capitalists.
The Nigerian capitalist manages capital without
employing productive labour just as he has ran a nation in
more than three and a half decades without the spirit of
nationalism. The Nigerian capitalist inherited an agriculturally-
based productive economy from the colonial master which he
soon turned to an oil money-gulping, usurious, contract-based
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economy in which the nepotic habits and psychology of ‘man-
know-man’ and ‘kick-backs’ have become official state policy.
Eight years of Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment
Programme (SAP) was later to introduce into this pathetic
national economic scenario the now hegemonic culture of
settlement and money-as-a Godhead. Indeed, whenever
the history of this generation is to be reappraised by the future
generation (if we assumed that the present curse upon us would
have passed by then) one wonders what an uphill task it would
be understanding that over 100 million full-blooded Nigerians
allowed their homeland to be maimed, sucked and raped in eight
inglorious years of ascendancy of military dictatorship. Need we
quickly step in to save this yet-unborn generation this agony by
pointing out that sections of this 100 million found themselves
places of dishonour either as key actors or as back-ups in this infamous
drama of nation-breaking.
He who wants to accuse Ibrahim Babangida of leaving
without having taught our people any lesson should look at our
emerging middle class. Examine the banking sector and see the
level of ramification and upliftment” it witnessed in the past half
a decade! Look at what fat profits they declare. Or take for
instance the Labour Movement and check out how, in step with
the worsening of the conditions of the working class, the
conditions of their leaders in the trade union movement have
continued to improve courtesy of ‘new thinking’ and ‘scientific
trade unionism’. And what about the car ‘loans’ given to army
and police officers in the dying days of the Ibrahim Babangida
Junta. It was also to the glory of the Junta that at no other
time, under no other regime, did the contractual sys tem
fatten the pocket of the ‘capitalists’ than the one under scrutiny.
The skeletons and carcasses of abandoned projects that
strewn our scotched landscapes bear testimony to the wanton
fiducial lawlessness of the era under examination, just as the
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large number of the members of the middle class that committed
monumental landed properties to the care of God leaves
nobody in doubt as to the resting places of funds flying
out of government coffer. All this courtesy of an endlessly
black gold.
It should be clear by now that we are grappling with a
class whose outlook is limited by crass parasitism. Concretely
speaking, it has not been able to define itself as a capitalist class
in the classical sense of it. It is wholly unable to engage
labour for the production of surplus wealth for its
accumulation, but has defined itself by a mode of appropriation
which amounts to stealing from the public treasury through
inflated contracts, over-invoicing and direct day-light
robbery. It also fronts for foreign multi-national finance and
commercial interests for which it has earned the well deserved
name of ‘agbero bourgeoisie’ after the motor park touts.
Significantly, its politics is just a reflection of the parasitism,
opportunism and long-throatism that mark its mode of economic
existence.
II
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as Nigeria. The June 12 victory symbolises on the one hand the
blowing of the final whistle for the oligarchy to quit the pitch.
The June 12 election and its annulment as well as
subsequent scheming cannot be separated from the events of the
60s viz:, the Western Nigeria Riots, the Nzeogwu-led coup, the
anti-Igbo pogrom and the 30 months officially sanctioned
pogrom called the Civil War. Nor can the truth of it all allow us
to carve a gulf between the 1914 amalgamation and June 12. We
should also not lose sight of those sad realities that lumped the
fate of a people whose leaders moved the motion for
independence in 1956 with the fate of another who resolved
against independence in 1957.
To understand June 12 properly, we must also be able to
fit in its proper place the pioneering effort of Governor
Yohanna Madaki. His unapologetic removal of a
powerful vassal of the Caliphate like the Emir of Muri
preceded the election of non -Hausa-Fulani majority
into local councils among those hitherto cowed people of the
Mambila range.
The religious/ethnic riots that spattered the historical
landscapes of the Middle Belt and South of the North in the 80s
and early 90s are but part of the real foundation upon which the
June 12 victory was built. In citing the history of June 12,
chroniclers must also always define a place for the April
22 Movement of Major Gwazor Okar and its agenda of self-
determination notwithstanding its tactical flaws.
The June 12 Struggle in its essence, therefore,
represents the consummation of the people’s political
consciousness, an active contest for political power by the
politically conscious and mature section of the coun try
opposed to the hegemonic cabal. May God help us! (Power no
be breakfast bread).
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From the economic angle, the ordinary man in the street,
maimed, sucked and animalised in seven years of IBB’s SAP
programme, could see salvation in god image of the great
philanthropist and humanist multi-millionaire, Chief M. K. O.
Abiola. And did not Abiola Milk and Rice begin to appear
in the market square even before his resounding victory.
To the common man be he Hausa or Ibo, Christian or Muslim,
Abiola was simply a messiah. On June 12, he felt he must claim
his freedom by thumb-printing the stallion, Abiola’s party’s
symbol. And once the Junta made bold its intention to annul the
people’s decision without scruples the quest for salvation
became a revolutionary quest. Hence the June 12 Struggle
embodies the elements of self-determination and economic
empowerment, in other words, a nationalist as well as economic
struggle.
The southern section of our political class, nurtured in
the art of whipping up ethnic and tribal sentiments whenever it
felt marginalised in the game of treasury-looting, saw in the
struggle another opportunity to settle account with its northern
allies. This was after it had become clear that the
oppressed people, especially in the South West, would
challenge the Oligarchy, in spite of their elites.
Sadly, even this decision they could not arrive at in good
time. To most of them the crumbs from the Oligarchy’s table
represented a bird in hand, which was worth more than the
prospects of equal access to power. And so it was that most of
them continued to vacillate and play hide-and-seek until the
midnight of November 17, 1993 when Abacha stuffed horse shit-
soiled hay into their ever-open mouths. Then it dawned on them
that there was the need to fight. That was really true-to-type in
the sense that they always ran to their “people” each time they
got their noses bloodied in the tempestuous terrain of booty
sharing by their more advantaged Hausa-Fulani brothers. Even at
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that, they always harbour an overwhelming suspicion of the
people since they are conscious of the strength that inheres in
their unity and resolve. However, and this is extremely
significant, they try to lead the people using tactics that would
minimise their accumulation of political experience. This is
because the Southern elites understand too well that, they could
also be fair game when the time comes for the masses to settle
scores with the elites on a multi-national scale.
Thus, the elites would rather have placards, petitions and
the likes rather than full-scale resort to political street-craft.
It is therefore understandable why the political class, in
pursuit of the actualisation of the June 12 mandate, would rather
prefer a carnival of market women to a cannibalistic charge of an
angry youthful mob. To the political class, a few sporadic
outbursts here and there, a few acts of thug gery and
banditry which they can effectively control and use to bargain at
negotiation table, is more appealing than a self-moving, dynamic action of
the people against the status quo. NADECO could not put its
members out in the streets to lead mass actions. The
NADECO to which we belonged belittled propaganda work.
In short, it would appear that, within it, we never could reach
beyond our arm’s length politically. As such initia tive
eluded us.
If July 5 to November 17, 1993 represented an
authentic people’s movement slowed down by the people’s
representatives, May 30th till date represents a movement
of the people’s representatives facilitated and accelerated by the
people to the dismay of the representatives. Oh Lord, protect us from
an accursed generation!
Ordinarily, the people would appear so vague, fluid and
innocent just as they appear like saintly-pawns in the hands of
the evil politicians they elected. But can the people be separated
from the politicians they elected, or rather can the people be
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isolated from and set against the soci ety that produce them
or rather the society they produce as the case may be? And
would there then have been a society at all in the first
place without the masses? Indeed, must the people not admit
the responsibility for the deeds of their leaders or rulers as the
case may be once they are yet to realise their oppression (that is
when they are yet to be oppressed) or when they have realised
such but have not purged themselves of all hindrances, both bodily and
spiritually, as to enable them face the oppressor in a pitched
battle? Indeed, the leader must be spared the burden of bearing
both his own blame and that of the led no matter how
inconsequential in weight the latter may seem.
Caught in the very web of its own selfishness, and puerile political
speculations, the Nigerian mind, denuded of even the
semblance of contemplative strength, rose up to an imaginary
American intervention on the eve of the struggle to actualise the
June 12 mandate. Churches, mosques and, indeed, tagless seers
saw on the horizon of apparition the colossal image of the
American Marine bearing at the muzzle of his flaming bazooka
the flower of freedom, a farcical antidote to fascism. Only that
the same Spirit failed to reveal to this seers what they would
otherwise have read in living history: that the Marines, like
heaven, only help those who help themselves and in the
interests of the United States.
But what do we expect of such a people? What do we
expect of a people whose whole social essence has been
destroyed (or rather a people that allowed their social essence to
be destroyed) in eight years of uninterrupted, unabated
ascendancy of individualism as a state religion and settlement as
social ethic? In eight years! Eight years of deprived humanity, eight years
of raped humanity, eight years in which all the colourful
legacies, no doubt of diluted essence, of past ages were torn
down and replaced with gilded death-robes and gowns of torn.
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The Babangida years saw the reduction of our people to the
whims of one man-Ibrahim Babangida. For once a people and a
man stood face to face in opposition and yet, with their
fates inseparably bound. Never in history has the success of a
people been so dependent on the failure of a man; never in
history has the success of a man been so dependent on the
naivety and stupidity of a people.
III
Thank God July 5th came to pass and the hope in our people
rekindled! Thank God our people separated their fate from the
fate of a scoundrel. Thank God we have our people, we have the
CD and now we have NADECO, all one and the same - the
product of a common existence. We must return to where we
started out. As belated an effort as it may appear, and no matter
how inconsistent its members have been, NADECO represents
a gigantic leap forward in the expansion of our democratic space.
For the first time in the course of our
disgustingly interrupted, bloodstained history, the
‘political class’ has come forward to challenge the military
under a banner not sanctioned by the Constitution or by decree.
For the first time our bourgeoisie come out to defend the
people’s mandate illegally. For the first time, sections of our
political class are organising and learning the methods of
struggle their colleagues in other parts of the world like Latin
America and Europe take as a matter of right and responsibility.
It could also mark the beginning of the emergence of
bourgeois statesmen who would insist on bourgeois liberal rights
and structures as becoming of a true capitalist class.
It is also significant that this is happening at a time when
the oil dependent political economy, the basis of the
squandermania of the ruling elites, is in troubled waters.
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Without oil money (or similar revenue) of Nigeria’s scale, no
nation can sustain a mammoth class of retainer capital ists the
kind we now have in Nigeria. The demand for
autonomy, self-determination or independence as the case may be by the
oil-producing communities is a demand for an end to the
personalisation of public wealth. In fact, it is a demand for the
abolition of that class whose existence has been based on oil
money.
And since the current political scaffolding called Nigeria
is based on oil, the re-configuration of the balance of
nationalities could well mean that oil- money would no longer
be preyed upon by the Oligarchy and its junior partners
supported by a huge state machine.
The implication then is that those politicians who are
likely to dominate the affairs of this country or what would
become of it in the not-too-far future would be those who
have purged themselves of the leprous plague of
parasitism and contract-greed. For those few elements within
NADECO who have resisted Abacha’s baiting with oil-money
and contracts, the hardship they now experience may as
well be a dress rehearsal of what would i ndeed be the rule
of the future - a future in which every capitalist would have to
prove his worth as a capitalist only by his ability to organise
labour for the purpose of wealth creation rather than dipping
fingers into public purse.
For the majority yet to see the difference between
NADECO and the SDP or say UPN/NPN we only hope that the
ridicule they would receive would not dwarf the type of demise
that would befall them a hundred folds. And so far as the spirit
that brought NADECO into existence is concerned, they are
aliens, or rather, mere fellow travellers. The sooner they are
yanked off as the journey progresses the better. In essence, the
fewer the better, a la V. I. Lenin. Initially the base of the
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
struggle broadened in size, now the broadened base must acquire
a new quality.
It would have become clear by now that there is nothing
fundamentally wrong in working with NADECO, given its
support for the actualisation of the June 12 mandate.
What needs to be tidied up, and was never properly
done, was the nature of the alliance. On the other hand, we have
an already existing umbrella organisation or a coalition based on
the programme of the restoration of democracy via a Sovereign
National Conference (SNC) and the expulsion of military from
power; that was CD which was tested in action, the problematic
is precisely the subsuming of the CD into another coalition
which was yet to stand the test of real, practical struggle. That
was problem number one.
Secondly, there is also the problem that the exact role of
the CD within the Coalition was not clear outside some vague, verbose
designations and heart-soothing pronouncements.
By committing these two initial errors, CD
authomatically stripped itself of playing the role of the tutor of
NADECO, of infusing it with the drive and dynamism
necessary to neutralise and nullify the vacillations and
inconsistencies of the other elements within the coalition.
Notwithstanding the initial oversights, it remains the
duty of CD to lure and draw trusted elements within the coalition
directly and openly against the regime, making them share
responsibilities for the consequences of those actions. But CD
must concentrate its effort primarily on strengthening its own
structures for an independent programme for the actualisation of
the June 12 mandate within the limits of its own human and
material resources while maintaining its position within
NADECO. The first step towards this has already been taken.
********
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
An objective analysis of NADECO’s vanguard role or CD’s
involvement in NADECO cannot be complete without a look at a
couple of events similar in their appearances and representing
links in the chain of events before us.
Whenever our activists criticise the half-heartedness of
NADECO’s leadership and the consequent failure of some of
their actions or when seeming lack of success of our actions are
seen as a reflection of the incorrectness of our
involvement in NADECO, it is of ten forgotten that the
history of failure on our part has not always been the history of
alliance with NADECO.
It remains to be seen how a link is to be drawn between
our failure to successfully mobilise the masses to stay at home
on May 9th, 1994 and our involvement in NADECO. This is
without prejudice to the claim by CD’s Chairman Dr. Beko
Ransom Kuti and active cadres generally, includ ing
yours truly, that we were satisfied with the outcome of May 9.
There was also the January 2, 1993 ultimatum CD issued
to IBB to vacate office which it could not venture to follow up
with any concrete action not just because we lacked the courage
but also because our courage carried us too far ahead of the
masses. January 2 was a reflection of our alienation from the
unprepared masses at a certain point in their struggle against
fascism. But there was no NADECO then.
Perhaps the problem basically was trying to
work according to some schematic design whether or
not such fitted into the objectively existing situa tion.
The mammoth street protests of July 5 and 6 cannot always be
re-enacted nor could they always be standards to measure CD’s
popularity with the masses. Just as August 12, 13 and 14 were a
novel advancement over the shortcoming of the nonetheless
more attractive and more inspiring deeds of July 5, 6, and 7, so
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must we at every point in time, be able to introduce new and
decisive methods to the struggle.
It is in this sense alone that one can begin to understand
Dr. Ransome Kuti, the CD Chairman better when he said
CD was satisfied with the outcome of May 9 Sit-At-Home.
The refusal of the people to stay at home on May 9 was not
deemed by CD to be a reflection of dwindling support for its
agenda unlike ‘The Champion’ (May 10, 1994) would want us to have it.
The posture of the people was a demand for more
meaningful, more result-oriented method of struggle. It was
an expression on the part of the people that the only condition they
could lose what they have is the possibility of getting what they want
either in the present or in the future.
Once more, the current struggle is strictly for
power. It is a revolutionary struggle. What it means is that
the novelties we begin to introduce into the struggle must not
be those that would drag us away from the path of
collision with the state machinery. The people and the people’s
power must come in collision with the ruling order at a certain
point in time. But the question that remains to be answered is
whether we have the wherewithal as an organisation to do this or
not. I have my doubts. Meanwhile the struggle continues. It
must continue on CD platform and on NADECO platform.
Everybody involved in the struggle against fascism and against
30 years of oligarchic domination, no matter his disagreement
with others and his love for his own method, must have a
platform from which to operate and must be allowed to
operate. New platforms are going to emerge and new alliances
forged, but the people’s real movement towards progress and the
future remains one big social movement without a tag. This
movement, I think, is the most important. And surely, it has
passed its first infantile test, now it must go through the ritual of manhood.
15-20 July, 1994. Lagos, Nigeria.
22
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
AREA BOYS IN JUNE 12: OF HEROES, VILLAINS AND
SCAPEGOATS
I
The June 12 Struggle can hardly be fully appreciated
and chronicled without taking cognisance of the special
contribution of the Area Boys community in Lagos and
their equivalent all over the South West. Of all the classes and
social groups that jumped into the June 12 bandwagon, only the
Area Boys played their expected role most consistently; only the Area
Boys needed the most minimal mobilisational impulse for the
most far-reaching effect. This is true of the June 12 Struggle as
for all popular protests for a reform of the existing order, or for
the pulling to pieces of the existing order. They lurk in the
shadow, bidding their time, waiting for such moment as that
society that scorns them puts forward a demand for scorn upon
itself but by its civility, its advanced culture, could not generate
enough faith to do so, to come out and save the society from its
self-afflicted dilemma. At every opportune moment the Area
Boys come out of their dark alleys to loot by rage and fire, to
impress their stamp on our national psyche. June 12 was one
such opportunity, an ample one.
It would therefore be doing a great service to ourselves
by, once and for all, seizing this opportunity to
investigate and understand the Area Boys phe nomenon.
It is essential to go a little bit beyond the chagrin and hatred of
the middle class for this ‘non-class’ to the arena of concrete
deciphering and proper definition of the social relation and the
psychology that always put the society at the mercy of this
lot at the moment of every social upheaval. Their history
dates before June 12. The beginning is where we must begin.
On May 13, 1992 when the Olusegun Maiyegun -
led NANS called a general strike and mass action against the
23
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
harsh economic realities of the IBB days occasioned by the
Structural Adjustment Programme [SAP], which
intensified earlier in March, 1992 as a result of the deregulation
of the economy, nobody was in doubt as to whether or not the police
would drench the popular movement in blood. What indeed caught many
off balance was the manner of justification of the killings and the
middle class support it generated.
The protest, flagged off at the University of Lagos,
Akoka campus, had been relatively peaceful after the initial
verbal confrontation between the students and the police at the
University gate. At first, it was an all-student-affair. Hoodlums,
street urchins, vandals, vagabonds, in short, all that could pass
for Area Boys in the eyes of a typical student in his
state of elevated ignorance were actively prevented by the
police, ably aided by the students, from joining the protest. But
by the time the protest got to the “Areas” controlled by the
“Boys” typified by such landmarks as underbridge shelters, cul-
de-sacs, dark alleys and ‘fox holes’, the ‘civilised’ students and
the police had lost control. Then the trigger was activated and
by evening, not less than six corpses had been deposited in
various morgues in Lagos and many more people were receiving
treatment for varying degrees of gunshot wounds. The police
had no cause to deny the killings. Those shot were said to be
‘Area Boys’ seizing the opportunity of the protest to loot. And to
further drive home its point the police PRO spent lengthy media
time and resources trying to convince himself and the of the
world about how peaceful and civilised the protest was before
the ‘Area Boys’ took over. But police claims reeked heavily of
falsehood in the light of the reality on the ground. For it
remains to be seen how the schoolboy who was shot at
Ojuelegba could have passed for an Area Boy in his school
uniform and with the very conspicuous satchel, which he
slouched with youthful aplomb. One prime-time lie of a
24
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
thousand police PROs could also not have convinced anybody
that the banker whose entrails spilled out of his well-tailored
suit was a ‘hoodlum’. It would appear that the Area
Boys propaganda has become in the hands of the police an
omnibus excuse for their homicidal exuberance - a kind of
‘justifiable homicide’-ala Los Angeles Police Department
(LAPD).
In 1989, the drenching in blood of the Anti-SAP Protest
was also justified by the police, though without any profound
effort, through the claim that they were restoring order and
putting an end to the free looting being carried out by hoodlums
who had taken over the protest. The question that remains to be
answered, however, is whether or not hijacked by Area Boys or
by some other species of marginal people, it can be
possible in our situation to pull off a really peaceful protest?
The answer to this question is definitely to be sought in the
objectively determined social psychology of the various classes,
sub-classes, non-classes and ‘marginadoes’ with which our
society is blessed and among whom you can’t but count first the
Area Boys and their allies.
On the eve of the July 5 event, what troubled every
radical mind the most, apart from the inevitable police interference, was
the fear of free-looting and area boys’ hijack of the popular protest.
However, on July 5, what shocked the radical mind more than
any other thing, having recovered from the spell of seeing
the ‘whole of Lagos’ on the streets, was the near -
absence of looting and the cooperation given the protesters by
Area Boys and hoodlums of whatever shade. July 6 was later to
shake the radical mind out of its earlier pleasant shock when it
witnessed free looting by hoodlums. Once more that gave
Abacha a cheap (but needless to say, unnecessary) excuse for
unleashing fascist troops on the South West to ‘maintain law and
order’.
25
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
Although it is clear from all indications that the Area
Boys mean no other intention when they join a popular
protest save the looting and robbing of the society by rage,
it is a matter of opinion whether or not this species of marginals
actually contribute to or detract from the people’s
struggle. Before going further as to what special role was
played by Area Boys in the June 12 struggle, it is important to
quickly put our understanding in correct perspective as to the
kind of conditions of existence and social psychology
that inform the kind of niche this tribe of marginals has created
for itself in our popular struggles.
II
28
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
All these are the things that strengthen the Boys in peace
time and make it possible for them to continue to live off the
society by cajolery, trickery, harassment and open extortion with
minimal police interference, except when some particularly
‘troublesome’ military governor who knows not the logic of the
area comes to the fore to perform, only for a while though, the
pitiable dance of the novice-in- town or on the eve of some
events of global significance such as an impending FIFA
visitation.
Just like the police, the politicians also know, use and
pay the Boys. Woe betides the politician who comes to the area
to campaign without first and foremost seeing the Boys. For the
Boys have the capacity to spoil the show if not properly settled.
There is also the highest bidder syndrome. The politicians, in
settling scores among themselves, also have to see and settle the
Boys. For the Boys, thuggery is a well-mastered art which they
prosecute to the degree of efficiency demanded.
We have now seen how our species of marginals, lumpen-
proletariat, have made themselves indispensable to our
rotten society, how the gentle man trying to get around the
law needs to see them, how the forget needs to see them, from
time to time, how the police, either for good or for bad, have to
pay homage and how the politicians, whose quickest power of
speech is the money, equally settle the boys to get things done,
and over and above all how in moment of social upheaval they
come to the scene and impress their indelible stamp on the
social movement on behalf of the popu lar mass, for the
benefit of the popular mass and at the same time at a great price
for the popular mass. We must go back to the specifics of June
12 Circus in which this category of circus kings performed.
III
29
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
July 5 did not only shake the minds of the radicals but also those
of the Area Boys. So spell-bound was this tribe of traditional
looters that some of them actually participated in crowd control and in
cases, actually helped in ensuring a successful ignition of the action,
even under the watchful eyes of the arms-of-the-law. Others,
more respected than the rest, having demonstrated their bullying
power in many machete-wielding and charm-throwing as well as
incantation-chanting duels in the past, automatically became de
facto kommandos of processions to the residence of the president-elect.
And it must be said on this day that the democratic forces found
the raw, albeit weed/charm-induced, courage of these
lumpen elements most useful in overwhelming and frustrating police
resistance as well as holding those few Area Boys who would not
show some understanding in check. Though it must be pointed
out too that this surprising attitude of the Area Boys bosses must
have been informed by some other hidden agenda of higher
stakes. Citing one or two instances of the on ground situation
would tell the reader more.
At about 8.20 a. m on Monday, July 5, 1993, a group of
youths charged with the responsibility of mobilising and leading a contingent
of demonstrators to the Ikeja residence of the president-elect had
arrived at Agege Motor Road, Mushin only to be confronted by
armed policemen stationed at bus stops and by street lamp posts.
There was no doubt that the people were ready to move, as they
hung from balconies and windows expectantly without
attempting to go to work. Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th had been
spent doing house-to-house agitation, leafleteering and pasting
posters, so lack of awareness about the intention was completely
out of the issue. But here, the people, there the police, between
them the leaders, prowling in their soft soles, jeans and khaki or
T-shirts. The latter had students written all over them so to say.
Time was running out. Then somebody came up with the idea of
talking to the Boys. It wasn’t difficult getting to them - they
30
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
were known and had their bases. After some cross examinations
- asking to see the student’s ID card or at least a ‘proof’,
questions about knowledge of the terrain, the day’s objective and
the like, they declared with enthusiasm that, indeed, they had all
the while been waiting for the students to come and lead the
‘action’ having seen the leaflets during the weekend. Then they
got down to drawing the battle plan. What a weird thing it was!
Burn a couple of Danfo buses on the road; fire a couple of
shops! -that was action! And it had to take some
painstaking effort explaining the objective of the day once
more to the Boys before they finally agreed to shelve the
‘original plan’. But all the same tyre was needed for the
‘action’. It meant some token amount for petrol, which they got
promptly. Tyres, petrol, petrol and more petrol - for the tyres
were wet (it rained the previous day) a couple of teargas
canisters and gunshots materialised and the people flooded the
street. An attempt was made by the students’ leader to address
them, but the people swarmed him, they swarmed the police and
the police retreated - the movement had commenced.
All the way to Ikeja, the student leaders kept in close
contact with the Area Boys’ bosses, always reminding them of the day’s
objective and getting them to deal with those boys who would
not abide by this objective in the traditional way - they were
usually bullied and dispossessed of their loots which in most
cases were not fully returned to their owners. These were mostly
wristwatches, trinkets and wallets of passersby defying the
strike, some of who took to their heels after being waylaid. The
unreturned loot apparently belonged to the bosses who,
alongside this, enjoyed every bit of the forced march puffing
ganja - you could not stop them after all.
Having gotten to the destination and listened to what
‘Baba’ had to say, the bosses started trying to ‘identify and
organise’ their respective groups. They definitely had hoped to
31
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
get something from Baba, as usual, not realising that the issue at hand
went beyond the traditional politician-Area Boys’ ‘egunje’ connection -
they were most disappointed.
But on July 6, they started a looting spree, and by noon
of the same day, the wanton killing had commenced. By the
evening, Abacha officially backed up the killings and sent out
more troops on the morning of 7th to complete the job. And
once again an excuse was found for killing innocent people.
Throughout the remaining scene of the first act of the June 12
circus, the Area Boys never had the opportunity to fully
exhibit their trait on a mammoth scale. August 12, 13,
14,26 and 27 couldn’t have afforded them such because they
were Sit-At-Home protests; likewise September 29th to October
1st because, mainly, protests never took off before they were
nipped in the bud. On the Lagos Island, however, on September
20th, they defended the democratic process without looting.
On November 10, the day of the Federal High Court
verdict that declared the Ernest Shonekan-led Interim National
Government illegal, the Area Boys were also at Baba’s house to
swell the crowd, also apparently to take crumbs from Baba’s
table, and honestly, they did have their lunch at Baba’s expense
(by right or by force). But to show the true character of our tribe
of lumpen -the very following day, Thursday the November
11th, University of Lagos students returning to their campus
after going to town to call for the resignation of the ING
were attacked with dangerous weapons under the Yaba-
Jibowu Bridge by the Boys for refus ing to allow them turn
the peaceful but angry charge into a free-looting exercise.
As Abacha’s sneaky coup of November 17 drew a
curtain on the first act of the June 12 circus, the Area Boys also
rolled back into their traditional shell of living-by-smartness.
We shall encounter them in a more profound colour and shape in
the next act. However, we shall attempt to assess the lessons
32
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
drawn by the new Junta from the by no means good showing of
the Boys in the first phase of the June 12 Struggle.
IV
One of the very first ‘sanitising’ acts of the Abacha-appointed
Military Administrator of Lagos State, Colonel Olagunsoye
Oyinlola, was not only to start ridding the streets of refuse and
garbage, but also to clear street traders and Area Boys from the
streets. On Saturday 26th March, 1994, shortly after Colonel
Oyinlola assumed office, seven Area Boys were put on display
before pressmen by officials of the State Task Force on
Environmental Sanitation after which they were sentenced to
varying jail terms without any legal aid of meaning. Their
shabbiness of appearance, resulting more from brutalisation by
the rifle-wielding Task Force troops than their vagrancy and
vagabondage, invariably served as enough evidence against
them before the presiding mobile magistrate who for
obvious reasons was always eager to dispense with the day’s job as soon as
possible.
In the following days, there would even be many more round-ups
and clamping in jail. It became even more intensified with the
opening of the second act of the June 12 circus mid-1994, which
we shall soon come back to.
Ordinarily, it would appear that the Area Boys’ clean-up
exercise was merely directed at stemming the menace of these
‘social miscreants’. And no wonder that middle class and
popular grassroots sentiments (particularly among the traders)
weighed heavily in favour of the anti-Area Boys action at its
commencement. It must, however, be said that behind the
pretence to sanitise was the determinat ion of the Junta
to rob the popular democratic process of one of its major constituencies-
the unemployed youths.
33
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
For often times, those arrested as Area Boys
were jobless youths and apprentices in the
neighbourhoods who had nothing to do with drugs,
gold-fingering or toll collection, but nonetheless were always on
hand to lend their energy to every popular action against
the status quo that oppresses and alienates them. These are
the people mostly bundled to jail and not the Boys-lack of
identity card (by an unemployed!) is enough to brand him an
Area Boy and be carted to jail.
But just as the battle was indirectly aimed at the ordinary
unemployed youth so was it directed at the Area Boys proper.
The Area Boys that lent their weight to the democratic process,
turning it into riot, nonetheless also have some commitment to
the process to a large extent. Every Area Boy knows fully well that
the community thrives better under a civilian administration than under
the military. The military don’t need paid thugs, for they already
have officially paid ones in the form of soldiers and police, all
belonging to one party-the Establishment. It is the politicians
that need thugs to settle scores. And as many parties as there are
and as many factions and sub-faction as there are within each
party, as many brigades of tough hands must be mobilised, this
many bands of thugs must be constituted. The boys, therefore,
have a stake under civil rule as much as other classes of the
society. With what experience they had gained in the
gubernatorial primaries in 1991, stuffing N50 notes into loaves
of bread and swelling the voters ranks for a fee in the
Agbalajobi-Sarumi imbroglio and in all the previous numerous
ballot peddling exercises that muralled the expensive canvass
of IBB endless transition since the November 1987
Local Government elections and their antecedents in the 1983
kill-and-go Adewusi era and more remotely the pre-1966 coup
Wetie bloody circus-the Boys needed no intelligentsia to tell
them that a civilian government was needed badly.
34
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
Equally important is the ethnic factor. From afar it
would appear that the boys have no ethnic loyalty - that they
serve the highest bidder. But this cannot be entirely true. Many
of them are Yorubas displaced from their family houses by
‘foreign tenant’ mainly Igbo traders and fellow Yoruba from the
hinterland (Ara Oke). They hate the Ibos as much as the
Mallams (Northerners) and definitely prefer Baba to IBB. So
they must put all their energy into pushing out the Junta.
It must be said also that there are moments this special
group of marginals genuinely side with justice with no strings
attached. In moments of blatant police brutality against one of
their kind or a youth in the neighbourhood, they never failed to
show their solidarity through positive action - one of the very
few moments they ever organise independent action.
The brutal killing of the Dawodu brothers in 1987 in central
Lagos brought out the humanity in the Boys who held Lagos
Island for almost a week until the first move to do justice was
made by the authorities. After the January, 1992 killing of a
Danfo driver by a trigger-happy cop, the Boys were also handy
in effecting the drivers’ one week strike at Mushin where it
happened.
The Boys are therefore not merely trouble-making
miscreants, they are also human beings with hearts in their
breasts. Thus in moments, they break out of the sectarian
cocoon of the underworld to make themselves relevant to the
laws and norms of the outside world, so that it is not always to
be taken for granted that when the outside world moves against
the Boys through parliamentary legislations, council
edicts and military government decrees such are targeted at
the underworld. No! They may as well be targeted at the
already bleeding heart of the society - after all the Boys are a
product of the society, a part of its burden, just as they also carry
its shameful burdens for it. It is not enough to hate the Boys, it
35
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
is more meaningful to know why the Boys must be hated and to
what depth this hatred must go so that the society, and more
importantly, the middle class and the oppressed masses do not
end up doing an emotional storm stropping job for the ruling
class where the stakes are not theirs parse. Anybody who wants
to properly handle the Boys must be ready to meet them in
their sober moments in the dungeon houses and back
alleys, perhaps with some wraps of fancy weeds for
enlivening the occasion. The secrets and mutual treachery
shared between the Boys and the Establishment would definitely
overwhelm him.
Meanwhile, let us once more direct our attention to the
practical, on the ground involvement of the Area Boys in the
June 12 struggle and how the (the Junta and its running dogs)
responded to them, as exemplified in the several battles of the
second act of the June 12 circus.
V
The Abacha regime exemplifies the most pervasive and unskilful
use of lies in the history of authoritarian statecraft in Africa.
However, its fate has also dramatised the futility of this
medium as a means of political and social engineering. Clearly,
social reality has left the grip of propagandists and has refused to be
obfuscated, misrepresented or subverted by even the most
degenerate fascist liars. Simply put, to want to convince a man
that he is a woman is about the most foolhardy lying expedition.
And it matters less if at the end of the day, at the bayonet point
or in the grey walls of the calaboose, you are able to get him to
agree he is a woman - the reality is not changed a bit. Indeed,
Abacha and his tribe of power seekers, both within Nigeria and
elsewhere in Africa, now and in the future, must always be
reminded that it wasn’t lies and the naked bayonet that sustained
Babangida for eight years in office. Rather, it was synthesised
36
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
lies, embellished truth, cunning and garlanded bayonet that put a
hundred million people belonging to over 250 nationalities at the
mercy of a single man. Skilful machinations made a near all-
time successful cardsharper of IBB. One of the Abacha’s regime
greatest undoing remains the fact that he has failed to realise that
Chekwumerije’s propaganda did more to hasten IBB out of
office than giving him a lease of life.
The history of the second act of the June 12 Struggle, so
far as the junta controlled media and their apologists are
concerned, is that of lies-churning.
The Junta’s functionaries exposed themselves as
formidable czars of lies in the wake of the massive boycott of
elections into the Constitutional Conference conducted on May
23rd, 1994. In entire the South West and, indeed all over the
country, a dismal number, 300,000 voters out of a
registered electorate of over 14 million, turned our in an
exercise that marked the first major defeat in the second act of
the June 12 circus. Although it clearly paraded a bloodied nose,
the junta answered everybody that all was at ease. It would later
claim that the boycott and physical disruption of electoral
activities took place only in the South West.
Predictably, it narrowed down the events to that of timeless
tribe of culprits - Area Boys. While it would be out of the
question to deny that Boys readily participated in the disruption,
it remains to be seen how Area Boys alone could have been
responsible for a total boycott of elections if the people were
really willing to participate. But ‘we haven’t seen nothing yet’ as ghetto
people would say.
On the day of the Lawyers’ protest against the Junta, in
July 7, 1994, an innocent police driver was overpowered and
lynched by an irate mob along Igbosere Road on the
Lagos Island. This was in response to the killing by
the police the same day of a schoolboy by over zealous
37
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
anti-riot cops. Although the Area Boys visibly partook in the
vengeful killing of the policemen, it would, however,
amount to devaluing the patriotism that motivated the
social fury evinced by the civil populace of that part of the Island
on that day. In other words, the action drew a lot of people from
a host of backgrounds. To use the words of our source, the
people defined the mission, the Boys supplied the courage - it
was a mob action. Yet again the Junta ‘hasn’t seen nothing yet’.
On Monday July 26 when about 70 heavily
armed policemen tried to disrupt a peaceful protest of
youths and women numbering about 4000 at Sangrose Market on
the Lagos Island, Area Boys came handy in forcing the armed
junta dogs to beat a hasty retreat. The Boys had
suddenly appeared from their hideouts, encircled the police
contingent and cut off all possible escape routes. At the end of
the day, outnumbered and overwhelmed, the police had to pacify
the protesters and Area Boys. The Boys heeded but only after
seeking the consent of the women.
The pro-Junta media on these two occasions,
unable to ‘kill’ he event editorially, decided to play up the
Area Boys’ involvement. And true to type they must again
exhibit their trait-they must loot by rage and fire. On the day
following the Sangrose Market incidents, Area Boys went on a
looting spree - their excuse being to instil sense in those ‘penny
wise’ traders who felt they could open their shops without
deference to the June 12 Struggle. Their action invited the full
force of State fury, but also helped in no little way in
demonstrating the courage and resilience of the Boys. Their
mastery of neighbourhood routes and hideouts has always come
handy, giving them an edge over the police. Their sheer raw
confidence in the face of hissing bullets often drew many
more to their ranks, such that, in mo ments of real struggle,
to distinguish between the Area Boys and an ordinary, socially
38
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
infuriated neighbourhood youth becomes difficult for an
outsider. Even the honest journalist not given to ‘risking’ it to the
scene of ‘ugly’ incidents is also susceptible to such difficulty.
And unfortunately enough, since media owners hardly
provide insurance cover for their workers and many
media workers lack creative adventurism, picking rumours from
the streets and formulating conclusions with the solace of whisky
glass become the most attractive options in such
circumstance. Significantly, within this context,
contrary to the Junta’s thinking, junk jour nalism or
ignorant half-a penny scribbling helps it far more than they help
the progressive movement. Against this background, the
journalist must be careful the way he uses the term Area Boys to
qualify sloppily dressed demonstrators lest he hurls the
proverbial stone into the marketplace. For most of
those people he encounters on the street and passes
off as Area Boys are, indeed, as educated as himself if not
better educated, not to use it to self if not better cultured, and
more responsibly placed in the society. Among them are
medical doctors and medical students , lawyers, Ph.D
holders, engineers, and composers of no mean abilities. They
are intellectuals with full understanding of the philosophical
basis of their actions, with well-conceived notions of strategy
and tactics as well as the likely consequences of such actions.
It is only circumstances that always compel them, in moments of
social upheaval, to discard their airs of middle-classhood and
don the tattered garb of the wretched of the earth. In short they
commit class suicide in the interest of the whole society. And in
so doing they invite the hatred of their class colleagues who have
not recognised the need for or are incapable of such suicide for
selfish reasons. Those who pretend to commit class suicide by
staying indoors or by cheering the protesters from behind the
‘safety’ of their window curtains and balconies do as well as
39
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
those who actually come to the street if pass mark is all that is
needed. But to stay indoors only to come our later on the pages
of newspapers or some podium of Junta-backed rallies to
denounce the effort of the people as the handiwork of city vandals
alone is most indicative of slavery-as-a way-of-life. It does not get
anybody anywhere, especially anybody belonging to an
already decimated middle class. Sycophancy on the part of
the middle class is the taproot of blos soming fascism. So
far, so good.
VI
40
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
On September 13, exactly a month after Col. Oyinlola’s
appearance, the Lagos State Command of the Nigerian Police
Force commenced Operation Clean Up Lagos. ‘Robber’s dens’,
gambling hideouts and places where drugs trade and use
flourished were claimed to be the prime target areas for routine
police raids. This was four clear weeks after Abacha’s declared
intention to silence all opposition by all the means at hand, even
the most crooked and base. By Friday, September 16, over 200
hundred boys had been bundled to the dungeon.
But who fools who? Must all the unemployed youths in
an area, who could not successfully dodge the police, be hauled
to the calaboose before the society controls armed robbery and
drug? Does it not amount to sheer dishonesty on the part of the
state to want to pretend that armed robbery is not sanctioned in a
way by the Establishment? And who told the police that they
could control drug use by merely hauling the Boys off the street?
Who told them that only the unemployed peddle and depend on
drugs?
The fact is that drugs abound everywhere like germs
(apology to Carat medicated soap). Evens in the police and
army barracks, and on our campuses. For instance, stories have
been told about rooms in the University of Lagos, Akoka
campus, where at least six out of eight occu pants take
ganja. It is a known fact that some of their ladies
won’t go out with a non-drug user. So if the thing is about
drug control then belts must be tightened and more effort
geared towards training competent per sonnel of The Drug
Law Enforcement Agency and counsellors rather than truncheon-
brandishing, gun-trotting cops.
But the truth is clear as noonday: nobody is about
controlling drugs or armed robbery. The conception on the part
of the state that the June 12 Struggle drew considerable strength
from the involvement of poor dispossessed youth, the
41
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
unemployed, semi-employed as well as the Area Boys proper
must necessarily have informed the renewed enthusiasm with
which the so-called anti-hoodlum campaign was carried out all
in the hope that by the time the ghost of June 12 once more
walked the streets, there would be no ‘plumaged redskins’ in the
form of the dispossessed and Boys to join the ‘ghost dance’.
This exactly is where they hit off the mark. June 12 is
not about performing a ghost dance, nor is June 12 a
revolution to preserve the class of the dis possessed. Nay,
it is a call to put an end to all dispossession, a call to protection
for the present day propertied class as well as the unpropertied
class on the basis of the most minimal, most basic rights of men
as universally recognised in contemporary time, as the first step
towards the actual and real emancipation of the Nigerian person
sooner or later. It either does this or put the entity asunder- so
far so good.
So far we have seen how Area Boys give
impetus to every people’s uprising by supplying raw
courage but also impact on it with their characteristic knack for
brigandage, looting and social opportunism, and how their intervention
serves the propaganda and military offensive purposes of the
State. It requires no deep thought, therefore, to see that this
social group-this class of miscreants (as the uniformed middle
class would prefer to call them) is not particularly indispensable
to a people’s struggle, but at the same time, must be carried
along if only in anticipation of its extinction. So that when the
time comes as when remnants of the old order begin to mobilise
opposition for the restoration of injustice and (dis)order, they are
deprived of that constituency of mercenaries who must live by
fire and rage and whose morality is limited by possibilities of
loot and the defence of the rule of that class or party on whose
platform the looting process is predicated. But on the
whole, only a genuine democratic trans formation of the
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
society can guarantee the emancipation of the Boys and the
destruction of the relations within them, on the one
hand and between them and the society on the other hand.
***
It is the tradition of the Area Boys to give their dead a befitting
burial with pomp and vengeful jigs so that the
heavenward journey is not made tortuous for lack of
money to pay the boat-man of purgatory. The Boys that passed
on during the June 12 Struggle were mostly deprived of this
singular ‘honour’ due to the particularly harsh circumstances of
those days. Our struggle owes it a duty to build a monument of
the eternity of their ‘heroism’, if only in anticipation of
the total emancipation of this unde sirable class as well as
its total extinction.
March 14-April 18, 1995.
Lagos, Nigeria
43
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
KONGI’S MARCH FOR JUSTICE - REBEL LAUREATE
I
Enlightenment has always been the greatest enemy of the oppressing
classes and the enlightener their first target of assault. If the
English nobility had declared in the years of that Empires great
Revolution (a Revolution cited in that country’s book of
revolutionary history as glorious and regarded by feudal
chroniclers as an ‘aberration’ occasioning mutual
slaughter of Englishmen by Englishmen), that: “God
preserve us from scribblers and speakers. We will live to
regret the day the press was invented”, it is to the extent that
men of letters, when at the service of the people, are
sometimes more formidable than whole army divisions.
What with their ‘vulgar libels’, their screaming
headlines and ‘junks’ and their sneers at ‘corruption and political
debauchery’, those two enchanting mermaids that have always spiced
the peaceably purulent séance of those ‘incubuses’ that weigh
down on the living like dead weights and those ghosts that suck
out the memory of the living dead. The adage that the “pen is
mightier than the sword” is itself mightier than the few words of
which it is made. And nothing could be more mortifying to the
oppressor than to be a soldier with the barrel of the pen trained
on him by a bloody civilian in mufti. He must get his ‘military
respect and honour’ back at all costs (even at the risk of losing
his honour as a human being in the first place).
The situation becomes even worse for the bloodsucker
when the scribbler is not just another half-a-penny juggler or
famished radical who, realising that his revolutionary heaven on
earth is yet to come, now begins to court ‘settlement’. Nobel
prize-winning rebels are difficult to come by but are equally
‘dangerous too’. They become even more dangerous when they
decide to add political street-craft to their trade, when they align
44
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
with the masses with their pens put aside, their leaflets-filled
jackets flying ruffian fashion and their ‘impudent’ lips
reeling and churning out ‘popular grammars’ in readiness
to summon the popular masses to a peaceful but defiant march
against the oppressor.
On Sunday, 24th July, 1994, Kongi marched for Justice;
on Sunday, July 24th, 1994 the Abacha Junta men of guns and
baton marched for injustice. We must begin from the beginning.
II
Several days before the D-day, newspapers had been splashing
the event on their pages. Professor Wole Soyinka was going to
lead a March for Justice as part of the events commemorating his
60th birthday. Other people would have cut a gargantuan cake, a
gangsters wedding affair-ala Graham Greene, but not my Kongi
People conversant with the way of the Junta in recent times
would have known that the march was not going to be, at least
not in the way it had been planned. Everybody knew the Junta in
its usual disgust for even the most harmless expression
of rebellion and defiance would stop this march - and if need
be drench it in blood. But they had come out all the same. Our
people, if not in the quest for freedom and justice but just to
catch a glimpse of the glittering mammy water skin of Kongi
and see the breeze waft that fluffy Martian grey
‘hirsute hell’ crowning his Nobel brain, turned out all the
same.
July 24th was a trial for the people and for the Junta.
Kongi came on time, the Junta was there before the H-hour but
our people came late. Some rather stayed away watching from
the safety of their balconies, windows and streets. With a few
guns and canister launchers trained on residence of
Tejuosho and passers-by, stern-faced troops displayed
few martial steps reminiscent of those colonial steps-‘Yan
45
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
bi ologun’ romanticised and ridiculed by Kongi in his
famous play “ Death and the King’s Horseman” and
the arena was set. It was now Kongi and a few
determined loyalists against the full force of fascist fury. The
men of the law were also armed with their instructions ‘bery
bery clear’ as declared by their citrax-faced commander:
Kongi must not be allowed to march. He was therefore
‘adbised’ (advised, really) to go home so hoodlums would not
hijack the March.
It was a moment of trial; it was a moment of decision.
Should Kongi insist on marching ahead of a mob? Would the
mob allow him to march ahead of it with the gun trained on the
“mob” and not Kongi or should Kongi turn tail and declare
the play ended and risk newspaper banality and press ridicule.
Kongi insisted on marching. In his own judgement he was as free as any
Nigerian and could not be prevented from “taking a walk” with
his “friends” on the occasion of his birthday. But this
only after all attempts by him to blackmail the police with his status
as a Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and a Nobel
Laureate had failed. The police conceded to a march with
‘friends’. But such friends must exclude ruffians, rabbles and
even students - all potential materials for the topsy-turvy
characteristic of the July days must be kept at bay.
The rest is now history. The ubiquitous Western press
screamed: a protest march in support of June 12 mandate was
stopped in Lagos by the police. The local press went further to
tell how the Nobel Laureate was sandwiched between a
horde of 20 policemen on his March for Jus tice from the
Lagos Mainland to the Island and how he later threw away the
insignia proclaiming him ‘Commander of the Republic
of Nigeria’ in vexation over the state of the country and the
refusal of the men of the law to allow him a bottle of drink at the
Island Club after a day’s work. But for the press hype that
46
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
followed and for Kongi’s reputation, it would have been a fair
enough judgement to say the K ongi-led March for
Justice was sufficiently managed to ridicule by the Junta.
And the argument has cropped up over and over
again in the recesses of ‘secretariats’ and ‘hideouts’ of
progressives whether or not Kongi had been right in demanding
his right to march with only “friends” and not the rest of the
mob?
But if one must say, the question is neither one nor the
other. The era under scrutiny called for neither of the two
variants of passive struggle save for the symbolism of it - which
the press hype had achieved. An attempt to lead a mass protest
stopped by the fascist is as good as a successfully executed
protest march in the eyes of the world - so long as a Nobel
Laureate of Soyinka’s calibre occupies the center stage. Kongi
could not have performed better than he displayed on the 24th of
July without spoiling the show. And at the same time Kongi,
given some other objective realities, could have performed
better. When the agenda of a people’s struggle has gone beyond
the level of petitions and stone-throwing, but they are yet to
grapple with methodological imperatives commensurate with
these higher goals, the struggle must either continue to
march, petition and rigmarole on a spot like in a circus or
pull the mask of orgy of comedy from its face and drink in the
full glare of shame. The former signifies hope and determination
of a sort; the latter could reflect either a higher courage
or an early capitulation, borne of lack of courage at all. The
former is easier to place; the latter is dual in character.
Kongi has never been a soul deprived of courage - to
hold a region as big as France to ransom at gunpoint in the
name of justice is not a mark of cowardice. July 24th
was never an indictment of Kongi but rather an indictment
47
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
of our struggle and our nation. To this we shall return at the
appropriate time and place.
If in recapturing of radical traditions of the 60s
America in his remarkable work, “Last Best Hope” ( Peter)
Tauber had written “Demonstrations had run the course of
audience tolerance; it would take greater circuses to move the
populace” (pp.612) this is even truer for the July days in Nigeria.
But if demonstrations would not move the populace, same could
not be said of the bloodsuckers. A regime that would not
hesitate to drench a nation’s honour in the muck by setting
soldiers against defenceless citizens as Abacha did on July 6 and
7, 1993 and by sneaking to power under the cover of darkness
and under sweet pretences as he did on November 17, 1993,
could hardly be trusted to treat another peaceful march of the
same people with kid’s glove-notwithstanding the
presence of a Nobel Laureate. Demonstrations are
more than enough to set the fascist running dogs
cracking. And have we not long since been brought face to face
with this truth? Has it not come to pass how only four days after
Kongi’s March, July 28th, a peaceful protest at the venue of the
Junta’s trial of the winner of the June 12 mandate at Abuja was
drenched in blood leaving at least four people dead, how shortly
after the Junta’s ‘Enough is enough’ fascist speech, Benin and
Ekpoma universities were turned into some rowdy
shooting ranges with the students as targets, and how the regime
has stepped up its campaign of intimidation and violence against
activists and progressives? What else does such a regime require
than that force that would shoot it out of office? The struggle in
the July days demanded more than just marches and protests.
Treason against the existing state, treason, not by mere
declaration as Basorun Abiola did, but an active treason aimed at
destroying and reconstituting the state to reflect the desire of the
people was what the time demanded.
48
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
III
July 24th, 1994 was not the only novelty Kongi introduced to the
June 12 ‘circus’ to the utter disappointment of a
number of his young admirers. Saturday September 18,
1993, a peaceful rally jointly organised by the Lagos Mainland
branch of the Campaign for Democracy, CD, and Mainland
Progressive Youth Movement, MPYM, came under police
battering. It was at the Evans Square, Ebute Metta, Lagos. The
youths of the neighbourhood gave it back to the police and the
whole neighbourhood became one big arena of running battle
(hide-and-seek and game of wits between the people and fascist
running dogs). Residential buildings in the area were turned into
fortresses and strongholds by the youths from which they
skilfully stone-picked policemen. The ‘dogs’ dared not penetrate
the people’s castle and the people dared not walk the streets, for
both parties were unrelently vigilant. Each party held its own.
Then the spectacle changed. Youths came out of their
fortresses, on guard no doubt but not attacking. The running dogs
stopped prowling, astounded and thankful for the momentary
cessation of the attrition. In the arena, just disembarked from his
Peugeot 505 Saloon car, was Kongi like a god out of the sea,
fluffy-haired, polish-skinned. For a short while, there was peace
spiced with an exaggerated sense of victory on the part of the
rebelling youths.
Kongi’s appearance was no accident; he had been billed
to speak at the rally. And when he had appeared, the
militant youths on ground had ex pected him to begin his
speech outrightly, using his intellectual charm and unbeatable
grammar to force the police to concede to an ‘ille gal
gathering’ against ‘bery, bery clear instructions’ from
Headquarters.
49
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
The disappointment on the young rebellious faces
around Kongi could best be imagined when he pointed out that
having made the point in the first place by starting the rally at all, the
people should avoid confrontation with the fascist killer squads and
disperse or find a cool enclosure within which to hold
discussions and reflect. Under pressure from the youths,
Soyinka’s attempt to seek out and speak with the commander of
the squad came to naught. And it is on record that at the end of
the day, it wasn’t Kongi’s advice that eventually dispersed the
people but the burning teargas and crashing truncheon. The
Nobel Laureate also inhaled quite a dose of the poisonous gas.
Perhaps if the people had accepted Kongi’s elderly word?
By sundown, 21 youths were in the police dungeon
gaping at the grey walls. Kongi’s attempt to put aside his
Rebel laureate garb for Nobel Laureate gown for the
sake of the youths came to nothing - the police denied
holding anybody.
What other lesson can we learn from September 18th
than that running dogs know not what it means to be a Nobel
Laureate; that running dogs deserve none other than dog
treatment.
When the running dog is confronted with the
spellbinding aura of the intellectual, the ease with
which he reels out ‘big grammar’ and his demon strated
understanding of the secrets and logic of that law which the
running dog claims to protect, he is taken aback. The running
dog cringes, shivers, then simmers to a sudden realisation that
not only must he necessarily carry out his ‘bery, bery clear
instructions’ but must also defend his person against the
oppressive air of the intellectual. Such de fence would
definitely not come in the form of intellect or logic in which the
opponent is most learned. It must come by brute force. But even
50
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
at that, each blow of this attack comes with such half-
heartedness that bespeaks an acute inferiority complex.
The dilemma of the running dog becomes even more
compounded when he sees the ‘Professor’ in the midst of
ruffians and Area Boys haranguing the ‘breakers of law and
order’ to ‘bloody rebellion’; when his intellect and logic could
not dissuade him from associating with street urchins
and trouble makers. And soon, in the eyes of the running dog,
the Professor becomes the greatest problem -the Chief Area Boy
who must be dealt with according to the law, but with some
dignity. He must receive the gas, but only enough to make him
clear from the scene of trouble. He must see the
truncheon crashing, but only to the extent that it does not yet
draw more than a few splashes of blood here and there. He may
even be hustled into a station but only to the extent that such is
defined as a ‘protective custody’. And when he is finally taken
away from the scene of trouble it is to clear the shooting range
for easy target practice.
The Professor is not only a problem to the
running dog because he harangued the trouble makers or
because he sometimes pretends to play the role of troubleshooter,
but also because he obstructs his targets and bears a poetic
witness to his atrocities, magnifying them in the imagination of
the world with such linguistic flourish as to move even the Rock
of Gibraltar.
And what is more, with a background spiced with a rich
crop of mythical images of gods and supermen, fetish and
omnipotent deities, the running dog could hardly comprehend
the origin of the Professor’s enchanting erudition save by some
celestial power. For if the Quran had been revealed to
Mohammed in some fast and prayer-inspired trance and it had
taken forty nights of communing with God on the mountain for the Ten
Commandments to be revealed to Holy Moses, who else would
51
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
say some gnomes in the Mountain of Ascension at Ife or some
mermaids in the River Osun had not inspired the Professor’s
condensed metaphors.
This is what the intellectual must count on, but only to
buy time and impose some sanity on the rowdiness
characteristic of all encounters be tween an embittered
people and fascist running dogs. For the running dog is
nothing but a dog. His universe in the final analysis is
not the spellbinding rhetoric and aura of enigma in which the
intellectual is encapsulated but his ‘bery, bery clear
instructions’. Those instructions are his daily bread, his
freedom, his future, and the future of his children, of
his wife. In short, the instructions mean the difference
between life and death. Not to carry out his instructions is to put
himself between the jaws of the lion - the instructor. He, must
therefore recoil from whatever spellbinding rhetoric the
intellectual presence has cast upon him and carry out his
instruction. And this he must do with exaggerated zeal and
diligence. For those few words of compliment and those soothing pats
on his sore, weather-beaten back from the immediate
instructor count so much to him. And the
recommendations and pips.
This, the intellectual must count on to cast his spell,
which he must also do in good time except there are some higher
points to be made. Kongi was not prepared for those higher
points on July 24th 1994, just as he was not prepared for same on
September 18, 1993.
But July 24 was a success so long as the objectives were
gotten correctly in the first place. Kongi marched in Lagos and
cast a spell on a few running dogs while Lagos sprawled
unhindered, but the same march cast a spell on the whole of
civilised world, a debilitating foreign relations blow.
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
***
In the dying days of the earlier Junta, the Association of Nigerian
Authors, (ANA) had honoured Nigeria’s sole Nobel
Laureate with a befitting award - “A Triple Heritage
Award”. And so Kongi was at the Museum Kitchen in the midst
of poets and storytellers representative largely of the younger but
already frustrated (not wasted yet) generation.
Here again, as usual, poetry and politics found
harmony. In Kongi’s opinion the unilateral cancellation
of the presidential elections’ pri maries by the IBB junta
was nothing but “dictatorial, undemocratic”, nay,” fascistic.”
He searched but could find no ‘lavender’ word for it. Evident
from the ‘tortuous, convoluted, circuitous’ nature of the Junta’s
transition programme, it was clear that it would not leave unless
pushed out of office by the people.
And what was more: that if the Junta would not allow
people to meet and discuss at home we would “go to Republic of
Benin and hold our discussion.” So it was that Kongi in a
brief moment, like a prophet, pre pared the young minds
before him for the tasks ahead in the coming year. Kongi left the
kitchen like all else in a sober mood - so near to feast but without
a feast.
In the third month of the year prophesied by Kongi as
the year of intensified struggle, letters on Africa Democratic
League (ADL) letter-headed papers and signed by Kongi himself
went out to groups, etc., inviting them to a conference on the
theme: Consolidating Democracy, to be held in Cotonou, Benin
Republic come August. Then there was June 12 and its products.
Kongi again had to hurry another missive to his democratic
colleagues in Nigeria regretting the inability of the League to go
ahead with the democracy workshop as scheduled and urging
them to use any means within their power to prevail on the Junta
to handover to the winner of the June 12 elections. After all,
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
even meetings abroad could also become difficult. Meanwhile,
the dynamics of the struggle later made meetings at home
inevitable and people found the means to meet and
discuss, and even brought their meetings to the street in the full
glare of the Junta, albeit with some painful losses. At any
opportune moment Kongi had joined these meetings - objective
reality teaches after all. Let us say sixty poetic cheers to
Kongi at sixty and wish him many selfless, novel
contributions to our struggle. Even with airport harassment,
hovering choppers and ‘portrait hunting expeditions’, Soyinka shall
outlive our ‘last dictator’.
***
A critique of Soyinka’s novel contributions to the June
12 struggle as exemplified by the July 24th event cannot in
anyway be complete without due tribute to one man who has
equally contributed in no little measure to the struggle for a
better Nigeria. He was a hardworking man, a disciplinarian, an
educationist and over and above all, a man of principle
- honest in a society where to be honest is to be out of the
ordinary, where to uphold one’s honour and dignity is to stand
for poverty and tribulations.
Tai Solarin took time off convalescence to speak with
the people at Evans Square on September 18, 1993.
However, the police honoured his presence with some
show of fascist bestiality - but he eventually spoke to
them that had come to listen.
On July 24, 1994, himself and his wife, Sheila, were also
with Soyinka at Tejuosho. Uncle Tai insisted he was going to
march and he did march, not alone, but with friends - more than
Kongi was allowed, perhaps on account of his age.
“Talo so pe ao ni baba? Kai ani baba. Tai Solarin baba
wa kai ani baba”. Three days later on Wednesday 27th July,
1994, Baba Tai Solarin passed away in active service to the
54
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
nation and mankind. And according to his will, he was buried on
a piece of the farmland at Mayflower School, Ikenne, which he
founded 40 years ago. He wore his inevitable khaki shirt and
shorts on this last journey home - to mix and mingle with the
elements and as such with nature. Even in death he clung to his
principle. Indeed, it must be said that men like him are not like
‘pieces of cloth on the market square’. They are hard to come
by.
55
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
ON THE NUPENG STRIKE
I
Those who claim that oil is the basis of Nigeria’s unity are
indeed more than mere enunciators of what appears like
the absolute truth. Oil -petroleum- confined to a small
corner of the geographical entity known as Nigeria is indeed the
lifeblood of the nation. This is true not only in the sense that it
constitutes more than 90% of the nation’s source of foreign
exchange but also that the sections of the country that control
this oil are exactly those outside the geographical limit of
the oil sources, and are expectedly depen dent on it for the
running of their comparatively advanced economic life. He who
controls the oil and all the activities associated with it controls
the nation. He who holds sway in the oil sector, either for the
progress of the oil industry or for its temporary disablement,
controls the economic life of the nation. In the hands of an
oppressive regime, the oil becomes a source of financing
reckless economic spending, life of debauchery and corruption
as well as mean of sustenance of the instrument of repression of
the people. In the hands of the opposition, to hold the oil
industry and hold it firmly is to have sounded the death knell of
the ruling clique.
The NUPENG pro-June 12 strike, commenced on
July 4, 1994 with overwhelming enthusiasm and hope, and
ended on August 17 unceremoniously, has more than
demonstrated this. And what is more, than that a whole array of
even more salient points has been thrust out from the dark
chambers of our collective national tragedy of absurdity to the
full glare of dispassionate, naked self-criticism. The potency of
labour strikes, strike in the oil industry, political strikes, the June
12 errors of strategy, the gulf between rhetoric and action, the
relationship between the leader and the led, the dichotomy
56
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
between sentiment and clear philosophical (ideological)
commitment and many more are issues on which lessons must be
learnt.
We must, as usual, always endeavour to begin from the
beginning without boring the reader with unnecessary
details. For this is not a mere chrono logical record of the
events of that time but, rather, an attempt to locate the chronicle
itself in our social consciousness.
The much awaited but hurried declaration of government
by Basorun M. K. O. Abiola on Saturday June 11, 1994 in one
remote corner of Lagos was predicated on certain assumptions.
Among these, we must count first the readiness of the labour
unions to embark on political strike, the mobilisation of the
people for civil disobedience by pro-democracy and human
rights bodies, the winning over of the mass of the
soldiers and officers of the Nigerian Army to the side of June
12 and the realisation by Abacha and his cohorts that the most
honourable thing to do would be to handover peacefully to the
winner of the June 12 elections. History has proven these to be
none but fatal assumptions. We have seen how the July 13 civil
disobedience was checkmated in the street, how those officers
and men of the Nigerian Army exhibited their patriotism over
bottles of beer and pepper soup plates in the mammy market
rather than spill their entrails on the altar of nationhood,
how the police, destined to aid rather than ha rass the
people, had at the last minute reckoned only with wither their
daily bread flowed. And have we not also seen the dilly-dally of
the labour movement, the struggle to adjunct the pro-June 12
demands to some more immediate economic demands on the
part of the worker? And has it not come to pass how,
disillusioned and desperate for a new comedy to the circus, the
Basorun had come out of hiding on June 22, was arrested in the
small hours of June 23rd and hauled off to the calaboose to the
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
dismay and disillusionment of our helpless and hopeless masses?
For what was June 12 if not the hope of the hopeless and heart of
the heartless. June 23 did not put the Basorun in jail. What
was imprisoned was a people’s collective willing ness to
put an end to three decades of misrule and despotism. The ability
of the people to break out of this prison would determine
whether or not their fate is once and for all settled.
But it turned out also that June 23 was another fatal
assumption. All labour unions that had earlier threatened heaven
and hell if the Basorun was ever harassed much less arrested by
the Junta kept mum. All politicians who had tried to make the
corpse of democratic institutions disbanded in the wake of the
November 17, 1993 Abacha coup walk the streets again,
Zombie-fashion, had either been spirited to the calaboose or had
scampered for cover; the students movement was in disarray; the
pro-democracy bodies had not yet recovered from the
paralysis and mass impotence of the days immediately
following the declaration. This done, it would only have required
a self-deluded simpleton not to see that an early death had been
pronounced on the second act of the June 12 circus. Now the June 12
opposition must prepare itself for the post-defeat ridicule accruing to
every defeated opposition irrespective of the loftiness of ideas
professed.
Then came NUPENG. July 4 not only rekindled the hope
of the hopeless but also practically shook the Junta to its
foundation. The gains of popular struggle in those July days
were doubtlessly gains predicated upon the foun dation
laid by the NUPENG strike.
For the purpose of this discourse we shall
recognise three [3] periods in the NUPENG strike, each
differing in its purpose, intensity and the enthusiasm that greeted
it and as such in the mass psychology of the time. The first
period spanned the period of preparation for the strike
58
June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
before July 4 and the early days of the strike ending with the
‘arrest’ of NUPENG General Secretary, Comrade Frank Ovie
Kokori, the second period embraced the period of Kokori’s
‘incarceration’ ending on July 23rd. The third and the last period
enompased the period from July 23rd to the time of the official
breaking of the strike.
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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
action in their zone and on July 11 the Warri plant oil depots
were shut as more local unions joined the action.
The government was in a double crisis - one was politico-
economic, namely the economic hardship and social confusion
occasioned by the intensifying strike and the other a moral crisis,
as it could not explain the whereabout of Chief Kokori and
different arms of the state’s instruments of repression began to
suspect each other of being responsible for the arrest. In fact, in
their lousy manner, some government bureaucrats even
had occasion to defend the ‘arrest’. Never before had the State
so doubted itself. Meanwhile the strike continued to bite.
For the NUPENG and their sympathisers the ‘arrest’
now became not only a weapon for mobilisation of sentiment in support of
its demands and highlighting the high handedness of the state
and its disrespect for the peoples fundamental rights, it also
became in itself the source of a new demand -a kind of ransom -
Kokori must be released before any negotiation.
By Monday July 12 when PENGASSAN commenced its
strike, a clear week after NUPENG commenced its own, the
beleaguered regime had become tempered and was now ready
for negotiation. All sectors of the economy were already
groaning under the weight of the strike, NEPA was in trouble
running its gas powered plants, banks had to prune operations, streets
around petrol stations had become parking lots -
negotiation! negotiation! negotiation!.
But what would be the content of the negotiation. The
transport Minister Retired Brigadier Sam Ogbemudia was deemed the best
candidate for the tough job, being a veteran of several military
juntas and a short-lived civilian junta. Expectedly
PENGASSAN and NUPENG refused the nego tiation
offer. They equally indicted the NLC of double agency. For the
NUPENG any negotiation must be predicated upon Kokori’s
release or else... That was July 14. In the following days four oil
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terminals would be shut thus cutting export of crude oil
drastically.
In the case of PENGASSAN the government was
further put in dilemma as a result of the myriad nature of their
demands which summed up a whole lot of ills in the oil industry
and the Nigerian society at large, now using the June 12 issue as
a string to tie these together into an ant-ridden faggot for the
regime to carry on its survival trek. As articulated by Chief M.A
Dabibi, General Secretary of PENGASSAN in a newspaper interview
[Guardian, Monday July 11, 1994, pp.11]:
“…the military government has devastated and
abandoned the oil sector, the backbone of the nation’s
economy. Greed, graft and crass corruption have rendered the
government unable to meet its own share of the operating cost to
its joint venture partners [in the oil sector]. Consequently,
thousands of our members have lost their jobs over the last one
year with no hope of securing new ones.”
The union gave the government ultimatum to pay the owed
partners. This was indeed an impossible demand, especially
when dropped on the lap of a regime peopled by a gluttonous
pack of hounds who, like the proverbial leaky purse, only takes
in money without fattening up. And PENGASSAN knew this.
It was now clear that the oil workers had some other
things in view, reason why they kept evading negotiation on the
strike. There was equally no doubt as to their realisation of the
fact that their strike alone would not completely break the regime.
What indeed NUPENG had counted upon was sympathy strike on
the part of other unions [not the NLC per se]. In the early days
of the strike many unions had threatened to join it. As at the end
of the first week not less than 18 industrial unions had indicated
such. But we have seen how these strikes never got beyond the
pages of newspapers - paper tiger unions that they were, and how
those that took off had been largely opportunistic moves
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calculated to ride on the back of NUPENG for gaining
selfish concessions from the employer [see the 40 Hours Strike].
Except few unions, among them, the Lagos Taxi Drivers
Association, the Airport unions, the Iron and Steel Senior Staff
Association [ISSSAN], and a couple of others, all the
strikers of those days were double -tongued opportunists,
and one way or the other played into the hands of the regime.
Their inertia assisted the Junta’s recovery and eventual
clampdown.
Towards the end of the third week of the strike, at the
time the oil workers/government negotiation ran into a deadlock
as a result of disagreement on procedural issues and lingering
uncertainty over Kokori’s whereabouts, the Lagos NLC was
celebrating its successful negotiation and asking its
members to go back to work having won concessions for them
in the form of allowances and welfare packages that would
ameliorate the impact of the strike - [opportunism of the basest
order no doubt]. That was July 22. It must be said, however,
that whereas the labour unions h ad blatantly betrayed
the oil workers and the peoples’ struggle for genu ine
democracy - the same thing cannot be said of the pro-democracy
organisations as represented by CD and NADECO. The role
played by these two bodies in facilitating and
coordinating the oil workers action with the general pro-
democratic agenda must be mentioned, if only for historical
reasons.
It also has to be pointed out that the intensification of the
strike and the worsened socio-economic conditions it occasioned
was rendered more relevant to the process. The mass anger and
fury in those July days- the violent resistance and civil
disobedience that spattered the second period of the oil workers
strike and which became intensified in the latter period were
catalysed by the preceding strike itself. The use of
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delay tactics and subterfuge to evade negotiation and
prolong the strike played a most revolutionary role in
advancing the course of June 12.
It was little surprising therefore that the regime,
apparently incompetent and un-coordinated, gleefully
breathed with relief when Chief Kokori appeared to the
world hale and hearty on Saturday July 23rd, 1994
ushering in the last period of the NUPENG strike according to
our own delineation.
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II
***
Since the second act of the June 12 circus was officially
confiscated to the cooler with one Herculean speech on
August 17, 1994 and the Junta un leashed fascist gangsters
on the people and their leaders, the NUPENG and
PENGASSAN leaders have been hauled off to some
remote Sahel concentration camps and ‘normalcy’ has returned,
if only for a while. But does this discount from the unique contribution of
the oil workers to the June 12 Struggle? Or does it even mean an
end to the struggle itself? Definitely not. The struggle of our
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people has become even richer since the strike than before it.
June 12 is a spirit that will continue to haunt the memory of the
nation until the contradictions it reflects are resolved. The
struggle of a people cannot be confiscated to the waste bin of
history by confiscating their leaders to the calaboose, or by
defeating one nascent phase of it.
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THE 40-HOUR STRIKE: A CONSUMMATE
EXPRESSION OF TOTAL DECAY
I
The 40-hour NLC’s Political Strike of August 3rd and 4th,
1994 has helped answer more ques tions than it bargained
for but left many unanswered - at least so far as the burnt out will
of the pawny mass is concerned.
But need it be said that only RUSE itself
reserves capacity for springing up unsurprisingly predictable
surprises as had been demonstrated by Pascal Bafyau’s NLC. At
no other time in the history of both the trade union and the labour
movement in Nigeria has honour and dignity been consigned to the refuse
dumps of Lagos streets than the period under examination.
And to hear that this 40-hour strike, this lame strike, half
heartedly embarked upon by an equally lame labour movement,
has been seen as totally uncalled for, as a step too gigantic for
the fabric of the sick (not weak) Nigerian system to absorb! And
what is more, that these objections, these complains, and
NTA Network-orchestrated grumbling and side -talks
predicate themselves on the mere (inexplicable) argument that
trade unions are not bodies set up to participate in politics - why
then must trade unions embark on political strikes? Short memory - short
memory indeed, sickeningly glaring demonstration of lack of
memory!
But far more important is the fact that if all these woes
have been the result of lack of knowledge, our problem (or rather
their problem) would have been half solved. Before us,
however, is a classical species of mischief-makers and dishonest
labour confronting an equally mischievous opposition. That is why no
matter how boring or unpleasant this story of infamy may
appear, we have no option but to go over it. And if we have
chosen to do this, then it must be done with the thoroughness it
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deserves. The rotten Congress is not to be helped by sparing it
the agony of bashing its rotten essence against the brick wall of
reason. The rottenness of the Congress cannot be masked
from reality, just as it cannot be magnified in our
imagination beyond the reekiness and foul of its
reality. It is the duty of revolution theory in our time, no
matter how unpleasant this may be, to kill in images and vivid
pictorial details the rottenness of the Congress as it is today in
order that a space may be created for the rejuvenation
of the labour movement. Pascal’s Congress must necessarily
come under the barrel of our revolutionary pen ala Ngugi. Then
and only then will it be possible to properly locate and appreciate
the arguments of the accused and accusers alike in their utter nudity.
The congressional political strikers and their congressional and
non-congressional non-political strike advocates are
identical twins of the same pair of monstrous beings -a
consummate expression of the opportunism characteristic of
our social life. We must begin from the beginning.
II
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must be ready for an unpalatable repercussion when it will desire
this instrument in its sharpest, most dependable form. Thus far.
If we have had to go through this tortuous and
convoluted thought process in order to highlight the role played
by the central labour in the June 12 event up till the great victory
of unsigned bail bond, it is for no other reason than that the
event before us is as much tortuous, convol uted and
unthinkable in a society of people of honour. And once we have
embarked on this tortuous road, once we have tasted of the craze
of this crazy route, we must follow it through to the end, so that
we may be able to learn from experience and may not by any
stroke of ill-luck find ourselves lured back like junkies to the
convulsing appetite of this convoluted route. The
Congress’ opportunistic load of yam must be emptied to
the rounded bottom of the pot and eaten hot without delay, for
to tarry is to risk eating a tasteless, sickeningly cold dinner of
pounded yam. This is the domain of the next part of this
scrutiny.
III
IV
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rank-and-file workers. And in our case they exist in large
numbers.
The erroneous view that politics is all about standing for
elections, campaigning, sitting in parliament, lobbying,
and scheming, often times gentle man fashion but
intermittently in open violent battles involving thugs, hired
assassins and mob is that which must be corrected.
So long as politics boils down to how the society shares
among its members the product of social production, then the
workers cannot shy away from politics and reserve the right
to use any instrument at their disposal to ad vance their
collective political aims.
It was not the name or the flag of the SDP that attracted
the NLC to it. Granted, there are no significantly fundamental
differences between the programmes of the SDP and NRC, the
fact that the SDP had the semblance of a welfarist programme,
especially in the areas of education and health, reflect more the
economic interests of the worker than the NRC’s avowedly
conservative programme. While it is true that the most
immediate economic interest of the worker is served by wages
and allowances and other conditions of service in which case he
relates to his employer as against relating to the government, it is
important to note that the most far reaching effect on the
economic condition of the worker is not the correctness or not of
decision taken by the employer at factory floor level or sectoral
level.
Government policy-politics on a provincial,
state or national scale or inter national scale put the final
seal on the economic fate of the worker. If majority of Nigerian
workers therefore had voted for an economic programme as
represented by their overwhelming vote for the SDP and such a
programme has been scuttled by scuttling their votes, they
reserve the right to challenge such infringements.
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Economic struggle of the working class as represented
by struggle for wage increase, leave bonus, transport allowance,
lunch ticket and rebates of all shades are reflective of a
comparatively low level of consciousness. To challenge
fundamental programmes of government as they affect
the workers is to operate at a higher level. To recognise the
inflationary effect every wage increase would have on the
overall economy and as such on the welfare of the worker is
for the worker to have realised the limits of this so -
called economic struggle, which of course appeals more to the
appetite of opportunists in labour and reactionaries in
government.
To be partisan, to take position in partisan politics, is for
the working class to have come to realise itself. It is a recognition
that the interest of the class coincides with a particular overall
programme of politics and social economics. The arena of
politics is not a stage for the exclusive use of politicians to
demonstrate and act out the oddities, absurdities and
intrigues characteristic of that category of people deeming
themselves the natural ruler over the people by God’s grace.
If anything at all, far from having more than its own
share of politics, the Nigerian working class is guilty of too little
partisan politics. This again is traceable to the opportunism in the
labour movement. We cannot here, however, afford to put the
reader through the pain of recounting this woeful tale of the main
issue at stake.
From the point of view of simple logic and morals, the
fact that the Nigerian workers are part of the Nigerian society
against which an injustice has been committed, presupposes that
the labour movement must also lend a voice to the people’s
effort. In so doing all forms of legally recognised and hitherto
illegal means are open to application. For if the constitution in
the first place does not recognise the application of the weapon
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of strike as a means of resolving political crisis, the same
constitution also has no place for an act of annulment which
equally constitutes illegality in more than a way. Firstly, in the
sense that the annulling government is that without the
people’s mandate, a government that stole its way to
power brandishing the bayonet under the cover of darkness,
and has maintained itself in power trusting the bayonet in the
people’s heart. Secondly, not even the decrees promulgated by this
regime created any room for such annulment as it carried out.
The argument that the Abacha Junta was not responsible
for the annulment of the elections and/or that it must not be held
responsible for the deeds of its predecessor is equally untenable.
A Junta is a Junta. The Abacha Junta rode to power on the wave
created by the peoples struggle for the actualisation of June 12
mandate. The best such regime could do for itself and for the
society at large would have been to actualise the mandate. But
the Abacha Junta has demonstrated more than anything else that
it only came to help sweep the ‘remains’ of June 12 from the
memory of our people through cosmetic changes in the
command structures of the army, a caricature conference of ‘his’
[not our] representatives called Constitutional Conference and
the laying of bayonets in waiting for brutish blood letting in
moments of ‘irresponsible’ popular anger.
Abacha was the one who sent out the bayonet and tanks
to crush the June 12 movement in its infanc y when
Lagos witnessed its biggest demonstration in history on
July 5, 6, and 7, 1993. This same regime could therefore not have
been taken seriously when it spoke of opening a chapter different from its
predecessor.
The rejuvenation of the June 12 Struggle in May, 1994 is a
testament to the fact that our people, at least a section of our
people, have realised themselves [woken up from time
immemorial slumber] and come to recognise the need to defend
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their honour and dignity. The refusal of a people to crumble
before the bayonet is not an act of stupidity as a trader ‘friend’ of
mine once pointed out, but rather a declaration of the human
element in such a people. There was the aspect of honour and
dignity to the June 12 Struggle, which indeed in the final
analysis determines the extent to which any people can
pursue their struggle. This, more than any other thing,
propelled the Vietnamese; it pushed the Palestinians
just as it did the Koreans to mention but a few. The 40 -
hour strike, far from being an o verzealous act on the part
of the Congress, in fact shows the wretchedness of the lots of
which the Congress is made up. The declaration of the 40-hour
strike was an act of cowardice in politics and reaction in thought
rather than too much radicalism, as the opponents of
political strike would want us to be lieve.
Ours is a country of uniqueness and several absurdities.
What else can be expected of a country of 250 ( ala
Abacha) nations and nationalities (and of course tribes)
fused together by the order of the British Crown into a nationless
Crown Colony, and later, a nationless state, other than absurdities in
250 different shades?
Today, thirty-five year after independence, and on the
threshold of the twenty-first century, the ghostly figure of the
working class once again dons the misty shroud of
cowardice, in a particularly reverted fashion. The
working class was marginalised from the struggle for
independence; today the working class marginalises itself from the struggle
for democracy-what a colourful addition to our many self-
identities. 251 absurdities! - To score 100.4% is to a genius in
the field of the absurd.
The fact that Pascal Bafyau’s Congress carved for itself
the role of being the pall-bearer of our pro-democracy struggle
to its final resting place must not blind us from locating this
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struggle in a world perspective vis -à-vis the global
working class movement. Rather, it is this that has made it even
more imperative that Pascal’s Congress be seen through a global
pro-democratic prism before its final confiscation to the evil
forest to join other untouchables preceding it and prepare the
place for other untouchables soon to come - our untouchables are
countless and the season of cleansing has come. No matter how
unpleasant it may be and no matter what role the imperialists
have carved out for themselves in the present pro -
democracy wave that started sweeping across the world since the
last year of the 80s, the objectivity of the changes going on in the
world cannot be underestimated. For the countries of the former
Eastern bloc it was a radical, disorderly, yet the only possible
retreat from a communism that has rendered itself useless to the
human person because it had purged itself of humanism or doled
out too much of humanism where bestiality and moral decay - a
legacy of more than three millennia - determined that
socialist humanism be spiced with such Western barbarisms as
strip-tease, drugs, gun-totting and the likes. For us (that is the
whole of Africa) the pro-democracy movement,
promoted by the imperialists for whatever rea son, is a
training school to give back to our people their humanism, which
a hundred years of colonialism has stolen from us, a condition
which another thirty years of neo -colonial independence
has perpetuated and compounded rather than obliterate,
unsurprisingly though.
This humanism - no matter how it comes and no matter
on whose instigation - is necessary so that our people will be
able to enter the race for human development as human beings
and not a park of toothless hounds behind a handful of ancient
whining lions. The oppressed strata of our society bear the
heaviest burden of this.
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Perhaps this is why the pro-democracy dove, wherever it
has landed, never resumes flight until it has infested the working
class with the enlivening rhythms of strikes, street
protests and, inevitably, riot - bloody riots.
We must here recall the role played by the
Polish Dockworkers in the Solidarity under the
leadership of Lec Welesa in enforcing the disor derly
retreat-nay, flight-of Polish Communism; the role
played by the Soviet workers in crushing the August, 1991
hardliners’ coup and a host of other Caucasian contributions to
the pro-democracy experience.
In Africa the picture is even more glaring - Zaire, Benin,
Togo, Zambia, everywhere, the workers have been at the
vanguard of pro-democracy movements, introducing their own
inventives and colours.
Only at the same time as the Pascal Bafyau’s Congress
got its much needed state- bashing for its half-heartedness, in
Lesotho, the working class seized the gauntlet by plunging
headlong into a strike - a bloody strike-to protest the King’s
unconstitutional dissolution of the Parliament. The Congress of
South African Trade Unions (COSATU), an umbrella body of
trade unions just like our own NLC, played by far the
most significant role in the process leading to the
convocation of the CODESA and was never ex cluded,
overtly or covertly, from the CODESA effort when it eventually
took fuller shape. Everywhere in Africa, the working classes are
waking up to their strength as a political force to reckon with.
And this is in order.
At this juncture, to continue to rummage in the jungle
for reasons why the opponents of political strike should be
confiscated to the waste bin of a famished present and an
unenviable future is to continue to speak to the deaf. He who has
not seen reason here and now can never again see reason - he
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must be spirited out of existence to make place for new test
specimens. Pascal’s Congress belongs exactly here.
August, 1994
Lagos, Nigeria
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POSTSCRIPT