💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › solidarity-federation-africa-helpless-hopeless.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:58:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Africa: Helpless & Hopeless? Author: Solidarity Federation Date: Spring 1999 Language: en Topics: Nigeria, interview, Direct Action Magazine Source: Retrieved on January 19, 2005 from https://web.archive.org/web/20050119185254/http://www.directa.force9.co.uk/archive/da10-features.htm Notes: Published in Direct Action #10 — Spring 1999.
No, the Ogoni people and Ken Saro-Wiwa were not the exception to the
rule. Yes, Africa is fighting back against capitalism, ethnicism and
nationalism. This interview with Sam Mbah of the Awareness League in
Nigeria reveals the reality of African resistance.
It was always a myth. The archetypal liberal view that Africa is a
continent without hope or the spirit for resistance to its western
exploiters — imperialist, colonialist or global marketeers — never held
true.
So, are you curious to know how a resistance group in Nigeria views the
outside world and the task ahead? How they view the involvement of Shell
in the Ogoni heartlands? Samuel Mbah was interviewed during his recent
speaking tour of the United States. This is what he said.
Mbah is a member of the Awareness League, the Nigerian section of the
International Workers Association (IWA) — sister organisation to the
Solidarity Federation in Britain.
Members of the Awareness League do not often get the opportunity to
travel outside Nigeria. And inside, they are regularly hounded by the
paranoid military regime which governs the country by brute force and
blatant corruption. Survival of an organisation in these conditions is
itself an achievement — steady growth is near-miraculous. The Awareness
League is living proof that — in Africa as well as anywhere — resistance
can flourish in the face of adversity.
does that mean in the Nigerian context?
The Awareness League proclaims itself to be anarcho-syndicalist. It has
not always been so; originally the Awareness League was more or less
Marxist-Leninist, but following the turmoil and the collapse of state
communism, we reassessed our position. The Awareness League is a social
movement, it is not an official labour union. In Nigeria today there is
a lot of frustration among the working class at the official labour
unions because almost always they betray the cause of the workers at the
last minute and so more voluntary unions like the Awareness League have
begun to emerge. What we essentially do is we have outreaches in
industrial organisations, the public service, the universities, and
others. We take a stand on certain developments in the country,
political, economic, and social. At times we just have to network with
other left groups on specific issues. In the workplace, of course, our
members are very active in trying to do political education,
enlightenment, and lead in actual campaigns on issues — and these
campaigns are usually against government because in Nigeria and Africa
we find that the government is the largest employer of labour. Salaries
are not paid for upwards of three months or more, and the official
unions seem incapable of doing anything, so we come in and fill that gap
and try to mobilise with the workers; maybe embark on a strike, maybe a
demonstration, things like that.
invigorate and inspire workers in the existing unions?
We are trying to invigorate and inspire workers in the existing unions,
but it has become apparent to us that we just have to build a beginning,
an alternative to the official unions. It will take quite some time for
it to be able to really mobilise and convince the workers of the need
for this, but I think it is almost becoming inevitable in the context in
which we find ourselves. Unions are supposed to exist for the interest
and welfare of workers, but we find that the contrary is the case in
Nigeria. People actually see unions and union positions as a stepping
stone to becoming a part of the elite, because once you get there the
government gets to court you and give you bribes. It is no longer enough
for us to just go ahead and reinvigorate the existing unions; we are
moving beyond that to build an alternative union for the workers.
Our membership is about 600 nationwide, that is, members who are paying
dues. There are also people who come in and join in our activities. They
are not really members but you could describe them as being friends or
associates of the League. Now, if you call a meeting in Nigeria in a
university, students will come. Although they may sympathise with your
position and ideas, it does not mean that they are members. We find also
that we can rely on them occasionally. If we’re embarking upon a
demonstration and they come it is good for us.
We have about 11 branches in different parts of the country, with at
least 20 members in each. We try to see that each branch is autonomous,
in the sense that it makes its own decisions within the specific
environment. Then we have a working conference that brings together all
the branches, and we have a national conference, which meets once a
year. At this national conference we review the previous year’s
activities and set an agenda for the upcoming year. It is only where a
decision taken by a branch is in conflict with our charter that it can
be reversed, otherwise the branches are free to take their own
decisions.
No. You wouldn’t expect that, honestly. The government does not really
allow people to meet freely. In the past five years it has been
particularly difficult, but with the death of the former dictator
Abacha, who died in June, the new man has been a lot more tolerant of
activist organisations. We are now beginning now to meet openly but,
prior to June (1998), most of our meetings had to contend with the
activities of the security operatives who were all over the place. But
this is not to say that unions and groups did not exist. In fact, the
opposition groups in Nigeria are not just organisations like our own;
there are pro-democracy groups and ethnic sub-national groups who are
campaigning for autonomy, and the same treatment is given to all these
groups. The government cannot possibly kill off all these organisations.
So in our own way we continue to organise in defiance of government
repression.
conditions in Nigeria?
The economic situation in Nigeria today is very bad indeed — inflation
is beyond control; there is massive unemployment; schools and hospitals
are in very bad shape. In the midst of all this, the government and the
military, which have been in power 31 out of 38 years of independence,
we find that the military, the generals and top government functionaries
are living in affluence. There is a lot of corruption. The defining
characteristic of the Nigerian government is primitive accumulation by
means of corruption. A report in ‘The Economist’ in 1995 said that the
then-government of Abacha was trying to achieve corruption parity with
its predecessor; by 1998, when Abacha died, he had got around £3.6
billion over a 5-year period. So you can see the kind of looting and
thieving that is going on in Nigeria.
If you want to really understand the economic problems in Nigeria you
have to go back to the period of colonialism, and how the colonial
powers sought to integrate Nigeria into the global capitalist system
through the instrumentality of trade, investment, social-political
interaction. By the time Nigeria and other African countries attained
independence, the incorporation into the capitalist system was already
halfway done, but the governments that came with independence — some of
them were nationalistic — still tried to fight against it. The
incorporation process was re-ignited again in the mid-1980s by the IMF
and the World Bank, through the Structural Adjustment Program, which is
an austerity program designed to re-colonise African countries once
again.
The major plans of the Structural Adjustment Program are the
deregulation of the economy, liberalisation of trade, devaluation of our
currencies and withdrawal of subsidies. Two-thirds of Africa is under
some form of this program, even the so-called leftist regimes that have
no option but to submit themselves to the IMF, and the results have been
anything but cheering; increased unemployment, no drop in inflation, and
massive corruption on the part of the government. So that is the
situation we find ourselves in today on the African continent.
On the political side, what we are seeing is a crisis of the capitalist
system and the failure of the state system on the African continent.
Most of what you call African states today were creations of the Berlin
Conference of 1884–85, where colonial powers divided Africa amongst
themselves. We know that these divisions were arbitrary, they did not
take into consideration the cultural, ethnic, religious and language
differences among different groups; they just welded groups together.
The attempt to construct liberal democracy in Africa has not worked
either. Too much of what goes into liberal democracy is alien to Africa.
The whole concept of elections, a government party and an opposition is
not in sync with our culture, because we find that, when you elect
people, the only point at which the electorate comes into contact with
the representatives is at the point of elections. For the next four or
five years the representatives can do whatever they like, and the people
have no means of sanctioning or recalling them (sounds familiar?! — DA).
In Nigeria today, there is an attempt on the part of the military to
hand over power to civilians. Irrespective of the outcome of elections,
I think the critical problem in Nigeria today is economic — the poverty
of the people, the inability of most families to have three square meals
a day — and this is manifested everywhere in Nigeria. 90% of our foreign
exchange revenue comes from oil, but over the past six or seven years
there’s been a lot of tension in these areas, which led to the trial and
killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1993, who was trying to mobilise his people
against Shell and against government and the other oil companies.
Even with the killing of Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues, tension in the
area is because the oil companies have succeeded in despoiling the
environment. This area has a very difficult terrain, we’re talking about
a multiplicity of islands, swampy vegetation. The activities of the oil
companies have only worsened this. They virtually wiped out the farming
and the fishing, so that people have virtually no means of livelihood.
People who went to school cannot get jobs, and meanwhile the oil
companies and the Nigerian government make millions of dollars from this
region. And so people are shutting down the flow stations, holding the
staff hostage, and the government has responded by pushing more security
into the region. A lot of people get killed and a lot of people get
wounded in the process. Most of those who get killed we never hear about
because the terrain of the region is such that there are areas that you
cannot reach even in a day’s time, sometimes you just have to rely on
boats and ferries to reach them. So the crisis in the oil-producing
region goes to underline the political and economic crisis in Nigeria.
The government is in alliance with the multinational oil corporations —
notably Mobil, Shell, Chevron — especially Shell. Shell accounts for
almost half of Nigeria’s oil production. It is no longer a secret that
Shell even purchases arms for the Nigerian military, they also arm the
police. As a matter of fact they have their own police who guard the oil
installations.
We want to see autonomous communities, self-managing, self-accounting
communities managing their own affairs. This is an approximation of the
African village system that was in operation before colonialism. These
villages were autonomous and independent, and functioned on their own to
decide what to produce and distribute. The decision-making process was
such that no single individual lorded over others. In fact,
decision-making was by means of consensus. You did not have vertical
structures enforced by force.
So we strive to elaborate on the relationship between anarchism and the
village systems in Africa, because by and large the village systems were
democratic and autonomous and they delivered the goods. You know, the
state system in Africa today has failed in delivering the goods. It has
instead become an instrument of repression and the denial of freedoms of
individuals and groups. So our focus is upon this basic principle of
organisation of society, and we find that an attempt has been made in
the past by the Tanzanian government to create these African traditional
systems in what they called Ujamaa villages, where villages were invited
to farm among themselves and shared the produce. Of course, whatever
government attempts always ends up in corruption and bureaucracy.
Corruption and bureaucracy are the two basic factors that led to the
collapse of the Ujamaa system. But we believe that if government is
removed from this process, it is surely going to work.
Yes, in the urban settings, actually, you still find elements of the
village system, but of course the urban setting has its own logic. When
people move to the urban area, life becomes governed by capitalist
principles, but there are of course other aspects of their life. When
people in a town lose their jobs, they still rely on the extended family
to cover for the period they are out of a job. In a situation where
salaries are not paid for upwards of six months, what sustains them
basically is the extended family. You find that even in urban areas you
still have town meetings, village meetings, going on as a way of keeping
in touch with the village.
There is a tendency in the west to see every crisis in Africa as being
ethnic or tribal in character. But essentially, most of these crises
actually are economic in character. The tribe in Africa was constituted
very much after the colonial state had come into being. Prior to the
coming of colonialism, groups were organised on a village basis. But
with the coming of colonialism and the imposition of the capitalist
economy, with the cutting of community ties, all the groups begin to
come together because you had a situation where every social group
within the state was in direct competition with each other. The larger
you were the more able you were to compete. So it was this capitalist
system and colonialism that led to the rallying of all these groups into
what we now have as tribes and ethnic groups.
Association?
The IWA is the anarcho-syndicalist international, so we put in an
application. The IWA Secretary had come to Nigeria in 1994 to assess our
work. I believe they were impressed with what we were trying to do given
our own limitations, the fact that we had a rough time with the security
forces. In one of our meetings, they swooped on us and we had a number
of people arrested. We were able to come out of it, and the
determination and solidarity displayed by our members in the face of
this assault was something that really impressed them. It was about two
years after that the Awareness League was admitted into the
International.
It has given us a kind of understanding, and exchange with the
affiliates around the world in trying to exchange ideas, information,
and they have also tried to assist us. WSA (US Section of the IWA) did a
campaign to help us buy a computer. We had thought that by now we would
have an email facility but acquiring a telephone is a difficult matter.
We hope as time goes on we can acquire a telephone so that we can be in
electronic communication with all groups, including the IWW.
We do not really want to be dogmatic about what we are trying to do. We
believe that there is a need for working in co-operation among workers’
groups around the world, all workers’ groups that are opposed to
capitalism, anti-authoritarian, and opposed to the state system. That
should be enough common ground, instead of splitting on issues of
ideology and doctrines that don’t seem to advance the cause of the
working class. That is our position.