|
Wilmot, Death Of Ideology And Ettehgate By Jonathan Ishaku
On September 18, 2007 the Department of Sociology University of Jos played host to the Jamaican scholar and former lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Prof. Patrick Wilmot. In his introductory remarks the Head of Department, Prof. Rotgak Gofwen described Wilmot as an “intellectual Che Guevara.”
Che Guevara (1928-1967), popularly called Che for short, was the Argentine-born revolutionary who along with the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, played an important role in the guerrilla war that ousted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and subsequently served as Cuba's minister of industry (1961-1965). Che was the revolutionary icon of all times; a strong antagonist of United States dominance in developing countries Che advocated peasant-based guerrilla warfare against imperialist forces around the world. In 1965 he disappeared from Cuba and after a brief stint with the anti-Mobutu forces in the Congo resurfaced as the insurgent leader fighting the Government of General René Barrientos Ortuno in the jungles of Bolivia. He was captured by the Barrientos forces near the village of Vallegrande on October 8, 1967 and was executed the next day. Some weeks back marked the 40th anniversary of his martyrdom and it was celebrated in many countries of South America, notably in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, the three countries where socialism is the guiding ideology of governance.
The Zaria school of radicalism Wilmot is hardly an advocate of the armed struggle but he is nevertheless a strong antagonist of Western imperialism and its lackey regimes around the world especially on the African continent. While he taught at ABU Zaria, alongside the stormy leftist radical, Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman, Wilmot succeeded in moulding a generation of vocal anti-imperialist pan-Africanists the same way Che did in the Americas.
Apart from helping to promote the idea of a united Nigeria during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, Wilmot and Y.B. Usman played pivotal roles in revolutionising Nigeria’s foreign policy under the short-lived regime of General Murtala Mohammed. This became critical in the ultimate decolonization of the African continent. Africa’s recognition and support for the MPLA in Angola, thanks to Murtala’s fiery speech [Africa has Come of Age] at the Organization of Africa Unity (OAU) summit in Addis Ababa in 1975 gave legitimacy to Cuba’s eventual military assistance to the MPLA-government forces. It was the defeat of the forces of Apartheid fighting alongside the retrograde UNITA in Angola that paved the way for the final triumph of black majority rule in Mandela’s South Africa.
Prof. Gofwen was right in his description of Wilmot. While the international limelight was recently focused on the anniversary of Che, we can ill afford to ignore the message of our very own Patrick Wilmot! It was hardly surprising that even in this era when public lectures have lost their magnetism to political rallies, where verbose politicians routinely feed their vast and credulous audiences with lies, the Jos University multi-purpose hall, the venue of the lecture, was filled to capacity. The Wilmot personality excites considerable passion and nostalgia among Nigerians of my generation but I was pleasantly surprised to observe the overwhelming presence and rapt attention given to the lecture by very young people who were barely toddlers when Wilmot was deported from Nigeria during the Babangida era. Perhaps not all hope is lost after all!
I did not attend ABU but even at the University of Ibadan where I studied with its rich mix of radical and liberal scholars such as Billy Dudley, Richard Joseph, Ajibola, Bode Onimode, Tam David-West and Sogolo, Dr. Wilmot was a well regarded academic. His influence on popular consciousness in Nigeria was pervasive indeed. Under the tutelage of Dr. Biodun Jeyifos, Dr. Onofume Onoge and Comrade G.G.Darah, then a graduate student, both the Marxist Leninist Movement (MLM) and the Nigerian-Cuban Friendship Association, to which I belonged, tried to match the revolutionary fervour spewing out from Zaria’s Patriotic Youth Movement (PYM). So much so the when the then military dictator, General Olusegun Obasanjo, introduced his IMF-inspired educational reforms he met strong resistance from students of these universities along with other patriotic forces at Lagos, Ife and Benin. It is a sad turn out of events that these days student activism invariably takes only the form of blood-letting ethno-religious riots. But that is a story for another day.
I attended the Wilmot lecture for two reasons. After the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991 and the upsurge of Western libertarian thoughts proclaimed by Fukuyama as the End of History I was anxious to hear what the veteran of the Old Left would have to say about contemporary developments. Many of us schooled in the methodology of Marxist dialectics and its materialist conception of history have barely recovered from the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, a global model of the system we propounded. As imperfect as the USSR was in term of the theoretical underpinnings of a socialist society, it was, thanks to the raging cold war of the era, an ally to most people of the developing world struggling to oust the yoke of oppression which Western colonialism and imperialism had imposed on them. But the disintegration of the USSR was a sort of triumph for capitalism and America’s global interests to which Marxists had no ready response.
Decolonization of African intellectualism
The underpinning of the intellectual plethora of the left in the developing countries was the exposure of the role of neo-colonialism in the new states of the Third World. Intellectuals such as Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), Samir Amin (A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment), Franz Fannon (Wretched of the Earth) and Claude Ake (Social Science as Imperialism) made bold postulations about the role capitalist organizations like the Bretton Woods institutions and multinationals in the perpetuation of underdevelopment in the countries of the southern hemisphere, economically and politically. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the scholars of the right, whose raison d’etat was the defence of Western imperialism rose to the counter-defence by rubbishing these profound works.
But thanks to John Perkin’s bestseller, Confession of an Economic Hitman, published in 2004, we now know that the Rodneys had all along been right about the use of multinationals and the Western financial system to perpetuate slavery, penury and death in countries of the Third World. Perkin in his book confessed to how as an Economic Hitman (EHM) he belonged to a group of
The West was scandalised by the revelations contained in the book. The U.S. State Department called it “the hallucinations of an Economic Hitman.” But this just sour grapes as the presence of EHMs continues to be felt around the world especially after the U.S. invasion of Iraq but more about this later.
IBB and the pseudo-left in Nigerian politics
Back in the eighties, however, the seemingly disarray of the ideological left was compounded by the Babangida military regime’s sustained war against “undue radicalism” and the routing of professors “professing what they were not paid to teach” from various university campuses.
As a magazine reporter, based in Lagos at time, I landed Zaria about 48 hours after the deportation of Wilmot. During a visit to the Senior Staff Club at Samaru, jokily referred to, in those days, as Africa’s most fêted watering-hole where pepper-soup mixed flawlessly, even if loquaciously, with wine and ideas, I was shocked to notice that people now spoke in subdued voices. Most people were reluctant to speak to me about Wilmot’s deportation. A lecturer friend confided in me that what was happening on the campus was a process of incorporation perfected by General Babangida and formulated along the maxim of ‘if you can’t beat them join them.’ He said IBB, as the wily military President was called, had collected the curriculum vitae of most outspoken radicals on the campus assuring each that he or she would be given a federal appointment as soon as he or she toned down criticism of the military regime. Each was assured that the transaction was “highly confidential” and should not be disclosed even to their spouses. So at every 4:00 O’clock Network News, he said, they would gather around their transistor radio expecting their names to be announced for one appointment or another. I can not attest to the veracity of this story but not a whimper was heard during my visit on the Wilmot saga except from a handful of dyed-in-the-wool critics of the government such as the late Dr Moddibo Tukur, with whom I had an extensive chat during the visit. Howbeit, IBB eventually founded his own pseudo-Left having amassed a number of intellectuals around him. Many had stirred such populist government activities or organs as the famous “IMF Debate,” the Directorate for Rural Roads and Infrastructures (DFRRI), MAMSER, the First Lady’s Better Life for Rural Women, “a-little-to-the-left, a-little-to-the-right” political parties, Option “A” Electoral System, etc. The premise of this home-grown “ideology” was based on the presumption that he could evolve a self-reliant philosophy even by colluding with imperialist forces; so it was not considered inappropriate for the military regime to introduce a stringent regime of structural adjustment programme (SAP) that bore the voice of Jacob and yet the hands of Esau.
By the time democracy returned to our shores after several years of military rule the ideological spectrum had indeed become considerably blurred. In fact the parties that emerged in 1998 were hardly distinguishable in ideological orientation; they did not even permit the IBB “diversity” of “a-little-to-the-left, a-little-to-the-right.” They were mere transmutation of the General Sani Abacha-created parties (“the five leprous fingers” as the late Bola Ige once described them) which barely a few months back had tried to outdo one another in adopting the General as their sole “consensus” candidate for a presidential election which date was yet unknown.
Obasanjo, the imperialism’s undertaker
To further confirm the ideological bankruptcy of the nascent democracy, the political elite resorted to the invasion of a prison to rescue a certain ex- military fascist, renowned for his antecedent as an imperialist undertaker and, proceeding to launder his hollowed image, installed him president. And President Olusegun Obasanjo did not disappoint his sponsors; at the end of his eight-year reign, under the direct supervision of the World Bank and the IMF, he had auctioned off virtually all the “family jewels” (to quote his political doppelganger and chief of the ruling party, Dr. Ahmadu Ali, who at the time of the stabbing comment was rueing over the demolition of his personal houses by the Obasanjo appointed fascist superintending the affairs of the Federal Capital Territory).
Posterity will remember Obasanjo as imperialism’s most unquestioning and obliging ruler Nigeria, nay Africa, ever had. While he treated his foreign friends with a type of deference bordering on servitude he had nothing but absolute condescension for the Nigerian people and their condition. Without any thought, he could increase the pump price of fuel if any of his American-accented advisers as much as made a dazzling POWERPOINT presentation to illustrate some macro-economic points you could clearly see were beyond his mental comprehension. You didn’t need what Perkin described in his book as imperialism’s “jackals’ to cajole him into action; he was too beholden to capitalism to need convincing. He could pay doubtful creditors of the Paris Club but would not care if domestic creditors languished in penury. In a book being collaborated between Perkins and other EHMs, Steve Beckman (The World Bank and the $100 Billion Question) writes about how political leaders around the world collude with officials to steal funds meant as development aids to their countries. The Nigerian press is awash with speculations about the stupendous wealth of the ex-President who was reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy before he was elected. But that is yet another story for another day. I attended the lecture because I wanted to hear what Wilmot had to say about all these. Wilmot suffered from cold that day and one could see the difficulty he endured to be audible to the large audience. At one point he asked to be given water to help clear his throat. One of the organisers came forward to whisper something to his ear. Apparently he had explained to Wilmot that he had just sent for bottled water.
This is how Wilmot reacted: “When I first came to Nigeria in 1970 I used to drink water from the tap. Now everyone drinks bottled water or gets typhoid. What type of nonsense is this? Absolute rubbish!”
There could not have been a better metaphor to illustrate the abysmal condition of the nation. Without potable water, good roads, good health care delivery system, etc, President Obasanjo deluded himself as the greatest leader Nigeria has ever had and fought hard to change the Constitution in order to reward himself with a third tenure and possibly Life Presidency. But was Obasanjo, the self-styled Founder of Modern Nigeria, ever serious about his hype of placing the country among the world’s top 20 economies by the year 2020 when in eight years he couldn’t provide the basic necessities of life like water, electricity, roads and health care?
Wilmot did confirm the widely held scepticism by Nigerians that the World Bank tele-guided reforms currently in place are never meant to stimulate growth in our real economy but are mere conduit pipe to continue to drain our resources. As Perkin puts it, concerning the so-called G8 plan for debt forgiveness, even this is invariably tied to conditionalities demanding the sale of “health, education, electric, water and other public services to corporations.”
We are all witnesses to how Obasanjo’s Education Minister, Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili, now a World Bank top gun, had attempted to sell off our educational institutions, especially the unity schools, under a dubious PPP scheme before the expiration of the tenure of that government. The universities were not spared; by the time Obasanjo quit office all the public funded universities were under lock for resisting his invidious plan to have them auctioned.
While the Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, an apostle of Castro, utilized the money realised from sale of excess crude oil to build four ultra-modern petroleum refineries to make the products more accessible and cheaper to his people, in our country Obasanjo was busy selling them out to his business cronies. These sales were to be revised by Yar’adua following popular protest by the Nigerian people.
And according to MDG guidelines government is expected to hands off direct control and management of water supplying agencies. With independent power producers (IPP) involved in the energy sector soon corporations will takeover total control of generating and distributing electricity in this country. The list goes on…
Of a more insidious nature, in my opinion, is the frenzied scramble for African resources such as gold, diamond, coltan and oil with its serious proposition to national security. In the Congo the exploitation of coltan, a semi-conductor, for the making of cheaper cell phones by multi-nationals continues to fuel one of Africa’s longest civil wars. The ruthless exploitation of diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone had also resulted in a protracted civil war in these countries. Although the long history of neglect and environmental degradation in Niger-Delta of Nigeria has bred popular disgruntlement, the sophisticated warfare waged by well-organised militia groups, which characterised Obasanjo’s tenure, suggests a barefaced imperialist design to balkanise the region for more effective exploitation of the vast petroleum deposits. If President Umaru Yar’adua is serious about finding a lasting solution to the restive Niger Delta, therefore, he will have to beam a critical searchlight on the activities of multinationals in that region.
The lessons from Cuba
The second reason I attended the lecture was the topic itself – CUBA. Cuba is a country that has fascinated me right from my youthful days. I have always been enamoured by the revolutionary exploits of the Castro brothers and Che in the Cuban revolution. Along with Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream and Nelson Mandela’s The Struggle is My Life, I could recite Fidel Castro’s famous speech History Will Absolve Me by heart. Its conclusion still rings in my ear:
This was Fidel Castro, then only 26, standing treason trial for leading the assault on Moncada Barracks in 1953. He bagged 15 years imprisonment. But upon release in 1955, after a general amnesty, he went to Mexico where he once again raised another group of insurgents against the Batista regime. It was also there that he met Che. With Che and Raul, Fidel landed 82 men on the Cuban Island on December 2, 1956 but were ambushed by forces belonging to Batista. According Wikipedia encyclopaedia only
Despite the harsh terrain and the constant bombardments, Fidel, Che and Raul waged successful guerrilla warfare against Batista until his (Batista’s) flight on January 1, 1959.
Since taking power in Cuba, Castro had become the U.S. enemy Number One. In fact he has survived a documented 638 assassination attempts masterminded by the CIA. The country too had survived many serious crises such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Missile Crisis and recently, the Special Period, the crisis precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main ally.
On July 31, 2006, Castro transferred his duties as President of the Council of state, President of the Council of Ministers, First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party and the post of commander in chief of the armed forces to his brother and comrade-in-arm, Raúl Castro. This action transferred power temporary while Fidel recovers from surgery which he underwent due to an “acute intestinal crisis with sustained bleeding.”
The subject of Castro’s health has always interested the American government which does not disguise its desire to see to the end of the Cuban leader and the overthrow of his government. After his sick condition was made public, America started talking glibly about the end of Castro and a regime change in Cuba. Several scenarios including armed uprising and mass demonstrations were sketched. It has been over a year since Castro “transferred” his powers and yet neither he nor the regime has come to harm.
How have Castro and Cuba survive for this long? This was the question that interested me and to which Wilmot attempted to provide answers to. Cuba has survived because Castro is a patriotic leader who loves his country and people. Castro has survived because his country and people love him back.
As poor as the Cuba is, compared to Nigeria, it has provided for its people most of the basic necessities of life. It is among the leading nations of the world in term of the provision of education, health care, nutrition, modern infrastructures and biotechnology. In fact it rates higher than the USA in health care delivery to its citizens.
Ettegate product of Obasanjo prebendalism
Why has Nigeria with its enormous wealth not fare equally or more? The answer to me is obvious: Nigeria lacks patriotic leaders in the mould of Castro. Cuba does not have politicians who think only about themselves. Cuba does not have the Patricia Ettehs who would commit a whopping N638 million to renovate their official quarters and buy posh cars while the majority of their fellow citizens, living below a national average income of $1, continue to eke out an increasingly difficult livelihood. And would there be as much as a murmur of compliant from the people, they would wonder loudly and self-righteously what all the noise was about. Why were the people so ungrateful and the mass media so mischievous, they will muse.
Ettehgate represents all that was wrong with the Obasanjo prebendalist regime; a regime of an alienated, self-aggrandising and grovelling elite with an insatiable taste to loot, loot and loot the more. The public treasury was the object of public service under this ideologically bankrupt regime not the interest of the people.
A member of the audience asked Wilmot what he thought was the best system of government. The best system of government, he replied, was not defined by any -ism but by how well the government took care of the basic needs of the majority of its citizens. Although I suspected that Wilmot was running away from being labelled an ideological bigot, I, nevertheless, agreed with his postulation. Whatever name is given to a pro-people system or ideology does not matter so long as it delivers. But to stand for nothing is to fall for anything as we witness throughout the tenure of the predecessor regime.
This is Castro’s and Cuba’s lessons to Nigerians. Castro and his people knew that imperialism was the greatest obstacle to their development. Under Batista Cuba was the playground of American millionaires. But under Castro, Cuba caters for the interests of the people that live in it. When will Nigerians take over the country from the Carl Masters, the Andy Youngs, the Transcorp billionaires, etc, who under Obasanjo made Nigeria their playgrounds?
History beckons on Yar’adua
As a veteran of the left himself, one hopes President Umaru Yar’adua (reportedly a supporter of late Mallam Aminu Kano’s Peoples Redemption Party, PRP), will admit to the urgent need to review the anti-people economic reforms, bequeathed to him by Obasanjo and his imperialist masters, in favour of policies that will directly improve the livelihood of common Nigerians.
The world famous writer, Chinua Achebe, had long predicted (The Trouble with Nigeria) that since Mallam Aminu Kano passed this way; Nigeria would never be the same again. With Yar’adua, Aminu’s disciple, on the saddle as the President of Nigeria this prophesy may yet come to pass sooner than later. History beckons on Yar’adua. If, however, Yar’adua has any fear about fighting imperialism and the liberation of the Nigerian talakawa under-class, the example of Cuba should inspire and galvanise him.
Nostalgia apart, Wilmot, indeed, remains a worthy commentator on the Nigeria situation.
Mr. Ishaku, former Chairman, Editorial Board of Champion Newspapers Limited, Lagos, wrote from Jos and can be reached at the e-mail address: jishaku2@yahoo.co.uk
|