One
major problem limiting the national effectiveness and impact of the Nigerian
Left in the country’s politics—at least since the end of the (1967-1970) Civil
War—has been the contradictions (or “disconnect”) between organization and
programme. Put more concretely: The inability of the organizations of the Left
to fully and satisfactorily accomplish the tasks they assign themselves through
the employment of the structures, means and methods fashioned by them—and
therefore available to them—has been a major limiting factor in its national
effectiveness and impact in Nigerian politics.
As the
Left now prepares to “diversify” its politics by participating in future
electoral contests through combinations and alliances, it is necessary to step
up the struggle against this almost chronic weakness. The following
recollection is a statement and an illustration of the problem. Some details that
are inappropriate here and, in any case, irrelevant to this discussion, are
left out of the narrative.
Sometime
in the second half of 1988, a fairly large number of Nigerian socialists met in
the university town of Nsukka. They had come from the four corners and centre
of the country. It was at the height of General Babangida’s dictatorship when
the regime was trying to institute—or, perhaps, more correctly,
institutionalize—a form of “military democracy” or “diarchy”. Dialectically, it
was also at the height of Marxist vanguardism in the Nigerian Left.
Most
of the persons who were present at the all-night (necessarily underground)
meeting were in the forefront of the various struggles being waged at the time
by three popular-democratic organizations that were particularly under state
and ruling-class attack: the labour movement organized principally under the
Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and its affiliates, the Academic Staff Union of
Universities (ASUU) and the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS).
A few
other participants—among them the conveners and coordinators of the meeting—were
either not known in the open struggles at all (except possibly to the security
forces) or were seen by the public as journalists or mere ideological
supporters. One or two of the embattled popular-democratic organizations were,
at the time, also holding well-publicised and open conferences at or around
Nsukka. These two tactics—the existence and deployment of doubly underground conveners
and coordinators and a revolutionary meeting taking place on the sidelines of
open conferences—were well-practiced and effective covers—as it seemed, and as
we believed.
I
travelled from Lagos where I was serving as member of the Editorial Board and
Acting Editorial Page Editor of The
Guardian. First, I stopped in Calabar, my “base”. There I linked up with
other members of the Calabar Group of Socialists. From Calabar our delegation
moved to Nsukka in three groups along three different routes.
The
agenda of the meeting should, by now, be obvious. Its core can be divided broadly into two. The first was our response to
the regime’s clampdown on the leading organizations of the popular masses and
the Nigerian Left. The second was the review of Babangida’s transition
programme and our attitude to it. The agenda’s ancillary items included
organizational structure and coordination; finance and “logistics”; local
struggles; and “general”. The ancillary items were regarded as secondary,
subsidiary or merely supportive. That was the Nigerian Left 30 years ago. But
with the benefit of hindsight, I now regret that the so-called ancillary issues
were not organically integrated into the agenda of that meeting and of similar
meetings of that period.
The
so-called “general” issues unbelievably included the national question, the
gender question and general democratic questions that continually assailed and
still assail what we used to call “bourgeois politics”. These other issues, as
well as questions relating to organizational structures, finance and
“logistics” were just mentioned as delegates were looking at their watches and
calculating how long it would take them to move out of Nsukka or get to the bus
stations!
This
near-neglect of issues in “bourgeois politics”, internal organization and
“logistics” is a heritage that must now be buried—because I believe it has been
rejected by the movement of history. We may call this problem the “dialectics
of organization and programme” or “aligning organisational structure with what
is to be done” or the “correlation of what is to be done and how to do it”.
The
all-night meeting opened around 9.00 pm. Choosing a presiding officer and two deputies
and endorsing the composition of the secretariat took almost an hour because it
was a meeting of representatives of several groups, each protective of its
“autonomy” and afraid of “domination”. Those who convened the meeting had
merely deployed their personal authority—ideological, moral and political—to do
so. The solution of this preliminary procedural problem later became the
foundation of a bigger problem, as will soon be seen.
Participants
who were eventually chosen as presiding and recording officers—that is, the
trustees of the meeting – came from different locations and belonged to
different groups. The meeting, as expected, went on to take strategically important
decisions. The implementation committees were constituted by random nominations.
The grave shortcomings of this all-important meeting for which patriotic and courageous
Nigerians took great risks—convinced that this was necessary to save the nation
from creeping neo-fascism—began to emerge shortly after the meeting had ended
and delegates had sung the “Solidarity” and “Internationale” and embarked on
their homeward trips.
The
theoretical expectation was that the presiding officers and recorders would assemble
after the meeting to confirm and “tidy up” the records especially the decisions
reached—and communicate same to “stakeholders” by the usual methods and
channels. The various implementation committees were also expected to hold brief
meetings to confirm both their memberships and how to carry out their
assignments.
They
were also expected to appoint convener(s) and coordinator(s). The tragedy was
that these expectations were largely unmet before dispersal. If the presiding
officers and recorders and the implementation committees had met they would
have discovered that since their memberships were dispersed across the country
and both the individuals and their primary organizations were not buoyant
enough to permit them to travel around as necessary, they must find other ways
of carrying out their assignments. But these other meetings did not take place—because
the main meeting was deemed to have ended. The result was a catalogue of grave
shortcomings in the execution of assignments.
This
trend, which my own generation met in the early 1970s, continued until the
meeting in Calabar in April 1989. That Calabar meeting of the Nigerian Left
took place on the sidelines of a conference organized by the NLC to consider
the formation of a Labour Party. At the end of the Left meeting, an empowered 12-member
Coordinating Committee—each member representing a primary group—was appointed.
But, beyond this, the meeting appointed a 2-member Secretariat based in Lagos.
The two members were serious, committed and experienced; they also had a
history of working together; their places of work were close; and one of them
had a full secretarial support to offer the Secretariat.
These
two simple steps—appointing a fully representative and empowered Coordinating
Committee and setting up a working Secretariat—caused a great positive leap in
the post-Civil War effort to found a nationally-based organization of the
Nigerian Left. Another historic leap would be made if the Left, as Left, not
only “diversifies” into electoral politics—or bourgeois politics—but also aligns
its organization accordingly. And, in trying to do this, the Left may need to
re-possess and then revise, thus recreating, their inherited theory of
organisation called democratic
centralism. With the internet and the social media creatively employed the
new leap could be a double or triple one!
*Contributed by Edwin Madunagu,
mathematician and journalist, writes from Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.
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