Africa

The price of crude oil has broken through the $50 barrier. A series of events have contributed to this, the latest being the crisis in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, where Ijaw rebels are threatening to attack oil pipelines. These events are merely the extreme expression of a more widespread crisis that Nigeria is facing.

If the rate of US$2 per day is used to measure the poverty level, the percentage of those living below the poverty line in Nigeria stands at 90.8 percent of the population. At the same time the country has a foreign debt of $32.9 billion, on which it pays annually close to $3billion in interest. The imperialists together with their local lackeys, the Nigerian ruling class, are literally sucking the blood of the Nigerian masses.

In just four years since the year 2000, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) has called mass strike action 7 times. Repeatedly the leaders of the NLC have let down the workers. It is time to move on. Ther wokers of Nigeria need a fighting trade union leadership and their own party. Workers’ Alternative Editorial Statement.

Education, universally, has evidently proven itself to be the sine qua non to the development, progress and advancement of a nation. As a result of this, it plays a pivotal role in the development, progress and advancement of all other sectors of the social, political and economic enclave of such a nation. Pathetically however, despite this indisputable fact, the story of education continues, day-in and day-out, to remain one of tragedy in Nigeria. Education, particularly (though not singularly) tertiary education, continually suffers from abject neglect by the Nigerian ruling class, which starves the tertiary institutions of funds. According to a UNESCO report, the average budgetary

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The crisis in the Nigerian pension scheme can be best appreciated when one has a graphic view of the inhuman and highly degrading conditions pensioners have been subjected to. It is either a case of non-payment of pensions and gratuity, or the creation of undue bottlenecks to frustrate and kill pensioners. They are constantly to go for worthless “identification parades”, and “verification exercises”, tortured in long queues, receive insults from dubious government officials or their servants, etc. The following examples show what the situation is.

As we go to press [July 2004], the strike called by the medical and health workers of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital has entered its third week, 38 days to be exact and the workers remain resolved to see it through in spite of heavy threats from management and government.

On June 9 the workers of Nigeria embarked on yet another general strike. Two days later it had already been called off. There is a stalemate situation that has developed between the classes that must be resolved one way or the other. For the workers to come out on top they need their own party.

When King Hassan II died at the end of the last century all expectations of change were concentrated in the figure of his son Mohammed VI. Fascination grew over this young and apparently modern monarch who announced he would transform his country, establish the rule of law and lead it successfully into the 21st century. Expectations were running high. Only one year after his arrival, the royal reform movement stalled - the alliance of the Throne and the socialists has not delivered the results the masses had hoped and waited for. This is a recipe for future explosions in the class struggle.

In May Obasanjo, the President of Nigeria, imposed a state of emergency on Plateau State, removing the local state governor. The measures were taken after serious ethnic conflicts erupted in the area, but behind all this lies a more sinister agenda. The central government is preparing the ground for more bonapartist measures, that are ultimately aimed against the labour movement.

The Nigerian Labour Congress (the main trade union federation in Nigeria) has been under pressure to launch its own party. The leaders of the NLC have unfortunately always run after the coat-tails of Obasanjo's PDP. Earlier this year some elements within the NLC did indeed launch a party, the PSD (Party for Social Democracy). But they did so without really doing anything to seriously publicise the party and take it to the workers. The NLC was not seen to be officially backing it. This led to its disastrous electoral results earlier this year. Here we publish an article from the Workers' Alternative on the party's programme.

The Nigerian ruling class is famous for its levels of corruption and incompetence. What is even more striking is the way it was created. The irony of the situation in Nigeria is that the working class came into being long before the “ruling class”. This was due to the colonial domination on the part of British imperialism. Here a Nigerian Marxist looks at this apparent contradiction.

Wole Soyinka is a prominent Nigerian playwright, and in 1986, he became the first African writer ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In October 1965, Soyinka was arrested for allegedly seizing the Western Region radio studios and using them to publicly dispute the published results of the recent elections, but in December of the same year, he was acquitted. Didi Cheeka of the Workers' Alternative Editorial Board looks at the ideas and works of this well known writer.