Comrade Adeola Soetan spent 13 years at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile Ife, for a five-year course on account of his role as students union leader in the institution. The pro-democracy activist speaks with DARE ADEKANMBI on the proposed strike by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), decisions taken so far by President Bola Tinubu, among others.
What do you make of some of the policies that the current Federal Government has come up with since President Bola Tinubu assumed office?
Governance is about ideology, whether in your policies, programmes, business approach. It is all about ideology. Tinubu has chosen a continuation of pro-market ideology in a country where more than 133 million citizens are multidimensionally poor. Any government that throws its citizens to the so-called market forces can never bring hope at all. The hopefulness will turn to hopelessness. This has been shown within two months of his administration. When you have a neo-liberal policy motivated by IMF and the World Bank-driven government, what you are saying in essence is that people must suffer more for nothingness. As he promised, he is continuing Buhari’s regime and policies that left more Nigerians in poverty, despite assurances to the contrary. It is unfortunate about a government that says it is progressive. I have not seen any progressive government in the real sense of it that is pro-market. No. The theme of a progressive government, take for instance Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s government in the old Western Region, is that there must be more of government in people’s lives to drive the processes of development. This is why they say the overwhelming majority of the citizens must enjoy government. How did Chief Awolowo do it? Instead of withdrawing government from the people, saying government has no business with people, they pumped more public funds into generating human capacity, making economy work, giving free education, free health and into agriculture. These are indices of a real progressive government. The market forces are concerned about profit making and nothing more.
So, Tinubu’s policies so far are anti-progressive and you can see that the market reacted immediately to these policies. When you talk about market forces, you are talking about the capitalists. The Yoruba people say eniyan lo wa n’idi oro, ti oro fi nke [human beings are behind the voicing from the oro deity]. Market forces do not operate in abstraction. No. If you talk of the market forces in the cement industry, for instance, that is Dangote. The idea that critical businesses should be owned by some private individuals is anti-people. We have been trying it since the Ibrahim Babangida regime and it has not helped us because the economy keeps getting worse. When he started this their Structural Adjustment Programme or neo-liberal policy, we were assured by their professors of economics and so-called international economic group that Nigeria would become an El-Dorado. They painted so much bright future for Nigeria in 1984, 85 and 86. But see what is happening now. What Tinubu has just done is to deepen the SAP.
Like I have advised in many of my statements, IMF and the World Bank have never developed any country whose economy needs to develop. Go and read what Jomo Kenyatta, the former president of Kenya and his counterpart in Sierra Leone said about IMF and the World Bank. Their opinion about these Western institutions is that when you want to kill a country, just invite them and embrace their policies totally. And that has been the problem. See what is happening in Nigeria now. There is total inflationary trend that is unstoppable. Nigerians are becoming poorer. The moment the president withdrew the so-called subsidy, prices jumped. People can’t afford to buy petrol or even ride in their cars again. People can’t afford to produce at minimal cost and workers are right to demand pay rise. Asking for palliatives means government has caused pain and the workers want the pain to reduce. But the fundamental question is: why did the government cause the pain in the first place? The government did not need to cause the pain it is inflicting on Nigerians in the first place. Nigeria is the only country in the world where the more we produce things, the more we suffer. The Awolowo government did not rely on proceeds from oil, but relied on agriculture. That government was able to do free education, free health and so on then. Whether you were poor or rich, you had access to education. But see what is happening now.
The NLC and the working class people have a genuine demand. But they should go beyond the issue of salary increase and what have you, because the market already is totally disrupted by the sudden withdrawal of the so-called subsidy. The president had not even got to office before he inflicted this policy on Nigerians. He said he was possessed by courage, but that is not courage. That is confusion. Since 1984, we have been fighting against the removal of the so-called subsidy because this thing has to be discussed. Now that he has a cabinet. That would have been the first start. If Tinubu knew that a lot of fraud is going on in the oil industry, so, why should the poor people pay for the corruption of the oil thieves in NNPC and the oil sector? Go and search about oil wells today in Nigeria. It is only about a state that is trying to get about half of what is located within the state. The rest are in private hands. That is why we have people who can boast that they are richer than the states. They are many and even two or three of them have oil wells. We did a research work recently on OPL 245, which is one of the most lucrative oil wells in the country today. We discovered that the oil well was given freely to one of Abacha’s sons and two or three people. Within a month of been gifted the oil well, they invited Shell and sold it off for $1.3bn and they made cool $800m. So, it is not that Nigeria as a country is poor. What we have is a very rich country with looters as leaders who are making people to be poor. That is the truth.
What Tinubu should have done was to come in and look at all the books and figures concerning the oil industry. Since Babangida’s regime, NNPC would give a different figure from what the Ministry of Petroleum and CBN would give. That was why Chief MKO Abiola, when asked if he was going to increase the pump prices of petroleum products, said as an accountant, he would have to go in there first and look at the books so that nobody is coking the figures and passing the burden to the people. A former governor of I think Bauchi said it on a national television that one or two of his friends went to Buhari to protest that people are making too much money in the oil industry and that something should be done to protect the oil industry. So, why would a new president just come and pass the burden to the poor people who live on less than $2 a day as Tinubu has done? That is not a progressive government.
Do you see the ministers coming in to put up some creativity to address some of these challenges?
There is no doubt that we have some brilliant young chaps in the cabinet. But the reality is that a cabinet is just like you hiring some workers. The principle of government determines how they are going to work. Tinubu has set a pro-market ideology already and that is a problem for those who are coming in as ministers. Even if some of them are liberal, the economic tone of government has been set that Tinubu’s is a neo-liberal government that does not have a human face. Don’t also forget that Nigeria’s president is about the most powerful president in the world. His word is law. So, how can some of these brilliant young chaps redefine the ideology except there is pressure from the people? This is where NLC has a role to play, as well as human rights organisations and civil society groups. The citizens themselves have a role to play. People complain that the NLC is this or that. I condemn NLC’s inconsistency and timidity at times, but what of us as people? Do we call on the NLC to intervene when our landlords increase our rent criminally and astronomically? Do we call on NLC to argue and debate with our school proprietors when they increase tuition fees of our children? So, we as people must be active. Citizenship confers the rights of protest on all of us in one way or the other. Though I agree our NLC and the working class leadership have a role to play because a lot of people look up to them. But at the same time, they are not mercenaries. They act on the basis of the readiness of the people after mobilising them. Do you need the NLC to tell you that a bag of rice is about N45,000 in Abuja now? My wife called me yesterday [Thursday] that she could not buy rice in the market. The market price two weeks earlier was about N35,000. A bag of flour is now about N37,000. Within three weeks, there has been over N3,500 hike in the price of a bag of flour and N200 hike in the price of a loaf of bread. Yet, we have devalued the naira to the extent that all the purchasing power of the people has collapsed. Tinubu should be reminded that not all Nigerians have access to looting or proceeds from sale of narcotics and drugs or Yahoo Yahoo. Government does not plan on the basis of ‘water will find its level.’ Government plans constructively on the basis of ‘who are the poorest of the citizens?’ You don’t plan and say the citizens will find their way. That is not governance. Governance will consider the fact that if there is going to be increase in tuition fee, we need to look at how much we are paying people. How much are we paying as minimum wage? These are the things that should inform government on its activities and policies, either on tuition or taxes.
The administration of Chief Awolowo taxed people. But that administration did not tax people to death. The government first of all encouraged people to be productive by pumping much money into the economy, education and health because they know that no matter what money is spent on education, the region would benefit at the end of the day. Those engineers, doctors, lawyers and so on that they have trained at heavily subsidized rate in the universities are going to return the capacities to the system.
So, I think that the NLC should be supported and other civil society groups should also join the movement. In any capitalist government, the only gain you can make is on the basis of your mass pressure and nothing more. It has been like that over the years and it is going to continue like that until we have a genuine working class party in Nigeria that can now know that the interest of the collectives is the ideology of such a party and not these bourgeoisie parties in the corridors of power.
Civic engagement is organised in Nigeria in such a way that there is the need for a body to pull the trigger for mass action. The only exception was during the #EndSARS protest and even for that, there were leaders on social media. The NLC had mobilised Nigerians to a protest against one of Buhari’s fuel price increases, only for the leadership to call off the action in the wee hours of the day it was to commence. Nigerians no longer appear to believe that NLC can act like the labour union of old, even with the threat of Wednesday strike.
Like I said, NLC has not understood its critical and traditional role as leader of the working class people. No matter what, if you have a capitalist government in power, your wish and their wish will always be contradictory. Those in government want more money to loot and more profits for the private enterprises of the few capitalists controlling the commanding heights of the economy. We want better payment for the workers, good pensions and so on. So, there are contradictions. So, what you are going to get will now depend on the ability to struggle and put pressure on such a government. But the problem with the NLC right from the Bafyau-Oshiomhole days has always been that they too don’t even have alternative economic and political agenda. Most of them are pro-liberal. Some of them have come to the conclusion wrongly that the problem of Nigeria is not about ideological and economic stance of any government, but it is about having good leaders. This is a farce and we have seen it. There is no person that has come to govern us in Nigeria that said he will loot money. They do it by virtue of what the politicians do in government; by the fact that too much money is spent on politics; too much money is used to rig elections and too much money is, therefore, expected to be stolen. This is where the NLC is getting it wrong. The NLC leadership has to be ideological to be able to interpret the society they live in. They don’t live in a society that does not have economic perspective and I think that is their problem. Don’t forget, Oshiomhole’s leadership during the Olusegun Obasanjo regime embraced the withdrawal of oil subsidy they are talking about in phases. And what did they do? They gave them hundreds of buses as palliatives when the fundamental pressure should have been that the government should go and fix the refineries; [allow] the communities and the states that produce oil own them and produce it and pay percentage to the Federal Government instead of the other way round. We have oil in the Niger Delta, but you will discover that private individuals own the oil and they just go there and give few people money to become rich. The NLC itself has not come to the conclusion that it needs to fight against neo-liberalism. The NLC still feels this cancer can be cured by applying Mentholatum. It is a question of their own limitation. The best we have had was [Hassan Adebayo] Sunmonu who was loyal to the ideology of the working class. That is what people don’t understand. The working class does not exist on the basis of no-ideology. How is it that we have poor people and we continue to have many rich people in a country? It is because of ideology. The politicians want to loot and make money, but it is the working class people who should say ‘No, we want to get better wages for our work because we are the producers of wealth.’ So, if the labour leaders have not understood that contradiction, they will be jumping from one ultimatum to another. That is what is going to happen. Now, they said they want to meet; If I were [Joe] Ajaero and co, there is no more meeting. Tinubu has declared his own ideology and has removed almost everything removable. So, what meeting are you doing again? The meeting you should have is to meet at the barricades on the streets so that when they put more pressure, government will consider withdrawing its own anti-people policies. That is how to meet. What are they meeting the government for? Is it to get palliatives from government? What do they mean by palliatives? If there is N500,000 increment in workers’ salary and I am not against such, but the reality is that maybe they are less than 10 percent of the population. Even the market is moving like a horse now and palliative or any hike in salary will be moving like a dog. So, in the race of economic survival, how can a dog move faster than a horse? That misstep of withdrawal of subsidy immediately has created a market that, to deal with it, is going to be impossible and that is the problem. Now, what people are doing now is to speculate because the market is not sure. You can go to bed with the price of a loaf of bread at N1, 000 and by the time you wake up, it is already N1, 200. So, it has dislocated the fundamentals of the market and this is where the NLC leadership should also get themselves educated in all these fundamentals. It is not about prayer or fasting.
These are obvious ideological principles. There is no economy, even in our secondary school days, that is neutral. Economic policy must have its own slant, whether it is pro- or anti-people, pro-rich or pro-poor. You cannot combine the two. If more money is spent on education, health and agriculture, there will be less money to steal and less money for the people in the so-called multinationals to steal. This is where IMF and the World Bank continue to pounce on us. They will tell us “come and pay your debt, remove subsidy; come and pay your debt, tax your people; come and pay your debt, commercialise education, health.” It is like saying the operation is successful, but the patient has died. Does that make sense? That is what the IMF and the World Bank are saying in essence. In the last eight years, Buhari failed in his promises to repairs the refineries. He said he will not remove the so-called subsidy, devalue the naira because he knows it is going to affect the poor. You can only devalue when you are producing and exporting heavily. If you devalue your currency and at the same time you remove subsidy and you are not producing, you are just leaving your people in the abattoirs of economic butchers in the world and that is very wrong.
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