Chinweizu Black Colonialists: The Root of the Trouble in Nigeria

[TShango]

Black colonialists: the root of the trouble with Nigeria

Chinweizu answering questions from Paul Odili, Lagos, 3SEP06
An Achebe Foundation Interview [edited transcript]

Copyright © 2007 by Chinweizu
You have expressed the view that the process of liberation of Nigeria from colonial rule was not far reaching enough. May we know why you think this is so?
I do so, simply to emphasise that the rhetoric claimed far much more than was actually achieved. In 1960, Nigerian leaders claimed they had achieved independence --the independence of Nigeria from Britain. But that was not true! They hadn’t. Nigeria had merely become a Bantustan—a black “homeland” ruled by black colonialists, and still exploited for imperialism. Far from becoming independent, Nigeria was, and is still, till today, held captive within the economic and cultural structures of the British Empire, which the British politely and craftily renamed “The Commonwealth”. If they had understood what independence is, those leaders would have realized that what they won in 1960, by a negotiated transfer of administration, was, at most, only the first important political battle on the hard road to independence. Far from the struggle being over, the political stage had only just been set for it to seriously begin.
But unfortunately, their conception of their project was terribly limited. As the Nigerian independence movement did not put a premium on political education, they failed to study the imperialist enemy well and produced no analysis or theory of anti-colonial struggle to illuminate their way. Consequently, they had not seen the need to struggle for the total liquidation of colonialism. The leaders were aiming only to replace the white colonialists—i.e. To become black colonialists. Of course, the Sardauna had a slightly bigger agenda. He was concerned also with recovering his imperial inheritance, the Sokoto Empire. For him and his feudal Fulani cohorts, it was also a struggle to recover their pre-colonial Sokoto Empire and then resume its expansion until, as they said, they “dipped the Koran in the sea”. And by 1970, at the end of the civil war, they had achieved that. And they promptly settled down to cream off and feed fat on the oil bonanza of their much-enlarged Sokoto Empire which wore the disguise of Nigeria.
The others simply wanted to replace the white colonialists so as to enjoy “life more abundant”, i.e. The European conquerors’ way of life. If Zik and Awo had any deeper notion of what their independence struggle should achieve, I am yet to discover where they expressed it. Lacking an ideology, and not having any intellectual organ to do detailed forward thinking for them, they had no conception of the stages the struggle needed to go through. And at what they called “independence”, a liberation movement did not step into office to continue with what remained of the struggle. If they had conceived of liberation in a correct and thoroughgoing manner—as requiring the total liquidation of colonialism--they might have produced a clear road map to liberation and known what to do immediately after getting into office. Unlike them, Amilcar Cabral, in Guinea Bissau, insisted: “that the national liberation struggle is a revolution, and that it is not over at the moment when the flag is hoisted and the national anthem is played.” . . .and that “so long as imperialism is in existence, an independent African state must be a liberation movement in power, or it will not be independent” [Unity & Struggle: 134,116]
Liberation or, to use the Nigerian terminology, Independence, is not simply a matter of getting autonomy for determining your policies within the existing local and international structures. Their error illustrates what Cabral called “the ideological deficiency of the national liberation movements” in Black Africa. [Unity & Struggle: 122]
Lacking a detailed knowledge of their own reality, and blind to what Cabral called the “presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure”, [Unity & Struggle: 122,123] the Nigerian independence movement not only failed, but also failed to see that they had failed, thus proving Cabral correct, not only about revolution but also about liberation/independence, when he said that “If it is true that a revolution can fail, even though it be nurtured on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet successfully practised Revolution without a revolutionary theory.”[Unity & Struggle: 123]
If you set out from Lagos to Kaduna, but have no idea where Kaduna is or what it looks like or how far it is, you can leave Iddo and get to Ikeja and think you have finished your journey. The freedom movement in Nigeria had a superficial conception of the colonialism they were struggling against, and even less knowledge of the global imperialism of which the colonialism they attacked was just the local agency. They therefore had no realistic notion of what liberation would require. I think that their failure to study and understand the scope of their project—a failure caused by the intellectual poverty, indeed intellectual barrenness, of the movement--was the fundamental reason why their struggle did not go far enough.
And, by the way, this happened, not in Nigeria alone. In most Black African countries, the leaderships of the so-called liberation/independence movements had made no detailed study of what they ought to be struggling for and how. As in Nigeria, their thinking was simply that the White man was enjoying “life more abundant”, and excluded them by the colour bar, and they wanted to join in by taking over the structures in which the white man was enjoying. They simply wanted the colour bar removed. They wanted to enjoy the white man’s jobs and pay; they wanted to go to the white man’s clubs, and to live where and how the white man lived. For those in South Africa, where they faced a white settler community, part of their resented target was the social apartheid structure—they could not move about without carrying passes; they could not vote; they could not live wherever they liked; they could not legally socialise with, mate or marry whites. By the time of the ANC’s Freedom Charter in 1955, they had effectively narrowed down their aims to gaining the same rights/freedoms that whites enjoyed in the Apartheid state, i.e. Down to integrating the Apartheid state and society, and had abandoned the earlier ANC aims of recovering their expropriated lands, restoring sovereignty to the eclipsed black African kingdoms, and regenerating the shattered cultures of the African race.
Such an under-conceptualisation of their struggle has proved a disaster for their peoples after their struggles “succeeded” and they came into office. They did not go into office to dig out colonialism root and branch; or to build their people’s power; or to protect their people from imperialism; or to recover the sovereignty their people lost under colonialism. In Nigeria, as elsewhere, having taken over the political administration created by the white colonialists, their aims were limited to taking over the white residential areas—Ikoyi, Victoria Island and the GRAs-- and the senior service jobs, complete with “home leave” and homes in Britain! Such was their conception of independence. Not having studied the nature of colonialism deeply enough, they had only a superficial understanding of what had happened to their people and did not see that they should be struggling for anything deeper and greater. Accordingly, whenever they managed, often at great cost, to politically or militarily defeat their white enslavers/colonisers, these Black African movements did not know what they should do next with their victory. And this was true of all the struggles, from Haiti in 1804 to South Africa in 1994. And because of their failure to continue the struggle to its correct conclusion, what black Africans have been calling “independence” for the last 50 years, has actually been black comprador colonialism. On each country’s “independence day”, it simply moved from being ruled and exploited for imperialism by white expatriate colonialists to being ruled and exploited for imperialism by black comprador colonialists. There had simply been a changing of the colour of the staff, from white to black, in the same imperialist prison. Consequently, white supremacy remains entrenched everywhere, obscured by black buffer, front office governments. For independence to be attained, the struggle needs to be resumed to overthrow the black colonialists—the black comprador managers of what Nkrumah called neo-colonialism.
The people you have in mind are highly educated, they were exposed?
But educated in what and for what? Were they educated in what C. L. R. James called “the political intricacies that the modern world demanded”? Certainly not. Despite their university degrees and general exposure, they lacked the appropriate political education. There is an incident reported in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography that shows that being “highly educated” and “exposed” might even be a handicap in the liberation struggle. Mandela had gone underground to start the military wing of the ANC. At one point he was hiding in Tongaat, a rural community of black plantation workers:
Shortly before I was planning to leave, I thanked one elderly fellow for having looked after me. He said, 'You are of course welcome, but, Kwedeni [young man], please tell us, what does Chief Luthuli want?' I was taken aback but quickly responded, 'Well, it would be better to ask him yourself and I cannot speak for him, but as I understand it, he wants our land returned, he wants our kings to have their power back, and he wants us to be able to determine our own future and run our own lives as we see fit.'
'And how is he going to do that if he does not have an army?' the old man said.
--[Long Walk to Freedom: 330]
That incident took place in 1961. By then the ANC was some 50years old, and it had just come to realize, and reluctantly accept, the necessity for armed struggle to attain its objectives. Now, what had taken the “highly educated” leadership of the ANC half a century to realize was quite obvious to an “uneducated” rural farm labourer!
So, everything depends on the education they received, what it moulded them into. If you are educated as a lawyer, your mental framework tends to get limited to what you can do in a law court, or within the existing legal and constitutional arrangements. And if your education is such that you think from the point of view of your conquerors, if it moulds you into a black European, that is mis-education, not education. If you take a rat and train it to see the world in the way the cat sees the world, you have not educated the rat, you have mis-educated it for life in a world with rat-killing cats. You have actually made it an easier prey for the cats, because the natural instincts of a rat would have told it how to deal with cats, or how to avoid cats. But after you have given the rat the education of a cat, it would lose those instincts. It might even think of itself as a cat! And that is what this colonialist education has done to Africans for the last two centuries. We have been fundamentally mis-educated, and we cannot even see the world from our own point of view, let alone in our own interest.
You talked about the next stage of the struggle. In the case of Nigeria the white colonialists were clever not to resist demand for independence, and so, since there was no resistance the next stage could not have been initiated by our founding fathers, to recover political sovereignty?
First of all, point of correction: What founding fathers? Zik, Awo, and Sardauna, according to the unthinking Nigerian cliché, are “our founding fathers”. But what exactly were they the founding fathers of? Certainly, not Nigeria. The founding fathers of Nigeria were the British. Specifically, Goldie, Lugard and their gang. Your so-called founding fathers were simply the heads of the local black comprador gangs that inherited Nigeria from the British. If they founded anything at all, it was the black comprador colonialism that is still the root trouble with Nigeria. And they did that, not on their own, but as junior partners of the British Government. This was quite unlike the American Founding Fathers who broke away completely from British rule, created a wholly new and independent republic based on new ideas and institutions, and with no participation in the process by the already expelled representatives of the British Government. After 50 years of being exploited for imperialism by these black colonialists, Nija niggas have yet to catch on to the fact that their “independence” was a hoax, and that their nationalist leaders—these so-called founding fathers—actually ended up as black colonialists! By failing to push ahead to the next stages of the struggle, they fell into the trap the imperialists had set for them and became black colonialists.
Now, the lack of resistance by the British is neither here nor there. The point is, if you know that what you are doing is a jailbreak, your taking over the prison, even if with minimum resistance, does not mean you declare the jailbreak over. That takeover only sets the stage for you to organize to march your people out of the structure that has imprisoned them. The minute you drive out the commander and guards you must pull down the prison and go build something else to house your people in safety. You don’t stay in the prison, take over the jobs and houses of the expelled prison commander and guards, and then carry on doing what they did to your people. And this is where all these movements failed. This failure took place in Ghana in 1957, in Nigeria in1960, in South Africa in 1994 and everywhere else in between.
The same failure had been blatant in Haiti in 1800, when Toussaint, having defeated the French, Spanish and English, took over the entire island of Hispaniola and set up his black-ruled colony within the French Empire! He reconstituted the old slaving system but with black generals and the French planters running it together. That was because the black leaders “considered the European way as the good life and wanted only to be included in it”. [The Irritated Genie: 35] Toussaint’s black ruled French colony was a precursor of these Bantustans of Black Africa today. Reflecting on Toussaint’s travesty, Dessalines, the ultimate liberator of Haiti, told his people, in his proclamation of Haitian independence in 1804: “ . . . Your struggles against tyranny [are] not yet done . . .. Our laws, our customs, our cities, everything bears the characteristics of the French, . . . And you believe yourselves free and independent of that republic.” [The Irritated Genie: 125] Dessalines, in effect, was urging his people to embark with him on the next stage of consolidation: the struggle for cultural liberation. Dessalines made it quite clear that if their notion of ‘the good life’ was that of their French enslavers, then they were still slaves, despite their military victory over the French. “And what a dishonourable absurdity—conquering in order to be slaves” he added. [The Irritated Genie: 90] Whereas Dessalines identified the cultural stage of the struggle back in 1804, Nkrumah, in the early 1960s, pointed out the economic stage by his denunciation of neo-colonialism--the economic structure that imperialism used to constrain Ghana’s sovereignty. But, of course, Nkrumah didn’t address the question of cultural liberation. In each black African country, having taken over the political structure that the conquerors instituted, these movements should have gone on, and at once, to the next stages of the struggle—the cultural, the economic, etc. The task was to use the opportunities of self-rule to fight those further stages of the liberation struggle. Dessalines and Nkrumah, to their credit, saw the next stages, but the majority of each leader’s comprador followers opposed his insights and, impatient, as Cabral puts it, “to have a little enjoyment of the crumbs of colonialism” [Unity & Struggle: 65], finally got rid of him as the obstacle to their Europhile and materialist ambitions.
What I am submitting is that these Black African movements failed in defining, and in embarking on, the stages beyond what they were naively celebrating as independence. So when I said they were not far reaching enough, it is because, if they had realised that they were trapped in a global structure that was designed to enslave and thoroughly exploit their people, they would have known that until they dismantled all their links—including the psychological-- to that structure and got beyond its reach, and their society had taken total control of its economic, cultural and social life, their struggle was not completed.
Your submission indicates that what happened in Nigeria and elsewhere was inevitable, because these structures were not demolished by our founding fathers, and by extension the crisis that trailed Nigeria resulting in civil war shortly after independence was also inevitable?
I do not know about “inevitable”. If you are standing on an escalator that is taking you into a furnace, that you will roast in the furnace is inevitable only if you are too foolish to jump off the escalator, and in good time. All I am saying is that their concept of liberation/independence was superficial and flawed, and has yet to be corrected. Theirs was an intellectual failure. It flowed from their failure to study the enemy thoroughly. They failed to understand that you do not get independence by sewing a flag and singing a national anthem and having your leaders move into the colonial masters’ jobs and houses. And that was what happened almost everywhere: Zik moved into State House, Marina; Nkrumah moved into Osu Castle, where the British governor used to live. Mandela’s case was even more revealing. I don’t know if Mandela moved into the official residence of the President of the Apartheid State on becoming president of the “New South Africa” in 1994. But even if he didn’t, he privately did something symbolically even more stunning. In his autobiography he states:
After being released from prison, I set about plans to build a country house for myself in Qunu. By autumn 1993, the house was complete. It was based on the floor plan of the house I had lived in at Victor Vester. People often commented on this, but the answer was simple: the Victor Vester house was the first spacious and comfortable home I ever stayed in, and I liked it very much. I was familiar with its dimensions, so at Qunu I would not have to wander at night looking for the kitchen.
–[Long Walk to Freedom: 728]
Why did people comment? We need to know that the house he copied was the deputy chief warder’s comfortable house within Victor Vester Prison, where Mandela was kept for 14 months before his release in 1990. In a world where symbolism matters, his choice to build for himself a replica of the prison warder’s residence must have reassured the Broederbond leaders—the intellectual inventors of Apartheid who were then orchestrating a transfer of office to some appropriate blacks who would preserve white supremacy behind a mask of black majority rule -- that Mandela was their man for the job. A man who would voluntarily build for himself a replica of his prison accomodation could be trusted not to pull down the system he would soon be managing for his jailers! But it was also symbolic of that mentality of voluntary cultural servitude in Toussaint that had drawn from Dessalines the scornful comment: “And what a dishonourable absurdity—conquering in order to be slaves!”
The choice of these residences by the leaders of Black African independence movements – Nyerere was probably the only one who didn’t move into the residence of the colonial governor-- was symbolic of the fact that taking over the management of the colonial prison was what they were really after, and that our so-called independent countries are just the old colonial prisons being run by black overseers for the absentee white colonialists—i.e. By black colonialists who believe that the European way of life is “the good life” into which to assimilate.
Would it have been different if independence were delayed and the leaders of these countries would have been better prepared?
Not at all! Independence is not something that the colonial situation prepares you for. The key to the colonizer’s project is to destroy your sovereignty; and the longer you stay under him the more your society’s habits of sovereignty would erode. Just like after the flag independence, you think the imperialist would help you develop your abilities? Of course not. Because it is against his fundamental interest. I do not think that staying longer under European colonial rulers would have improved your ability to struggle for or exercise sovereignty. Some people may think that the idea has some merit. So, let’s look at the case of India.
India was under the British for two centuries, but for the last hundred years, following the Indian mutiny of 1857, the British government ruled the country directly instead of through the East India Company. And in that century, they built a tradition of governance where, by 1910, the civil service, 99% staffed by Indians, was a coherent and effective instrument of administration. The Indian army recruited Indians--it was 65% Indian by 1910-- and the tradition of political neutrality was entrenched. So you could say that if the British ruled for one hundred years more, and did here like they did in India, they would have created a tradition of seasoned administration of the British type, and a seasoned military tradition of the British type. But the most that could do for you is give you a solid administrative structure which, at independence, you still had to adapt to new purposes. That was the most you could have gained from a delay. The question you would have to ask yourself is: can a civil service, even if trained for a hundred years to serve the British by adhering to British norms, survive the incursion of armed comprador bandits like Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo who, overnight in 1975, destroyed the ethos and efficiency of the civil service? Because they wanted to loot and enjoy “life more abundant”, these black colonialists, under the guise of fighting corruption, destroyed the structural constraints that could prevent them from looting. They made the civil service insecure and destroyed its ability to function with confidence. Now, even if you had a hundred years to train your administration, whatever you gained would then be lost in a week. The issue is not how much time you had to build the administration, the point is that it may not survive when armed comprador bandits attack and scatter the administrative structures.
On the other hand, had the struggle met stiff resistance and become protracted, the ensuing difficulties might have obliged the movement to do the hard ideological thinking required for success. But you can’t count on that happening with any movement that puts no premium on ideology, political education, analysis and forward planning. People who think through what they are doing, like Cabral, tend to do so from the start. And even before they start. Cabral actually diagnosed and articulated the required orientation even before the Guinea-Bissau armed struggle began in 1963. This can be seen from the programme for “total independence” adopted by his party, PAIGC, in 1956, the year it was formed; a programme which included among its aims “Elimination of all relationships of a colonialist and imperialist nature” and “Economic, political, diplomatic, military and cultural independence.” [Revolution in Guinea: 136]
With the advantage of that ideological clarity, Cabral was able, in 1961, to diagnose what crippled the black African independence movements as “a crisis of knowledge” [Revolution in Guinea: 14]—i.e. What C.L.R. James alternatively described as not being trained “in the political intricacies that the modern world demanded”[At the Rendezvous of Victory: 243]. That crisis of knowledge or lack of training needed to be cured by political education of the sort that the colonial situation, by itself, did not supply. Back in the 1930s,George Padmore and C. L. R. James got some of that education from the Stalinists and Trotskyites and imparted as much as they could to Nkrumah before he returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 to play his role in the anti-colonial movement there. Of course, the imperialists did all they could to shield their colonial subjects from Communist influence and tutelage. So, just delaying independence would not, by itself, have helped prepare these leaders.
Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe once said that Nigeria got her independence on a platter of gold, but do you think if there had been an armed struggle the orientation would have been different?
First of all, nobody hands independence to another, let alone on a platter of gold. In the history of the world, every genuine case of independence/liberation was won through hard-fought struggle. [For an example, from China, of hard-fought struggle for liberation see Recalling the Long March.] Zik’s remark is, therefore, ample evidence that whatever Nigeria got in 1960 was not independence!
Now, to your question about armed struggle. Not at all! Haiti went through armed struggle; Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe went through armed struggle; still they all became comprador colonial Bantustans misruled by black colonialists. The failure I am talking about is true of those who went through armed struggle and those that did not. The defect did not derive from unarmed struggle, it came from the intellectual unclarity about what liberation is and requires, and the unwillingness to follow things through. If that clarity is lacking, whether you engaged in armed struggle or not, you would still end up in the same mess of comprador colonialism. Cabral sums it up very well when he said: “ the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people. . . . National liberation exists when, and only when, the national productive forces have been completely freed from all and any kind of foreign domination.”[Unity & Struggle: 130] What counts is what you do when you get into office, not how you get there. Do you, or don’t you, get promptly to work removing the foreign domination of your productive forces and your culture? Armed struggle has its own role and virtues in a liberation struggle but does not, by itself, produce that orientation. A thorough study of your history and society, and of imperialism, is what produces the correct orientation. And that study is what these movements failed to make.
And, by the way, getting the correct orientation is not even a matter of being “educated “ or “exposed”. Dessalines, you must remember, was “uneducated”— he grew up as a field slave in Haiti, didn’t go to “school” or university or travel the world outside Haiti. On the other hand, the crucial insights into imperialism were already publicly available before WWII: Garvey, Marx, Lenin etc had already published their works. If Nkrumah, Zik, Awo, etc. Read them, they somehow failed to absorb the important insights that could have helped them figure out what to do the morning after the Independence Day celebrations. Nor have these insights been absorbed by Black Africans even today, half a century later. So, the failure was entirely intellectual—due to “a crisis of knowledge” which arose because they did not have the mental independence, and ideological clarity to seek the political knowledge required to win a liberation struggle against imperialism. This may be seen by comparing the writings of Cabral and Biko, on the one hand, with those of Nkrumah, Zik, Awo, Senghor, Kaunda, etc. On the other hand. The failure of the latter was not due to insufficient time for preparation or to lack of armed struggle but from the Philistinism, crass materialist aspirations and even anti-intellectual mentality of the class that they led. What C.L.R. James noted, in 1961, about the West Indian Middle Classes was largely true also of their counterparts in Africa:
They are professional men, clerical assistants, here and there a small business man, . . . Administrators, civil servants and professional politicians . . . They as a class have no knowledge or experience of the productive forces of the country. . . . Knowledge of production, of political struggles, of democratic tradition, they have none. Their ignorance and disregard of economic development is profound . . . Most of the political types who come from this class live by politics. . . .and carry into politics all the weaknesses of the class from which they come. . . What kind of society they hope to build they do not say because they do not know. . . . What happens after independence? For all you hear from them, independence is a dead end. . . .I do not know any social class which lives so completely without ideas of any kind. They live entirely on the material plane.
---C.L.R. James, “The West Indian Middle Classes”, 1961 in Spheres of Existence
It might be useful to look at how other peoples accomplished their liberation from imperialism. The Chinese are liberated, the Japanese are liberated. In the 19^th century, the European powers tried to conquer and partition China into colonies just like they did to Africa. But look at China and Africa today! What made the big difference? Faced with the same White Peril as the Africans, the Chinese, from 1840 onwards, went into a political and social convulsion and into an intellectual ferment. The Chinese people staged reform and revolutionary movements which aimed to extricate China from the foreigners’ grip. Peasant uprisings and other rebellions flared up repeatedly against the Chinese Government for being ineffective in defending China from foreign invaders. Then, in 1911, the Qing dynasty was overthrown, and a republic was proclaimed by Dr Sun Yat-sen. Nevertheless, forty more years of bloody struggle were required before, in 1949, the Maoists finally threw out the imperialists and their Chinese comprador lackeys, ending a century of anti-foreigner uprisings, civil wars and revolutions. The Maoists founded a completely new state—the People’s Republic of China—and then made sure that no foreign power could control any aspect of production or culture in China. They reconstructed China completely, changed its internal and external economic relations, industrialized it and built up its power. Along the way, they fought America and its imperialist allies to a draw in Korea, then built China’s atom bomb etc. Thus, despite the advantage of starting from semi-colonial conditions in 1911 rather than colonial conditions; and despite the even greater advantage of 2000 years of China’s political and cultural unity, it still required another 70 years of relentless, clear minded and well-led struggle to achieve and consolidate China’s liberation. The proof was that when China eventually joined the UN and the WTO, it was not on terms dictated by the imperialists. China did not diminish its sovereignty to get some transient economic advantage.
Similarly with Japan in the 19^th century. Commodore Perry and his American gunboats made an armed intrusion on an isolationist Japan in 1853. Thereafter, unequal treaties were imposed on Japan by the USA, UK & other White powers. The samurai spirit of the Japanese ruling class found all this humiliating and reacted by overthrowing the Tokugawa Shogunate which had been unable to prevent such humiliation. The new Japanese rulers launched their Meiji revolution in 1868, and were determined to make Japan an equal power with the foremost western powers. In this project, they sought to modernize but not Westernise Japan. They sent emissaries abroad to study their white enemies thoroughly. And they were interested in finding and adopting only those aspects of European civilization that would help in building Japan’s national power. They united the energies of the entire population to achieve absolute national independence from foreign capital and foreign rule; accordingly, they regarded foreign help as proof of national weakness. They were focussed on building enough Japanese power to prevent their being conquered, and to wipe out their national humiliation by foreign encroachments and tutelage. The Meiji nationalist ideology, whose basic aim was to preserve Japan’s independence, was summarized through such slogans as:
sonno-joi:“Revere the Emperor; expel the barbarians”;
fukoku kyohei: “enrich the country; strengthen the military”;
wakon yosai: “Japanese spirit; Western technique/talent”;
shokusan kogyo: “Economic development; industrialization”;
goshinhotan: “Perseverance and determination”.
Within 50 years, Japan had industrialised itself, defeated Russia in a war, and was recognised by all as a major world power. [The book to read on the Meiji spirit is Writings from Japan by Lafcadio Hearn.]
Such cannot be said for any of our Black African countries—with their unselective aping of all things European, their lack of a sense of humiliation at having been colonised, their pathetic addiction to foreign aid, their abject craving for foreign investment, and their absolute disinterest in industrialising themselves into economic and military powers. What African countries achieved between 1957 and 1994 was politically roughly equivalent to what China achieved in 1911. It fell certainly far short of what China achieved in 1949 and then still took another 30 years to consolidate. As yet no Black African country has pushed ahead to attempt what China did after 1911 or Japan after 1868. National liberation is manifested when you run your economy and society and culture entirely in your national interest. And if you join any of these imperialist “international institutions”, you do so on your own terms, not on the terms its imperialist organisers impose. Tiny Cuba under Fidel Castro did much the same thing, with a little help from the Soviet Union. Cuba’s economy is run in the Cuban interest: there is no foreign power determining Cuba’s policies, which is not true of any black country in the world.
Cuban system makes it difficult for private interest to thrive, and multilateral organisation to come in?
Whose private interests? Whose multilateral organisations? The anti-Cuban private interests and multilateral organisations of Cuba’s imperialist enemies? Why should Cuba’s enemies be allowed to enter and thrive in Cuba? The cardinal point about independence is that Cuba’s economy is controlled by Cubans, not by anybody else, whether through the IMF or World Bank, or through Wall Street, Bank of America, General Motors or United Fruit. It is organised by Cubans and for the Cubans. Which is why, for example, Cuba’s health service is rated one of the best in the world today, better even than America’s. Despite Cuba’s small size and resources, public health care in Cuba is of high quality and is entirely free of charge whereas, in the USA, health care is a very costly privilege beyond the reach of tens of millions.
The same independence is true of Japan. No foreign companies dominate the Japanese economy--that is the crucial point! So too with China. If you go into China, it is on China’s terms: they tell you what you can and cannot do, and they monitor you very closely. When Microsoft went into China, it went on China’s terms. Some Americans complained that Microsoft caved in to Chinese intimidation, but the point is that China controls its territory, controls its economy, and if you want to play in the market in China, it is under China-made rules and under Chinese supervision. That is the key point about economic independence. As Cabral maintained, until we have mental independence—“absolute independence in our way of thinking and acting” [Unity & Struggle: 79]-- and apply it to control our territory and economy and culture, we are not independent. So, the independence that Black African countries claim is fake, because they do not control any of these vital aspects of their existence.
The crucial point is that the movements that liberated China, Japan and Cuba were led by people who did hard thinking about their reality, and who applied some ideological perspective to illuminate the problems of their society. They did not allow that ‘crisis of knowledge’ that afflicted the Black African movements to ever arise.
However, unlike most of the other liberation/independence movements in Black Africa, and to its credit, the African National Congress (ANC), during Oliver Tambo’s 30 years leadership, worked closely with Communists, was keen about the political education of its cadres, provided itself with theories of society and liberation, and had taken every opportunity to acquire training in “the political intricacies that the modern world demanded”. The mystery, then, is that the Mandela ANC, on getting elected into office in 1994, did not quickly become a “liberation movement in power”, and has shown little inclination to proceed with the next stages—cultural, economic etc.-- of liberation in South Africa. With no effective and sustained move made thus far to abrogate the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act that legalised the white settler expropriation from black South Africans of the best 87% of the land in South Africa, it is as if, for the Freedom Charter ANC, black majority rule—black faces in the offices of the unreconstructed Apartheid state-- was an end in itself, was the final destination of their liberation struggle. But does the Freedom Charter, which Tambo himself described as a “drastic concession”, imply forfeiture of their stolen lands by the black Africans? I think not! That "South Africa belongs to all that live in it, black and white" does not imply that the white settlers should keep what they stole. They can live in South Africa, but need to be dispossessed of the stolen lands if liberation is to be completed. In addition, the white settlers, and all South Africans for that matter, also have to be culturally Africanised, for as Biko correctly stated:
one cannot escape the fact that the culture shared by the majority group in any given society must ultimately determine the broad direction taken by the joint culture of that society. . . . A country in Africa, in which the majority of the people are African must inevitably exhibit African values and be truly African in style . . . . Our kindness has been misused and our hospitality turned against us. Whereas whites were mere guests to us on their arrival in this country they have now pushed us out to a 13% corner of the land and are acting as bad hosts in the rest of the country. This we must put right. . . . We (want) to remove (the white man) from our table, strip the table of all trappings put on it by him, decorate it in true African style, settle down and then ask him to join us on our own terms if he liked.
--[I Write What I Like: 24, 86, 69]
Unfortunately, like all the other liberation movements in Africa, the ANC, despite the ideological illumination it welcomed under Tambo, seems to have now fallen into its own brand of the “crisis of knowledge” and to have settled into the imperialist trap of economic and cultural neo-colonialism. With this delay in pushing ahead to the next stages of the struggle for total liberation from imperialism, with this loss of liberationist momentum, the black South African elite, like their counterparts in the rest of Black Africa, have probably already coasted, and probably unconsciously, into the role of black colonialists that was devised for them by imperialism and the Broederbond—the organised intelligentsia of the Afrikaners and custodian of their white supremacist ideology. So, in the “New South Africa” white supremacy and imperialism live on, wearing a mask of black majority government. Just as in the rest of Black Africa, it is “White power behind a black mask”.
But that’s nothing new, I must stress: Black liberation movements are the global champions in the strange game of winner-lose-all. After all, Black Africans are consistently stupid about power; always too quick to concede too much to the white enemy! In two centuries of liberation struggles, from Haiti to South Africa, blacks grabbed the empty hole in the doughnut and celebrated "victory" while the "defeated" whites held on to the dough! No wonder whites make saints and celebrities of black leaders after easily duping them. Those few they can't dupe, like Dessalines and Cabral, they get other blacks to assassinate.
We need to study the black liberation struggles, from Haiti to South Africa, to see why, in two centuries of victories, military and political, none both achieved and consolidated its liberation. It seems that, in Mandela’s words, “as new conditions create the temptations of self-interest and personal enrichment”, short sighted black leaders, in their desperate hurry, as Cabral said, “to have a little enjoyment of the crumbs of colonialism” invariably became casualties to what Mao called “the sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie”. [Journey into Revolutionary China: 96]
In your book The West and the Rest of Us, you appealed to the African elite to strive to build an African power. It does not seem like that call has been responded to, especially in Nigeria which, by size and population, should be a big African power. Are you disappointed that no attempt has been made at all?
Why are Nija niggas so hung up on their size and population? What’s the size and population of Singapore or Switzerland or Cuba? A big population with an abysmally low political, scientific, cultural, ethical and productivity level is certainly not an asset. Indeed it is a fatal liability. Nothing to be proud of.
Let me turn to the issue of disappointment. You can only be disappointed if you have hopes or expectations. But the character of the African elite, as I described it in that book in the early 1970s, gave no basis for thinking that they would attempt anything like that. The analysis in the book simply pointed out what needed to be done by whoever got around to the task of liberating black Africa. And since nobody outside the elite could be expected to work through a 500-page historical analysis, the book was, inevitably, addressed to the elite. But did I expect these niggertrash elites to do the job? Not really; it would not be in their class character. Don’t forget what Fanon had already said of them by 1961:
"the bourgeois phase in the history of under-developed countries is a completely useless phase. When this caste has vanished, . . . It will be seen that nothing new has happened since independence was proclaimed, . . . [that] that caste has done nothing more than take over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought and the institutions left by the colonialists. . . . And that everything must be started again from scratch. . ."
--[ The Wretched of the Earth: 142]
Of course, if some crisis were to force some of the elite to ask “what needs to be done?” they might look for clues in a work like The West and the Rest of Us. That was the best that could be expected. In any case, I was merely echoing Marcus Garvey. He was the one who enunciated this idea, back in the 1920s, that we need a Black African power, and in Africa, that would gain respect for the black race throughout the world. But these black compradors are not interested in that. To understand the nature of the comprador class and why they cannot do anything like that, you have to study Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. You have to study Cabral’s works too. But I am sure they are not part of political education in Nigeria—if there is any political education in Nigeria. Nija niggas do not read, let alone read Garvey, Cabral or Fanon. Unsurprisingly, building an African power is not on their agenda.
As for Nigeria spearheading the struggle to build an African power, such a role is beyond its mentality. Nigeria is not even competent to manage itself let alone build anything. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Dubai, Nigeria can’t even organize the orderly distribution and consumption of its oil bonanza! It does not have the mentality, it does not have the knowledge, it does not have the skill, it does not have the will or interest to tackle anything major. A junk state that, in fifty years and despite its oil bonanza, can’t even complete the Ajaokuta steel mill, that can’t maintain basic law and order, that can’t maintain the postal and railway services it inherited from the British, that can’t conduct a credible population census, that can’t maintain its refineries or clear garbage from its pot-holed streets—can such a failed and incompetent state build African Power? Anybody pinning his hopes on Nigeria is wasting his time. If Nigeria is the hope of the black world then the black world has no hope.
Just look around Lagos, our black colonialists’ self-proclaimed “centre of excellence”. So much visible unemployment; so much work crying to be done to make it clean and liveable; but the state government can’t gather the teeming idle hands roaming the streets and organise them to do the work that’s crying to be done! The black colonialists, at every level of government, are too busy looting to spare a thought or moment to organise the work needed in the society. Furthermore, at the local government level, after some 25 years non-enforcement of public nuisance laws, the level of noise pollution from the ubiquitous churches of the born-again lunatics is intolerable. They mount the most powerful loudspeakers and from there blast their prayer meetings, with hand-clapping, singing, drumming, and shouting of “Praise the Lord, Hallelujah!”, “In Jesus name” etc. And they do so, usually from midnight to dawn, not just on Sundays, but whenever the anti-social devil spirit moves them, thereby subjecting all within earshot to the nightly torture of sleep deprivation. They must believe that their god Jehovah is so deaf that he can hear their desperate prayers only if made in the stillness of deepest night, and loud enough to wake the dead.
As they say, Nigerians are an incompetent people. We are allergic to detail, logic, analysis, precision, principles, foresight, discipline, vigilance. We are not mentally thorough or tough. We are not like the Germans or Japanese. We are not even like our now despised and demonised ancestors who created the exquisite works in the acclaimed exhibition “2000 years of Nigerian Art” that toured the world in 1980. After 100 years of colonialism—the white expatriate phase followed by the present black comprador phase-- we have totally degenerated, in character and competence, from our so-called primitive, pre-colonial ancestors. Similarly, whatever fighting spirit their ancestors had has been squeezed out of Nija niggas. And whatever codes of “death rather than dishonour” and “victory or death” their ancestors may have had, have been long discarded by Nija niggas. The Nija nigga is now possessed by the “never-say-die” spirit, and this, in his case mans: the spirit that, like Saddam Hussein, desperately avoids dying, and clings to another day of life even if he has to dishonourably crawl into a rat hole or shit pit to hide and see the next sunrise.
These days phrases like “ imperialism” and “ neo-colonialism” have disappeared from popular usage and public consciousness, even when we know it is real. Why do you think this is so?
I guess there are several contributing factors: (1) the collapse of the Soviet Union; (2) the invasion by the globalisation rhetoric; (3) the upsurge of the infantile/primitive prayers-and-miracles religious worldview that is uncongenial to socio-historical thinking, and that has deeply depressed the scientific, cultural and ethical level of the population—depressed it from a level that had been quite low even in 1960; (4) the ideological vacuum, Philistinism and even anti-intellectualism bequeathed by the independence movement—it left no tradition of pamphleteering, of debating and applying the illumination of analysis and ideology to socio-political problems; (5) the impact of SAP on the rickety infrastructure of intellectual life in Nigeria—the universities have been in a state of collapse for a long time; publishing is moribund, with vanity publishing now the norm; the press is pathetic—daily doping the public with a diet of scandals and sports and mindless entertainment. There are no weeklies or monthlies of ideas and social criticism—no equivalents of Britain’s Punch, New Statesman, TLS, or America’s Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, New York Review of Books etc. There are no venues for proffering insights into, and debating alternative solutions to, societal problems. In short, Nigeria is an intellectual desert. As a result, Nigerians have grown incapable of, and even impatient with social and political thinking. And concepts and categories of social analysis—including imperialism and colonialism-- have disappeared from what little thinking there is.
Your question, as you can see, would need a long interview of its own to explore these complex factors that have created the intellectual vacuum into which the globalisation rhetoric has rushed in and imposed its aversion to terms like imperialism.
In this degenerate intellectual climate, the money-and-miracles mentality reigns unchallenged: money--and ever more money-- and the miraculous intervention of God, are seen as the solution to all problems in the here and now, just as Jesus is the solution in the hereafter. Hence the Nija nigga’s extreme passivism in the face of chronic misgovernment.
All in all, Nija niggas have no sense that the population should take responsibility, thought and action to shape their society. That is the main reason why, here in Nigeria, you do not find people who think and understand what their basic problems are.
So there is no understanding of the problems even amongst the intellectual class?
If there is, there is no evidence of it in the political culture and the media of the last 50 years. They do not show that the intellectual strata understand the problems, or even try to understand them. Just take the example of the Nija nigga’s notion of the democracy that is nowadays on everybody’s lips. According to a survey reported by Oluwole Adejare:
nation-wide responses to the question, ‘what is democracy?’. . . Produced sickening banalities among which are the following examples:
(a) when Obasanjo rules again,
(b) when soldiers hand over to civilians,
(c) when they give government to the Yoruba people,
(d) when everybody can do what (s)he likes,
(e) the government after Abiola and Abacha died, and
(f) when we vote for politicians.
He adds that:
The cliché, ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ was recited with no depth of understanding . . . By respondents such as civil servants, students, teachers, politicians, journalists etc. Who constitute about 60% of the sample population.
--[Democracy: 15]
Pathetic! But not surprising in a country that, in its century of existence, has not had organs for political education or for discussion of ideas.
Is the leftist school of thought in Nigeria entirely dead or simply in retreat? The black condition persists- mental slavery and idolising of the white accomplishments; poverty, neo-colonialism, HIV/AIDS; it seems hopeless for the black man?
What leftist school of thought? You mean the leftist school of thoughtlessness, with its sterile version of ‘class analysis’? They used to mouth the language of imperialism, here as in the rest of Africa; but that finally disappeared when the Soviet Union disappeared. The best of them were Marxologists; they were parroting the Marxist rhetoric they heard from their European masters. As far back as the early 1980s, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of these Marxologist parrots had converted from Marx back to Jesus. Like Trotsky said to C.L.R. James in 1939 about their counterparts in Europe in the 1930s, when the world socialist movement was suffering setbacks: “Many of them are returning to all sorts of vague things—humanism, etc. [even] to God as well as to democracy.” If you can go, in one week, from Marx to “Praise the Lord, Hallelujah!” something was unsound about your Marxism. Either you did not understand it, or it was just another fad. Let me read you what Mao said of their type in China in the 1930s:
He is unable to apply the method of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin to the concrete study of China’s present conditions and her history or to the concrete analysis and solution of the problems of the Chinese revolution. . . . He goes to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin not to seek the stand, viewpoint and method with which to solve the theoretical and tactical problems of the Chinese revolution but to study theory purely for theory’s sake. He does not shoot the arrow at the target but shoots at random. . .
--Mao Tse-Tung, “Reform our Study” (1941) in Selected Works Vol. III, pp. 19, 21
The best of our Nigerian leftists could keep you spell bound talking about the minutiae of the French revolution or the Russian revolution, but they showed little aptitude for investigating and understanding our local situation. Unlike Cabral, our Marxologists did not apply their class analysis to the concrete problems of Africa or African liberation.
The trouble with the intellectuals in Nigeria is that they do not like to think, are too lazy to think, and most do not even know how to think. Nigerian intellectuals are highly allergic to ideas of any kind. They, and the rest of their black colonialist class, are a prime example of what C.L.R. James called “an elite that lives completely without ideas, that lives entirely on the material plane.” You cannot be talking about a leftist school of thought among such unthinking parrots.
As for the conditions you enumerated—mental slavery, poverty, idolising of whites, neo-colonialism, HIV/AIDS, etc-- well, they are cause for alarm about the future of black Africans. In particular, with the deliberate genocidal AIDSbombing of Black Africa, by the US Government and the World Health Organisation (WHO), now wiping out millions of people and communities, and with a patented cure for AIDS being mysteriously withheld from the public, [State Origin: The Evidence of the Laboratory Birth of AIDS, by Boyd Graves] the black race seems to be on its last legs, on its way to extinction. Unless they summon the will and intelligence and energy to achieve in the next fifty years what they should have organised in the last 50 years, there will be no black Africans left alive on earth by the end of this 21^st century. If they have lost the will to organise themselves to survive, despite Garvey’s warning eighty years ago, their extinction will be purely a case of enemy-assisted race suicide.
Considering the origin of Nigeria, a colonial creation, and what the leaders have made of it, do you think it is a waste of time reforming the country, the way various governments have attempted?
Yes of course. Trying to reform Nigeria from the top is a total waste of time. Can cats reform themselves to stop killing mice? Black comprador colonialism cannot be ended by any reforms, least of all by reforms carried out by the black compradors themselves. It would be irrational to expect these black compradors to reform themselves out of existence. Only the total abolition of neo-colonialism, with liquidation of the black colonialists, can bring about any changes fundamental to the survival, dignity and prosperity of the Nigerian population.
But what specific reforms do you have in mind? Reforms with what objectives? Just take the case of the current OBJ reforms. Like IBB’s SAP and Abacha’s Vision 2010 TINA reforms before it, OBJ’s reforms are teleguided by the IMF and the G8. They are designed to make the Nigerian state even more subservient to imperialism, and more predatory on the Nigerian population. OBJ, in his personal vendetta against Nigerians, has even added his own vampire extras to the reforms mandated by his imperialist masters. By deliberately destroying the refineries, allowing uncontrolled price increases, and resorting to importation of petroleum products through a cartel of his agents, OBJ has craftily reduced Nigeria to a vast economic torture camp. The population have been locked into an economic structure where they must have petrol and kerosene to keep alive. All it takes is an artificial scarcity orchestrated by OBJ’s cartel of profiteers to bring Nigerians to their knees, clawing at one another and begging for a drop at any price. In this situation, whatever little fighting spirit the Nija niggas have—and they never had much--is used up fighting one another: Unlike black South Africans, Nija niggas do not have a tradition of political militancy with high courage and self-sacrifice. They can’t spare any fighting spirit for resisting the government that is torturing them. Under the cover of market-friendly reforms, OBJ has set up things so that, at the slightest hint of opposition to any government action or policy, he and his gang can bring the entire Nigerian population to heel by orchestrating an artificial petrol scarcity! These OBJ reforms amount to a war on the Nigerian population—OBJ’s private war on Nigerians, to avenge his stay in jail for coup plotting against Abacha!
Incidentally, the sad thing is that Nigerians had a good chance to prevent these OBJ vampire reforms from being implemented in the first place. But they refused to heed Adams Oshiomole’s NLC when it repeatedly called them out on strikes in 2003-2005. Complaining that even a two-weeks long strike would be too much hardship for them to bear, their half-hearted strikes failed, and the government confidently went ahead with its hefty price hikes and anti-people reforms of the petroleum sector.
All those other reforms of the last 40 or 50 years—simplistic, piecemeal, ill-conceived, and arbitrarily implemented reforms like the Buhari-Idiagbon War Against Indiscipline (WAI) in the 1980s [with its biased enforcement and sacred cows, as in the 53 suitcases scandal] and the earlier Murtala-Obasanjo bull-in-the-china-shop attack on corruption in the 1970s—have each contributed to the decay of Nigerian society into anarchy and the degeneration of the quality of the population. They were no better than attempts to rearrange the curtains and chairs and to repaint the interior of the Nija Titanic slave ship; but you can’t save the Titanic from sinking by doing that; the ship cannot stay afloat and the peoples trapped in Nigeria had better build life boats and get out fast. But the comprador crew are self interestedly fostering the illusion that it is going to stay afloat and even steam ahead to some fine harbour. It is all so tragic.
Nigerians need to grasp one simple fact: Nigeria? Can’t reform it, can’t repair it, can’t develop it! The house of Nigeria is far too rotten for renovation! Just pull it down! Besides, as they say: Reform always comes from below. Nobody with four aces asks for a new deal.
If you think the elite has sold out and are incapable of creating a genuine country, how should the people go about recovering their country?
You talk about selling out. Selling out is a conscious action by somebody who, instead of doing what he knows he should do, does something else because he has been bought off. But these black comprador colonialists are so brainwashed that nobody has to buy them off. These characters do what they do because they are a lunatic elite; you cannot buy off a lunatic. His irrational behaviour is not open to purchase.
Now, about “the people” recovering “their country”. First of all, does Nigeria belong to its population? Who actually owns Nigeria? Legally and in practice, Nigeria actually belongs, not to its population, its nominal citizens, but to what are nowadays called the “stakeholders”: i.e. The imperialist corporations and the black colonialists who manage the Nigerian state apparatus for them. By the Land Use Decree of 1978—a.k.a Land Thief Decree-- the entire land of Nigeria now belongs to the Nigerian state; and furthermore, by extending to all of Nigeria what Lugard, the conqueror, had decreed in 1903 only for Northern Nigeria, the 1999 Constitution has given all the resources under the land to the Nigerian state. Oluwole Adejare argues that in law, “land includes the physical earth with the mines and minerals beneath the surface and buildings erected on the surface.” And that “section 44(30) [of the 1999 Constitution] gives the Federal Government the contents of the same land” [Democracy: 259-267] Thus, by the Land Thief Decree and the 1999 Constitution, Nigeria does not belong to its population. The Nigerian state has stolen all the land and landed property in the country from the population, and given them worthless Certificates of Occupancy (C-of-Os) that can be revoked by the state at its pleasure. If Adejare is correct, that means the black colonialists, through the Nigerian state, have quietly stolen 100% of the land from the black Nigerians. And the dumb Nija niggas don’t even know it yet. As a result, the Nigerian population is in a worse plight than even the black South Africans who were openly robbed of only 87% of their ancestral lands by the white settler colonialists! So, legally, if the population insists that Nigeria is theirs and want, as you say, “to recover their country”, they have to struggle and take it back from the ‘stakeholders’, just like the black South Africans, Zimbabweans and Namibians have to struggle to take back their lands from the white settlers among them.
Secondly, who exactly are ‘the people’? As Cabral points out: “The definition of people depends on the historical moment which the land is experiencing . . . The people are defined in terms of the main stream of the history of that society, in terms of the highest interests of the majority of that society” [Unity & Struggle: 89, 90] Since the founding of Nigeria a century ago, our historical moment has been that of foreign domination. So, the definition of the people has to be, as Cabral said: “all those born in the land . . . who want what corresponds to the fundamental necessity of the history of our land”, namely, those who want liberation from foreign domination. Accordingly, nobody who accepts the comprador idea of the ‘good life’ belongs among ‘the people’. Needless to say, the black colonialists, being agents of imperialist domination, are not part of “the people”. Furthermore, after 50 years of social and cultural degeneration under the black colonialists, are there any “the people” left? What you have to realise is that the rot, which was still confined to the top at “independence”, has now seeped down to those usually considered “the people”. All that is wrong with the comprador elite is now also wrong with almost everybody, down to the villagers and infants. In fact, in a talk, subtitled “The Lunatic Elite”, which I gave in Abuja in 1995 at the National Health Summit, I said that we have to focus our attention on those under 20, if we want to get out of our mess. And somebody remarked that that age would be too late, that we should focus on those under five! The lunatic comprador mentality now permeates the entire culture, and is promptly imbibed even by newborn babies. There are hardly any Nigerians today who see foreign domination as against their interest; and escape from foreign domination as their cardinal interest. So who are “the people” who are going to recover “their country”?
But the job has to be done somehow.
Does it? Like Cabral points out, there is a time you have to give up. And his reason is quite instructive. He says:
our objective is to ensure progress and happiness for our people, but we cannot achieve this against our people. If some persons in our land do not want this, we face an alternative. Either they are not the people and then we can do anything against them, even imprison them. Or they are numerous and represent the people, and at that point we give up. We can do nothing more because one cannot ensure happiness and progress for anyone against his will.
--[ Unity & Struggle: 90]
We have gotten to a point where those who accept the comprador idea of the ‘good life’ are most probably in the overwhelming majority in Nigeria. Probably more than 99.99% of the population! That means that most Nija niggas are culturally committed, even if unconsciously, to the side of foreign domination, i.e. Committed to imperialism, and not against it. And unless a coherent and critical mass of the population actively rejects the comprador idea of the ‘good life’, and sets out to organise national liberation from black comprador colonialism, Nigeria will continue to decay. Until a movement emerges to defeat the black colonialists and finish the aborted struggle for independence; until such a movement expels the black compradors from Nigeria just like Castro expelled Batista and his comprador gang from Cuba, or the Maoists expelled Chiang Kai-shek and his comprador cohorts from China; until that is done, there is little chance of the Nigerian people recovering “their country”. But if all the people have been brainwashed or otherwise reduced to accepting this rubbish as the way to live, what, as Cabral points out, can anybody do about it? Just give up!
But you know Nigerians do not like living like this?
Don’t they? It is not enough for them to say and in private: “I do not like this, and I don’t like that”. If somebody is sitting in his living room and says he does not like the stench and the flies, and you tell him to remove the bucket of shit that’s there, and he makes no move to do so, then you know his complaining is just make-believe. Most Nigerians grumble about the Nigerian situation, but none of them dislike it enough to realise that they have to do away with the Nigerian state apparatus that’s giving them these things to complain about. All the grumbling has not even stimulated serious thinking about and analysis of the social decay, let alone a proffering of remedies. Until they give to their grumbling an organized political expression, their grumbling is just make-believe. You have the unfortunate situation where they have enough oil money floating around and they do not have to work or think hard for anything, and all their ambition is to grab the oil money and squander it. So long as that prospect is there, they are not going to exert themselves to repair or change Nigeria.
You see, the political, scientific and ethical level of Nija niggas has plummeted outrageously since 1960, and it wasn’t very high in 1960 to begin with. Nigerians are now political Neanderthals and have a stupid mindset. They are addicted to seeking individual escape routes from social problems. And each has the delusion that if only he grabs enough money he can individually buy his way out of all his problems and discomforts. Unfortunately for them, no amount of money can buy your individual way out of anarchy! Only a fundamental and comprehensive social reorganization can abolish the bureaucratic anarchy whose consequences are the things these Nija niggas complain about. But that little fact is too big for their lazy minds to grasp. Nigerians need to learn that social problems require social solutions collectively devised and collectively implemented. But they are too pathologically individualistic and money obsessed to get that into their skulls. Each Nigerian is hoping that, some day, he or his descendants will get into some public office and loot “his share” of oil money. So, they don’t want to dismantle the system. But they don’t ask: Will Nigeria still have oil a thousand years from now? And if so, what is the probability that any of his descendants will by then get into one of the looting stations and loot “his share”? Nigerians are too mentally lazy or deluded to ask such basic questions. If they did, they might see that the odds are heavily against their hopes. In any case, your oil reserves will be exhausted within a century. If these Nija niggas could curb their naïve optimism for a moment and realise this, they might wake up to the need to destroy the system now, even at the risk of their own lives, so as to save their descendants—assuming they are interested in the welfare of their progeny, which I seriously doubt.
Are you of the school of thought that oil is curse?
Of course it is a curse. All these immature countries that have been hit by the oil boom, go and see what it has done to them. The Shah’s Iran was a major example. Oil has been a blessing to a country like Britain or Norway, which was already industrialised and well organised, and oil was just another source of revenue which they could fit into an established system. Those countries that were not solidly organised before they found oil, and that did not have the wise leadership to manage the bonanza, became a mess. For them the oil boom has been oil doom! Certainly, Nigeria’s oil boom has been a curse. It instigated all kinds of delusions and illusions; it diverted people from what should be the central concern of politics—organising the public welfare [i.e. Territorial defence; internal law and order; dispensing justice; building and maintaining roads; delivering the mail; seeing to the efficient and nationalistic management of political and economic institutions so as to provide opportunities for productive employment for all, produce most of the food you need, manufacture the things you need daily, provide enough electricity, water and adequate health care etc.]
Oil money has distorted everything. The Govt, getting fabulous revenues from the oil companies, doesn’t feel any need to gather taxes from the population, and so feels no pressure to consult or heed their wishes. Furthermore, thanks to oil money, politics is now organised from the top down rather than from the bottom up! The parties are funded from oil money by the govt. The 50 or so registered parties are, in effect, government agencies, not organs of the population. So they cannot challenge a president who can cut off their state subventions. Even more distorting is the fact that the Constitution gives a president legal immunity for whatever he does, gives him control over huge oil revenues, and over the bureaucracy, the army and police forces. Yet people expect a man loaded with such enormous and unchecked powers to remain normal and not become a dictator, get power drunk and go berserk. Even Jesus would go berserk if given such powers! Furthermore, in a system where you need to spend so much to run for any office, only a looter, or one sponsored by looters can ever hold office. And yet Nija niggas righteously denounce godfatherism, not recognizing that it is inevitable in a political system where it costs millions to seek office but very few have any millions. Of course, the black colonialists installed such a system to ensure that they will hold a monopoly of power, either by themselves or through lackeys they sponsor.
Oil boom diverted people from attending to the nuts and bolts of how to run a country. As Nigerian politics became simply the means to grab easy money, it ceased to be about the public welfare and degenerated into sheer racketeering and gangsterism, like it has blatantly been since 1999. We need to recognize that when the objective or activity of a formal organized association is a crime, the association is a crime syndicate or mafia; its activity is racketeering or organised crime; its members are mobsters/gangsters. Since the crime of looting the treasury is now the primary objective in Nigerian politics, by these standard definitions, the 50 odd registered political parties in